Quotes About Christianity

But American Christians are going to have to come to terms with the brute fact that we live in a culture, one in which our beliefs make increasingly little sense. We speak a language that the world more and more either cannot hear or finds offensive to its ears.

This kind of thing is why more and more Christian parents are concluding that they cannot afford to keep their children in public schools. Some tell themselves that their children need to remain there to be "salt and light" to the other kids. As popular culture continues its downward slide, however, this rationale begins to sound like a rationalization. It brings to mind a father who tosses his child into a whitewater river in the hopes that she'll save another drowning child.

No Christian has the power to avoid suffering entirely. It is the human condition. What we do control is how we act in the face of it. Will we run from it and betray our Lord? Or will we accept it as a severe mercy? The choices we will make when put to the ultimate test depend on the choices we make today, in a time of peace.

A time of painful testing, even persecution, is coming. Lukewarm or shallow Christians will not come through with their faith intact. Christians today must dig deep into the Bible and church tradition and teach themselves how and why today's post-Christian world, with its self-centeredness, its quest for happiness and rejection of sacred order and transcendent values, is a rival religion to authentic Christianity.

Moreover, for Christians, no social order that denies sin, erecting structures or approving practices that alienate man from his Creator, can ever be just. Contrary to secular social justice activists, protecting the right to abortion is always unjust. So is any proposal—like same-sex marriage—that ratifies sin and undermines the natural family

The days to come are going to force American Christians to confront personal suffering for the faith in ways most never have done before (African American Christians are the obvious exception). Besides, it cannot be emphasized strongly enough: the old totalitarianism conquered societies through fear of pain; the new one will conquer primarily through manipulating people's love of pleasure and fear of discomfort.

Christians must embrace suffering because that's what Jesus did, and because they have the promise, on faith, that to share in his suffering will bring glory in the next life.

time arrives if we have not prepared ourselves to accept pain and loss for the sake of God's kingdom. Most of us in the West don't yet have opportunities to suffer for the faith like Christians under communism did, but we have their stories to guide us, as well as the accounts of Christian martyrdom

To rediscover Christian asceticism is urgent for believers who want to train their hearts, and the hearts of their children, to resist the hedonism and consumerism at the core of contemporary culture. And it is necessary to teach us in our bones how God uses suffering to purify us for His purposes.

Pastor Wurmbrand once wrote that there were two kinds of Christians: "those who sincerely believe in God and those who, just as sincerely, believe that they believe. You can tell them apart by their actions in decisive moments."15

History is in the stories we tell ourselves about who we were and who we are. History is embedded in the language we use, the things we make, and the rituals we observe. History is culture—and so is Christianity.

We will know when we act—or fail to act—as Christians when to be faithful costs us something. It may be a small thing at first—a place on a sports team because we won't play on Sunday mornings, or the respect of our peers when we will not march in a parade for a political cause. But the demands made on us will grow greater, and the consequences for failing to submit to the world's demands will grow more severe.

Developing the cognitive control that leads to a more contemplative Christian life is the key to living as free men and women in post-Christian America. The

Parecíamos satisfechos haciendo de capellanes de esta cultura consumista en la que se perdía rápidamente el sentido de lo que significa ser cristiano.

In our time, secular social justice has been shorn of its Christian dimension. Because they defend a particular code of sexual morality and gender categories, Christians are seen by progressives as the enemies of social justice.

Defender la ortodoxia bíblica del cristianismo en materia sexual se consideraba ahora de una intolerancia inadmisible. Los conservadores cristianos estaban sentenciados. Este ya no era el país de siempre.

Tradition-minded Christians who have immersed themselves in the writings of Wendell Berry should understand that agrarianism is no panacea. "You can't make a living as a farmer, but you can make a living as a die-setter," says MacDonald. "Industrialism is the new agrarianism. It's not back to the land, but back to the trades.

Many Christians will see through these lies today but will choose not to speak up. Their silence will not save them and will instead corrode them, according to Mi?osz.

A Christian who practices asceticism trains himself to say no to his desires and yes to God.

La pérdida de la religión cristiana es la causa de la fragmentación que Occidente lleva padeciendo de un tiempo a esta parte y que se está acelerando últimamente. ¿Qué ha pasado? Podemos destacar cinco hitos históricos que han sacudido la civilización occidental a lo largo de los siete últimos siglos y que la han despojado de su fe ancestral:

The old, hard totalitarianism had a vision for the world that required the eradication of Christianity. The new, soft totalitarianism does too, and we are not equipped to resist its sneakier attack. As we know, communism was militantly atheistic and declared religion to be its mortal enemy. The Soviets and their European allies murdered clergy and cast an uncounted number of believers, both ordained and lay, into prisons and work camps, where many suffered torture.

La nueva era derrocó el modelo aristotélico y cristiano del cosmos, que proponía una estructura jerárquica de la realidad en la que las cosas existían orgánicamente a través de su relación con Dios, y lo sustituyó por el de un universo mecánico regido por las leyes de la naturaleza, no necesariamente basado en lo trascendente.

Is the Christianity we have been living out in our families, congregations, and communities a means of deeper conversion, or does it function as a vaccination against taking faith with the seriousness the Gospel demands?

The 1960s media theorist Marshall McLuhan, a practicing Christian, once said that everyone he knew who lost his faith began by ceasing to pray.