Quotes About Christianity

If Jesus meant for his followers to rule the world, then why did he teach them to wash feet?

It just seems helpful to admit that Christianity is as complicated and conflicted as any other religion, with groups of followers who can believe in the unity of their faith even as they refuse Communion to one another.

In a single sentence, Gandhi has given me a new way to live with the verse at the end of Matthew's Gospel, which Christians sometimes call the Great Commission. The way to make a disciple is to be one. If your life does not speak, your footnotes will have limited impact. Become worthy of the message, and join the spinning brigade. Why isn't that the Great Commission?

In Jesus, Christians believe, everyone gets a good look at what it means to be both fully human and fully divine—not half and half, as if he walked around with a dotted line down his middle, but fully both, all the time. His full humanity was on full display as he taught, healed, fed, and freed people, just as it was when he honored the poor, defied the powerful, and turned the institutional tables along with his own cheek.

Is Christian faith primarily about being Christian or becoming truly human?

the Sunshine and Shadow design. The Amish A Devoted Christian's Prayer Book contained the prayer, "We pray, O Holy Father, that we might leave behind the night of sin and guilt and ever walk in the shining light of Thy wondrous grace, and cast off the works of darkness, put on the armor of light, and walk honestly as in the day.

It was a real surprise to me to come across the evidence that Christianity might once have been a danced religion. Certainly, some of the early church leaders thought this was great and spoke of what seems to have been circle dancing, perhaps around an altar.

LEONARD I've failed, Chris. I can't locate the white collective unconscious. CHRIS I wouldn't feel too bad about that. You know, western culture hasn't really carried the baton on folklore and mythology. The rise of Christianity put the kibosh on it--the gospel hits the number one best-seller list and everything else gets remaindered.

Christian contentment is that sweet, inward, quiet, gracious frame of spirit, which freely submits to and delights in God's wise and fatherly disposal in every condition.

With so many cesspools to fall into in life, we need a spring we can go to for splashes of joy — a spring full of living water that only Jesus provides. The foundation of all joy for Christians is that we can live as though Christ died yesterday, rose today, and is coming tomorrow.

Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex.

Its insistent principle that the life of the spirit and of the afterworld was superior to the here and now, to material life on earth, is one that the modern world does not share, no matter how devout some present-day Christians may be. The rupture of this principle and its replacement by belief in the worth of the individual and of an active life not necessarily focused on God is, in fact, what created the modern world and ended the Middle Ages.

Man himself was the formulator of the impossible Christian ideal and tried to uphold it, if not live by it, for more than a millennium. Therefore it must represent a need, something more fundamental than Gibbon's 18th century enlightenment allowed for, or his elegant ironies could dispose of.

It is a peculiar habit of Christianity to conceive the most compassionate and forgiving divinities and use them to sponsor atrocity.

servile degree." The object of the noble's function, in theory, was not fighting for fighting's sake, but defense of the two other estates and the maintenance of justice and order. He was supposed to protect the people from oppression, to combat tyranny, and to cultivate virtue—that is, the higher qualities of humanity of which the mud-stained ignorant peasant was considered incapable by his contemporaries in Christianity, if not by its founder.

the here and now, to material life on earth, is one that the modern world does not share, no matter how devout some present-day Christians may be. The rupture of this principle and its replacement by belief in the worth of the individual and of an active life not necessarily focused on God is, in fact, what created the modern world and ended the Middle Ages.

First of all, the Jewish religion has a great deal in common with the Christian religion because, as Rabbi Gillman points out in the show, Christianity is based on Judaism. Christ was Jewish.

Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war, With the cross of Jesus going on before. Christ, the royal Master, leads against the foe; Forward into battle see His banners go!

Hitherto Christianity has leaned, or has been represented as leaning, on authority--on the authority of an infallible text, or of an inerrable Church. The inadequacy of either support has been repeatedly demonstrated, and as the props have been withdrawn, the faith of many has fallen with a crash.

I think every good Christian ought to kick Falwell right in the ass.

Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.

have used it in a highly offensive way and drenched it in fallacious, right-wing "Christian nation" pseudohistory. Worse, they've sponsored "Christians only" prayer events that exclude millions of Americans. (And by "Christians" they mean fundamentalists. Progressive Christians like me got nowhere near the microphone.)

I've spent the last thirty years of my life telling the parents of gay and lesbian kids that as Christians, the only thing any of us can do is to accept and love our kids unconditionally, just as they are. I am certainly not about to do anything else when it comes to our own son.

Within three hundred years Jesus went from being a Jewish apocalyptic prophet to being God himself, a member of the Trinity. Early Christianity is nothing if not remarkable.