Quotes About Christianity

Since we cannot stop reading the gospels without ceasing to be proper Christians, we have developed all kinds of strategies for making alternative sense of the gospels and so screening out the dangerous and challenging picture they are actually sketching. That is at the heart of the problem I have been trying to identify.

We must remind ourselves yet once more that all Christian language about the future is a set of signposts pointing into a mist.

One of the central elements of the Christian story is the claim that the paradox of laughter and tears, woven as it is deep into the heart of all human experience, is woven also deep into the heart of God.

From Plato to Hegel and beyond, some of the greatest philosophers have declared that what you think about death, and life beyond it, is the key to thinking seriously about everything else – and, indeed, that it provides one of the main reasons for thinking seriously about anything at all. This is something a Christian theologian should heartily endorse. So, without further delay, we plunge into

But from the start the early Christians believed that the resurrection body, though it would certainly be a body in the sense of a physical object, would be a transformed body, a body whose material, created from the old material, would have new properties. That is what Paul means by the "spiritual body": not a body made out of nonphysical spirit, but a physical body animated by the Spirit, a Spirit-driven body if you like: still what we would call physical but differently animated.

For the early Christians, the revolution had happened on the first Good Friday. The "rulers and authorities" really had been dealt their death blow. This didn't mean, "So we can escape this world and go to heaven," but "Jesus is now Lord of this world, and we must live under his lordship and announce his kingdom.

The Christians would stay and nurse people. Sometimes they caught the disease and died. People were astonished. What was that about? Oh, they replied, we are followers of this man Jesus. He put his life on the line to save us. So that's what we do as well.

So what if it were true after all? What if the Creator, all along, had made the world out of overflowing, generous love, so that the overflowing, self-sacrificial love of the Son going to the cross was indeed the accurate and precise self-expression of the love of God for a world radically out of joint?

Paul and all the other early Christians, what mattered was not "saved souls" being rescued from the world and taken to a distant "heaven," but the coming together of heaven and earth themselves in a great act of cosmic renewal in which human bodies were likewise being renewed to take their place within that new world.

Christian holiness consists not of trying as hard as we can to be good but of learning to live in the new world created by Easter, the new world we publicly entered in our baptism.

have argued that the early Christian view of Jesus's death was focused on Passover and hence on the Exodus story, now to be experienced as the new liberating event that was also the great one-off "sin-forgiving" event. Though the language here is unique to this passage, the outline meaning—Passover and atonement, in fulfillment of the covenant and to forgive sins and cleanse from impurity—is the same.

Christianity is, simply, good news. It is the news that something has happened as a result of which the world is a different place

Paul is the classic example of the early Christian who has woven resurrection so thoroughly into his thinking and practice that if you take it away the whole thing unravels in your hands.

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. But if Christians don't get Jesus right, what chance is there that other people will bother much with him?

The New Testament insists, in book after book, that when Jesus of Nazareth died on the cross, something happened as a result of which the world is a different place. And the early Christians insisted that when people are caught up in the meaning of the cross, they become part of this difference.

When we learn to read the story of Jesus and see it as the story of the love of God, doing for us what we could not do for ourselves--that insight produces, again and again, a sense of astonished gratitude which is very near the heart of authentic Christian experience.

left to ourselves we lapse into a kind of collusion with entrophy, acquiescing in the general belief that things may be getting worse but that there's nothing much we can do about them. And we are wrong. Our task in the present...is to live as resurrection people in between Easter and the final day, with our Christian life, corporate and individual, in both worship and mission, as a sign of the first and a foretaste of the second.

God's plan is not to abandon this world, the world which he said was "very good." Rather, he intends to remake it. And when he does he will raise all his people to new bodily life to live in it. That is the promise of the Christian gospel.

For from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. —John 1:16

Many people think a Christian is someone who believes in God and tries to be good, or someone who lives by the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount (as if anyone could!). But what we and our children must understand is that a Christian is a person who recognizes that he or she is a sinner deserving nothing less than the terrifying judgment of God and who takes refuge only in the blood of the Lamb of God, Jesus Christ.

Sometimes we give our children the idea that the Christian life is all about what they must do for God. But at the heart of what it means to be a Christian is the willingness to accept the cleansing touch of Jesus so he can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. "The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve others and to give his life as a ransom for many" (Mark 10:45).

Hakluyt at least was more practical (and more Anglican) than Montaigne in his outlook on the aboriginals. He believed them neither dangerous nor innocent, but empty vessels waiting to be filled with Christian—and, no less, commercial—truths.

Millions of professing Christians are deceived; they are walking in ways that simply are not biblical. Their values, their responses, their relation ships, their choices, and their priorities reveal that they have bought into the lie of the Enemy and embraced the world's way of thinking.

All illustrate the "theory of courage," which Tolkien called "the great contribution of early Northern literature," meaning both Icelandic and Old English literature. It is a "creed of unyielding will": The heroes refuse to give up even when they know the monsters—evil—will win. For that is the big difference between Snorri's Ragnarok and the Christian Doomsday. Odin and the human army of Valhalla do not win.