Quotes About Faith

As John Wesley advised his young preachers in his day (when the Bible still shaped the horizon of most people's lives), "Preach the Law until they are convicted, then preach Grace until they are converted.

Thinking Christians think in believing and they believe in thinking.

This book focuses on a narrower issue and a simple problem: We have lost the art of Christian persuasion and we must recover it.

If ours is an examined faith, we should be unafraid to doubt. If doubt is eventually justified, we were believing what clearly was not worth believing. But if doubt is answered, our faith has grown stronger. It knows God more certainly and it can enjoy God more deeply.

As Pascal wrote long ago, "Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true.

Something has surely gone terribly wrong when Christians are the best atheist arguments against the Christian faith and Christendom their best argument for atheism.

calling in the Bible is a central and dynamic theme that becomes a metaphor for the life of faith itself.

Not only do Christians believe, they are those who "think in believing and believe in thinking," as Augustine expressed it. The world of Christian faith is not a fairy-tale, make-believe world, question-free and problem-proof, but a world where doubt is never far from faith's shoulder.

Faith desires to let God be God. Sin has framed God, whether by the ultimate insults that he, the creator of all things, does not exist, or that he, the white-hot holy One, is responsible for the evil and suffering that humans have introduced into his good creation.

Disciples are not so much those who follow as those who must follow.

Calling is the truth that God calls us to

If we truly know why we trust God—and that crucial if must be answered with full intellectual and spiritual assurance—if we truly know why we trust God, then God is greater than all, and God may be trusted in all situations, despite everyone and everything.

Life is much more than reason, so it can never be captured and explained by reason alone—crucial and valuable though reason is. Apply reason as carefully and systematically as you like, and there will always be things it cannot explain, things that simply will not fit into its categories, however hard you push, press and pull.

we Christians must show again that we are both people of the Word and people who believe in words. Words are never mere words for us

The truth of the faith does not stand and fall with our defense of it.

For any follower of Jesus Christ who follows this path on the quest for meaning, the statement is true: A Christian thinks in believing and believes in thinking.

Those of us who have the nerve to call ourselves Christians," W. H. Auden said in a sermon, "will do well to be extremely reticent on the subject. Indeed it is almost the definition of a Christian that he is somebody who knows he isn't one, either in faith or morals.

The way of the disciple is a different and deeper way of learning.

As Origen stated in answer to Celsus long ago, the gospel is not a matter of natural religion. It is not about the ascent of man but about the descent of God.

A striking symptom of the church's problems in the West today is the fact that in a country such as the United States, Christians are still the overwhelming majority of citizens, but the American way of life has moved far from the way of life of Jesus—which means simply that the Christians who are the majority are living a way of life closer to the world than to the way of Jesus. In a word, they are worldly and therefore incapable of shaping their culture.

we Christians are not practicing what we preach, we cannot expect our society to enjoy the fruits of the way of life of Jesus, and our Christian faith is likely to be implausible and off-putting to the wider world.

Again, the heart of apologetics is the apologetics of the heart.

We must never distinguish apologetics and evangelism too neatly. But in broad terms, evangelism is the sharing of the good news, and it addresses the needs and desires of those who know they are in a bad situation.

Christians," as that crusty old philosopher Bertrand Russell used to quip, "would sooner die than think—in fact they do.