Quotes About Christianity

No solo hemos sido liberados de la necesidad de cumplir la ley para ser salvos, sino también de la esclavitud al pecado en la vida diaria. Hemos sido liberados del peso de la ley para vivir una vida piadosa. No podemos gloriarnos en nuestra liberación sin a la vez aceptar nuestro llamado (ver Ro 6:1-14; Tit 2:11-14).

If God is your Father, the Son is your Savior, and the Spirit is your indwelling Helper, you have hope no matter what you're facing.

We were a Christian family in active participation in a vibrant church, but what we were involved in lacked one of the primary and essential ingredients of healthy New Testament Christianity: a trained, mobilized, and functioning body of Christ. It was Christianity devoid of Ephesians 4, 1 Corinthians 12, and Hebrews 3:12–13. For

The more you see your sin, the more you will respond tenderly to other sinners and want for them the same grace you have received. And as you taste new life, you will begin to celebrate, in fresh new ways, the grace that is yours in Christ Jesus.

Autonomous Christianity never works, because our spiritual life was designed by God to be a community project.

No debemos ofrecer a la gente un sistema de redención, un conjunto de ideas y principios. A la gente le ofrecemos un Redentor.

True Christianity is always a matter of the submission of the heart to God, something that only rescuing grace can produce.

People move from church to church as if the churches in their community are nothing more than ecclesiastical department stores. They're shopping for just the right preacher, women's ministry, youth ministry, or worship style. These Christians' relationship to the church mirrors my relationship to Macy's.

Many Christians also live inside the church virtually unknown. They slip in and out of the weekly service almost unnoticed. Sure, they will exchange niceties with the people near them, and if they do that, they will learn a few cursory details about one another's lives, but they don't really have a relationship with the people with whom they worship.

Christianity gutted of Christ is devoid of both its beauty and its power.

God" must be an experience before "God" can be a word. Unless God is an experience, whatever words we might use for the Divine will be without content, like road signs pointing nowhere, like lightbulbs without electricity. Buddha would warn Christians, and I believe Rahner would second the warning: if you want to use words for God, make sure that these words are preceded by, or at least coming out of, an experience that is your own.

If Christians, in other words, only talk and never listen, they're not very good Christians.

Generalizing grossly, what Buddhists mean by practice is more interior and personal, while what Christians mean is more external and social. Or as Aloysius Pieris puts it, in their practice Buddhists stress prajna or wisdom, and Christians stress agape or charity.

if a Christian no longer places Jesus Christ at the heart of what God is up to in all of history, she's no longer really a Christian.

I can imagine that some of my Buddhist friends, having read the above description of my struggles with a God-as-You, might scratch their heads and ask: "What's the problem? For us, no God, therefore no person, therefore no problem." I admire their immunity and freedom from such difficulties. But I am, or I want to be, a Christian.

My job, as Bernard Lonergan, S.J. taught us back at the Gregorian University in Rome during the early 1960s, is "to mediate between religion and culture." That means to make sense of the world in the light of Christian belief and experience and to make sense of Christian belief in the light of our experience and knowledge of the world we live in.

To put it bluntly but also imploringly: we Christians need more silence in our services and liturgies. Just how this might be realized, just how we

Christian prayer is generally too worshipful and therefore dualistic. And it is too wordy.

For Buddhists, to experience Awakening is to experience the interconnectedness that makes us all one. For Christians, to experience the Divine as Love is to experience the source that makes us all "children of God" and therefore brothers and sisters to one another.

In sum, passing over to Buddhist spiritual practice has taught me, and can teach my church, that all our words, whether in Christian theology or Christian liturgy, must arise from and lead back to Silence. Only then do they have something to say.

That's it! That's the crux of the problem: Christian dualism has so exaggerated the difference between God and the world that it cannot really show how the two form a unity.

Buddhism has some mystical methods that we Christians might take a good look at and make good use of in repairing or remodeling our own. For me Buddhism has been a rich, indeed an indispensable, aid in renewing and expanding the repertoire of my Christian practice.

To believe in Jesus as the Christ means at its deepest to confess…that Jesus has an abiding and constitutive significance for the approach of the Kingdom of God and thus for the comprehensive healing of human beings…. For Christians, Jesus therefore is the decisive and definitive revelation of God."26

True Pantheism has rarely been recorded in Christianity, for the very good reason that until the late seventeenth century it would have been punished as profound heresy. The few pantheists who did stick their necks out often paid for it with the burning of their books and often with excommunication and death.