Quotes About Christianity

I have come to think, as have so many others in the course of history, that the goal of Christian faith is the experience of God, not the comprehension of God.

The Bible is not, never has been, and never will be the center of the Christian faith.

Like a frail plant that needs careful tending and constant protection from sun and wind, perhaps the real problem wasn't me but the fragile, unsustainable version of Christianity I had been told was my only option.

Christians should not search through the creation stories for scientific information they believe it is important to see there. They should read it, as the New Testament writers did, as ancient stories transformed in Christ.

Feel free to call this a faith crisis. It's hard to imagine talking like this in church. Letting your guard down and bearing your soul with this degree of raw honesty is risky. You might find yourself in the middle of a protect-you-from-atheism intervention prayer phone chain faster than you can say "Bill Maher." Or you might be judged as a weak or uncommitted Christian and shunned.

If I were king of Christianity, after limiting church services to forty-five minutes and sermons to ten, as well as outlawing church "share time" altogether, I would proclaim a kingdom-wide decree that, at least for a while until we get it, "believe" should be stricken from all of our Bibles and replaced with trust.

We can't get our minds around God. I don't think the Christian faith is fundamentally rational, by which I mean it cannot be captured fully by our rational faculties—and in fact, more often than not, confounds them. A God who can be comfortably captured in our minds, with little else for us to find out apart from an occasional adjustment, is no God at all. Expecting faith in God to be rational is often more the problem than the solution.

The root of the conflict for many Christians is not scientific or even theological, but group identity and fear of losing what it offers.

A faith that eats its own not only drives people out but also sends up a red flare to the rest of humanity that Christianity is just another exclusive members-only club, and that Jesus is a lingering relic of antiquity, rather than a powerful, present-defining spiritual reality; a means of gaining power rather than relinquishing it. And who needs that, really?

Statistically, you can take two people, give them the same quantity of God's Word, and the one with the most Christian friends will be the one who's most likely to apply it. So the real question we need to ask ourselves is this, "Are we intimately connected with other people in the body of Christ?" If not, it doesn't matter how many sermons or worship experiences you ingest. You have very low odds of actually changing.

Obedience is now just one of the fun ways we say thanks to Him while He drenches us with favor; it naturally flows from our lives. Christianity is not a process in which we earn love; it's a process in which we reflect love.

Righteousness is not the reward of living rightly. It's the unmerited gift that irresistibly results in right living (Titus 3:5).

The Bible isn't a list of requirements; rather, it's a list of results after experiencing God's love. Following God isn't an action but a reaction. And if you have to painstakingly motivate yourself or others to serve God "because it's the right thing to do," you've already missed the very foundations of biblical Christianity.

Although some ancient Egyptian and Greek texts express animosity toward Jews, the rise of intense hostility to and fear of them largely coincides with the rise of Christianity. The relationship between adherents of the two religions always has reflected a paradox: The two faiths were both very similar and very different, which created intense competition.

Christians both took over and then deviated from the central tenets of Judaism.

Christianity declared that Jesus heralded a new Covenant that replaced Moses's, that the old laws were now obsolete, and that election to the status of Chosen People was now open to anyone who accepted Christ and the teachings of the Bible and the new scriptures.

One way of understanding what followed is to recall that Jews were the people who said no. Offered a new form of relationship with God, they said they preferred the one they had, and this rejection set off several hundred years of rivalry and mutual recrimination, as the two groups competed for followers until the fourth century of the common era, when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire and thus seemed to win the battle.

Strange Christianity, whose most pressing anxiety seems to be that God's grace might prove to be all too free on this side, that hell, instead of being populated with so many people, might some day prove to be empty! ~ Karl Barth, God Here and Now

Only one reliable force stands in the way of the power of the strong over the weak. Only one reliable force forms the foundation of the concept of the rule of law. Only one reliable force restrains the hand of the man of power. And, in an age of power-worship, the Christian religion has become the principal obstacle to the desire of earthly utopians for absolute power.

The new brand of militant atheism...adopts a mocking and high-handed tone of certainty, sneers at its Christian opponents, and states, or implies, that they must be stupid. This style of attack conforms to the irreverent spirit of the age and so is not very carefully examined. It is not widely recognised that secularism is a fundamentally political movement, which seeks to remove the remaining traces of Christian moral law in the civil and criminal codes of the Western nations.

Single Christians living in purity and community are billboards for the sufficiency of Jesus

To some, the temporal triumph of the Christian community in the world is a sign of God's favor and the essential righteousness of the Christian position. The irony of the matter, though, is that whenever the Christian community gains worldly power, it nearly always looses its capacity to be the critic of the power and influence it so readily brokers.

The question should not be 'What would Jesus do?' but rather, and more dangerously, 'What would Jesus have me do?'...As Mark Twain is said to have remarked, 'It is not what I don't understand in the Bible that troubles me; it is what is perfectly clear that does.

Confession or Brief, Simple Statement of Faith of Those Who are Called Mennonites in Prussia"35