Quotes About Christianity

he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.*

England had decidedly turned its back on any expressions of what we might call serious Christian belief. Having led to so much division and violence, religion was now in full-scale retreat. The churches of mid-eighteenth-century England all but abandoned orthodox, historical Christianity and now preached a tepid kind of moralism that seemed to present civility and the preservation of the status quo as the summum bonnum.

By the time Whitefield died in 1770, an inconceivable 80 percent of the population of the American colonies had heard him preach at least once.

The place where the questions about the reality of God and about the reality of the world are answered at the same time is characterized solely by the name: Jesus Christ. God

In any case, he had long felt that Gandhi could provide some clues for him. Gandhi was not a Christian, but he lived in a community that endeavored to live by the teachings set forth in the Sermon on the Mount. Bonhoeffer wanted Christians to live that way. So he would travel to India to see it practiced by non-Christians.

What madness is the course I am pursuing. I believe all the great truths of the Christian religion, but I am not acting as though I did. Should I die in this state I must go into a place of misery.

It's been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn't we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness? —ADOLF HITLER

is far too easy for us to base our claims to God on our own Christian religiosity and our church commitment, and in so doing utterly to misunderstand and distort the Christian idea.

What he had to say was really rather elementary: basic Christianity such as was professed in the Bible and in the doctrines of the Church of England, and to which almost everyone claimed to subscribe, was practically nonexistent in British society.

If a Christian may act in the several relations of life, must he seclude himself for all to become so? Surely the principles as well as the practice of Christianity are simple, and lead not to meditation only but to action.

The place where the questions about the reality of God and about the reality of the world are answered at the same time is characterized solely by the name: Jesus Christ. God and the world are enclosed in this name . . . we cannot speak rightly of either God or the world without speaking of Jesus Christ. All concepts of reality that ignore Jesus Christ are abstractions.

Christians do not wish to escape repentance, or chaos, if it is God's will to bring it upon us. We must take this judgement as Christians." Christians

The religion of Christ is not a tidbit after one's bread; on the contrary, it is the bread or it is nothing. People should at least understand and concede this if they call themselves Christian.

German culture was inescapably Christian. This was a result of the legacy of Martin Luther, the Catholic monk who invented Protestantism. Looming over the German culture and nation like both a father and a mother, Luther was to Germany something like what Moses was to Israel;

religion was a dead, man-made thing, and at the heart of Christianity was something else entirely—God himself, alive.

All right," he wrote, "if [the devil] devours me he shall devour a laxative (God willing) which will make his bowels and anus too tight for him. Do you want to bet? One has to suffer if he wants to possess Christ."21

religion to other religions. Then he came to his main point: the essence of Christianity is not about religion at all, but about the person of Christ.

the essence of Christianity is not about religion at all, but about the person of Christ.

After his own experience in Oxford, he knew that the Christian faith was not about how one behaved but about what one believed, and if one truly believed one could do nothing to achieve salvation but believe in Jesus, one's behavior would follow.

Christians were free, but he also made it clear that their freedom made them duty-bound to behave well toward others. Christian truth was eleven parts paradox out of ten. This was its essentially mysterious and glorious nature.

I thank heaven for a man like Adolf Hitler, who built a front line of defense against the anti-Christ of Communism." It was a throwaway comment made in an interview with the New York World-Telegram from his office at Calvary Church on Park Avenue and Twenty-first Street, and it did not reflect his wider thinking on the subject. Still, it illustrates how easily even the most serious Christians were initially taken in by Hitler's conservative pseudo-Christian propaganda.

Wilberforce's decision to remain in politics made the transfer of Christian ideas into the previously "secular" realm of society possible for generations of Christians to follow.

Being a Christian is less about cautiously avoiding sin than about courageously and actively doing God's will.

Historically speaking, however, the synthetic path of development—which includes the stage of the hero fight—was never followed in Christianity as it grew up under Gnostic influences, but only in alchemy, the cabala, and above all in Hasidism.