Quotes About Christianity

This meant, inevitably, that the victory would have to be implemented in the same way, proceeding by the slow road of love rather than the quick road of sudden conquest. That is part of what the Sermon on the Mount was all about.

The gospels were all about God becoming king, but the creeds are focused on Jesus being God. It would be truly remarkable if one great truth of early Christian faith and life were actually to displace another, to displace it indeed so thoroughly that people forgot it even existed. But that's what I think has happened.

It is true, then, that as soon as someone becomes a Christian, he or she can and must say `Our Father'; that is one of the marks of grace, one of the first signs of faith. But it will take full Christian maturity to understand, and resonate with, what those words really mean.

Perhaps even "his own people"—this time not the Jewish people of the first century, but the would-be Christian people of the Western world—have not been ready to recognize Jesus himself. We want a "religious" leader, not a king! We want someone to save our souls, not rule our world! Or, if we want a king, someone to take charge of our world, what we want is someone to implement the policies we already embrace, just as Jesus's contemporaries did.

Justification is not how someone becomes a Christian. It is the declaration that they have become a Christian. And the total context of this doctrine, here in Philippians 3, is that of the expectation - not of a final salvation in which the individual is abstracted from the present world, but of the final new heavens and new earth, as the Lord comes from the heavenly realm to transform the earthly

Sing these songs, and they will renew you from head to toe, from heart to mind. Pray these poems, and they will sustain you on the long, hard but exhilarating road of Christian discipleship.

Part of the hope the Christian faith offers is the knowledge that God will not allow injustice to be the last word. That is a central element in the good news of the gospel.

We sometimes speak of someone who's been very ill as being a shadow of their former self. If Paul is right, a Christian in the present life is a mere shadow of his or her future self, the self that person will be when the body that God has waiting in his heavenly storeroom is brought out, already made to measure, and put on over the present one—or over the self that will still exist after bodily death.

Take away the stories of Jesus's birth, and all you lose is four chapters of the Gospels. Take away the resurrection and you lose the entire New Testament, and most of the second-century fathers as well.

First-century Jews looked forward to a public event … in and through which their god would reveal to all the world that he was not just a local, tribal deity, but the creator and sovereign of all … The early Christians … looked back to an event in and through which, they claimed, Israel's god had done exactly that.

The present generation has gazed with justified revulsion upon the whole late modern culture of violence and death; and it has noticed worrying signs of the same culture in some expressions of Christianity.

The old idea that the goal of Christian existence is simply "going to heaven" doesn't, in fact, do very much to stimulate the fully fledged virtue we find advocated in the New Testament.

The Christian role, as part of naming the name of the crucified and risen Jesus on territory presently occupied by idols, is to speak the truth to power and especially to speak up for those with no power at all.

To begin with, you have to grasp the fact that Christian virtue isn't about you—your happiness, your fulfillment, your self-realization. It's about God and God's kingdom, and your discovery of a genuine human existence by the paradoxical route—the route God himself took in Jesus Christ!—of giving yourself away, of generous love which constantly refuses to take center stage.

People who believe that Jesus is already Lord and that he will appear again as judge of the world are called and equipped (to put it mildly) to think and act quite differently in the world from those who don't.

Following Jesus means denying yourself, saying 'no' to the things that you imagine make up your 'self', and finding to your astonishment that the 'self' you get back is more glorious, more joyful than you could have imagined.

This idea of God being faithful to the covenant clearly seems to be Paul's meaning here in Romans 3.

But in first-century Christianity, what mattered was not people going from earth into God's kingdom in heaven. What mattered, and what Jesus taught his followers to pray, was that God's kingdom would come on earth as in heaven.

Sin," then, is not simply the breaking of God's rules. It is the outflowing of idolatry.

But from the start within early Christianity it was built in as part of the belief in resurrection that the new body, though it will certainly be a body in the sense of a physical object occupying space and time, will be a transformed body, a body whose material, created from the old material, will have new properties. There has been a dramatic sharpening up of what resurrection itself actually entailed.

Resurrection, we must never cease to remind ourselves, did not mean going to heaven or escaping death or having a glorious and noble postmortem existence but rather coming to bodily life again after bodily death.

The death of Jesus of Nazareth as the king of the Jews, the bearer of Israel's destiny, the fulfillment of God's promises to his people of old, is either the most stupid, senseless waste and misunderstanding the world has ever seen, or it is the fulcrum around which world history turns. Christianity is based on the belief that it was and is the latter.

Gamaliel, at least as portrayed in Acts, advocated the policy of "live and let live." If people wanted to follow this man Jesus, they could do so.9 If this new movement was from God, it would prosper; if not, it would fall by its own weight. If the Romans wanted to run the world, so be it. Jews would study and practice the Torah by themselves. This, broadly speaking, had been the teaching of Hillel, a leading rabbi of the previous generation.

And the Christian who knows what he or she is about will constantly reflect that the most natural modes of God-talk are adoration, thanksgiving, confession, supplication and proclamation, not theorization.