Quotes About God

There is a difference — subtle but very significant — between having faith in my faith (i.e., faith in my intellectual concepts about God — another way of saying "leaning on my own understanding") and having faith in God. There is a corresponding difference between doubting my faith and doubting God.

Jesus faithfully and courageously represented the nonviolent and loving heart of God. Jesus and his way of nonviolent, self-giving love, the text suggests, will earn the trust of all humanity. We will ultimately migrate, in other words, toward the way of Jesus.

Because if anything is clear in the aftermath of the Reformation, it has to be this: we human beings can interpret the Bible to say and mean an awful lot of different things. We can very easily confuse "The Bible says" with "I say the Bible says," which we can then equate with "God says.

Spiritual practices are ways of becoming awake and staying awake to God.

In case after case in the past, there is a kind of Bible-quoting intoxication under the influence of which we religious people lose the ability to distinguish between what God says and what we say God says.

With Sir Isaac Newton's laws of physics, and God being seen as the powerful machine operator who perfectly controls the machine through these orderly laws, we end up with the opposite problem, the very opposite of the ancient situation. Now, instead of chaos reigning and us wondering if there's any order, order reigns supreme, and we wonder if there's any freedom.

They uncritically deploy verses like Romans 13:1–2 to squash dissent ("Submit to the governing authorities, for all authority is instituted by God and anyone who opposes authority is standing against what God has established").

Being able to know and feel what Karl knows and feels… that no matter what, I am God's, and God is mine… that we have a connection; we have a relationship. Faith in your life brings God in your life.

If, for you, orthodox means finally "getting it right" or "getting it straight," mine is a pretty disappointing, curvy orthodoxy. But if, for you, orthodoxy isn't a list of correct doctrines, but rather the doxa in orthodoxy, which means "thinking" or "opinion," then the lifelong pursuit of expanding thinking and deepening, broadening opinions about God sounds like a delight, a joy.

God unleashes history in the beginning. God helps the baby to stand in the beginning. But God is also out ahead, calling history homeward across the field or across the room. God doesn't force it. Sometimes history responds, or some parts of history respond, but others resist or rebel. But God keeps calling.

We must, therefore, never underestimate our power to be wrong when talking about God, when thinking about God, when imagining God—whether in prose or in poetry. Romano

I don't think we should give up on ritual. I don't think we should give up on any possible means of experiencing God.

For me, Carol, we can't be faithful to God unless we're faithful to the facts, faithful to the data if you will. And so, instead of hiding from evolution, I think we'd be more faithful to God to look it right in the eye and learn from it.

So if God is forgotten, we want to join God in being forgotten. So if God is rejected and opposed and misunderstood and misrepresented, we want to suffer each indignity and sorrow with God.

Since many Christians see God as an absolute authoritarian, we shouldn't be surprised when they prefer authoritarian leaders to democratic ones.

If God dominates the world and everything in it with an iron fist (or rod, as in Psalm 2:9 and Revelation 2:27), we may find ourselves more amenable to authoritarians who do the same, especially if they hold up Bibles in front of churches.

If we find ourselves offended or disturbed by elements of the Ikon services, we might ask ourselves whether the disruption of a disturbing liturgy is necessary at times to arouse people like us from the religious slumbers that so frequently overtake us - like the bizarre characters in a Flannery O'Connor novel or short story, for example - to jolt us into the realization that we routinely tolerate the intolerable in the ways we speak of God.

The Summa Theologiae is not, as is sometimes supposed, a potpourri of theology and philosophy; it is wholly a Summa of Theology concerned with the Sacra Doctrina, the Holy Teaching of salvation given by God's revelation.

though one can talk significantly about God one can only do so by saying what God is not.

Yet "to love" can also mean "to will goodness to something." In this sense it can be fittingly ascribed to God since he freely does this insofar as he brings about the existence of anything.

There is my father sun! You see now only by his wish; yet try to see into him and he will darken your eyes for ever. With hot burning he pulls up the corn and we will feed. With cold burning he shrinks it and we starve. These are his burning and our life. Do not speak to me of your god. He is nowhere.

Maybe God is nothing more than another villain—the biggest villain of them all. Maybe

The important question regarding spirituality is not which God you follow but are you true to your soul? Are you living a spiritual life? Are you a kind person here on earth, getting joy from your existence, causing no harm, and doing good to others?

Christianity, we might say, is driving around with a loaded gun in its glove compartment, and that loaded gun is its violent image of God. It's driving around with a license to kill, and that license is its Bible, read uncritically. Along with its loaded gun and license to kill, it's driving around with a sense of entitlement derived from a set of beliefs with a long, ugly, and largely unacknowledged history.