Quotes About Christianity

If one takes the incarnation—that is, the claim that the "Word became flesh and lived among us" (John 1:14)—seriously, then one should take seriously the time when, place where, and people among whom this event occurred.

That's why both Matthew and Luke provide genealogies placing Jesus in the line of Abraham, Judah, and King David.

Anti-Jewish and potentially anti-Jewish rhetoric goes unnoticed in so much Christian scholarship because the authors are not attuned to how their words sound to different ears. The

The Christian state," said St. Cornelius, "is not without serious inconveniences for a penguin. In it the birds are obliged to work out their own salvation. How can they succeed? The habits of birds are, in many points, contrary to the commandments of the Church, and the penguins have no reason for changing theirs. I mean that they are not intelligent enough to give up their present habits and assume better.

In point of fact, Christianity has run contrary to art in so much as it has not favoured the study of the nude. Art is the representation of nature, and nature is pre-eminently the human body; it is the nude.

Viewpoints and skin color don't matter to the Savior. He brought salvation to all manking.

To be honest, she may be kind of scared of the register. Or maybe she can't add. She is a Christian. I don't think they believe in math.

She says the problem with most Christians is that they show up once a week to pray that God's will be done- and when it is, they complain.

Other major world religions are still centered in the same general geographic area from which they originated except for Christianity. Even more intriguing, the center of Christian growth continues to move. Why? This author suggests that Christian principles bring prosperity but then the prosperity brings a temptation to chase stability and respectability. Thus, Christian growth moves to an area where people are desperate enough to trust Christ alone.

I think that the core doctrines of Christianity - the incarnation, the resurrection, life after death-these are as strong as ever. In fact, the belief in life after death has increased in this century.

From my limited and immature child's point of view, Heaven was therefore populated almost exclusively by white people who lived in the United States of America, along with the original disciples of Jesus, an uncalculated number of genuine Christians who had lived throughout the ages, and many but not all of those mentioned in Foxe's Book of Martyrs, which I first read at the age of eight when I found it on my parents' book shelf.

Rice would carry that burden for saving lost souls for the rest of his life, and it was driven by genuinely heartfelt compassion based on a powerful rationale: if sinners were going to burn in the literal flames of a materially real eternal fire unless they accepted the atoning sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, then any sensible, empathetic, and responsible person would devote all of his life to saving non-Christians from their God-ordained fate.

The revival movement was responsible for a tremendous spread of Christianity among slaves in the South. Slaves came in their thousands to camp meetings organized mainly by Baptists and Methodists, where they listened to the same sermons, succumbed to the same transports of emotion, and pledged themselves to the same spiritual renewal as white revivalists. At times white slave owners were known to undergo conversion at a revival meeting and then decide to free their slaves.

I had heard so-called "Christian" military and political leaders proposing that the U.S. bomb the dikes and dams along the Red River delta in Vietnam in order to "defeat Communism," thus potentially killing hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese people. I began asking myself, what sort of religion would justify such arrogance and criminality?

86 percent believe that Christians are hypocritical, saying one thing and doing another. 75 percent believe that Christians are too involved in politics. Over two-thirds believe that Christians are out of touch with reality, insensitive to others, boring, and not accepting of other faiths. 90 percent believe that Christians hate homosexuals.

The roots of 20th century American fundamentalism can be discerned in the confluence of these two streams of immigration, culture, and history. A unique American expression of evangelical Christianity emerged—profoundly democratic, anti-royalist and anti-clerical, militant and missional, convinced that God was naturally on the side of Americans. Any who disagreed might be suspected of being on some side other than God's.

The traumatic experience of the Civil War and its aftermath in the 19th century was the incubator of Christian fundamentalism in 20th century America. The agony of the Civil War had a devastating impact on subsequent generations of Southerners, many of whom carried the burden and promise of their Scots-Irish heritage.

I am ashamed to admit that I believed black people smelled bad and had low moral standards and that good Christian white people only associated with a few "good" colored people—despite the fact that I knew no Negroes firsthand. Isn't that remarkable? Where in the world did I get those strange ideas?

By contrast, Rice said, "Negro ministers, unfortunately have...very often had a bad influence. The Negro minister [Martin Luther King Jr.] in Montgomery, Alabama, who led in the organization of a Negro boycott of the buses, led that fight, unfortunately, not as a Christian trying to make good Christians and to lead in Christian understanding between the races. He led that boycott as a modernist and a socialist who was more concerned about racism than he was about Christianity, I fear.

And it was Texas that turned out to be especially congenial to the development of Christian fundamentalism in America.

This new fight was for the heart and soul of America against the tide of racially degenerate immigrants who sought to dilute her Anglo-Saxon bloodlines and undermine her Christian identity with their Roman Catholic conspiracies.

A principal leader of the revival movement in east Tennessee was Samuel Doak, the Presbyterian minister who had delivered his famous "Sword of the Lord" sermon in 1780 sending the Tennessee militia off to defeat the British. As the fires of revival flared up in the 1800s, Doak converted to abolitionism, freed all his slaves, and then traveled the countryside preaching that any true Christian would condemn and work to end the institution of slavery.

The logic of evangelical Protestants in the 18th century led to an inescapable conclusion: If God was indeed no respecter of persons, and if all were equal in the sight of God—men and women, young and old, rich and poor, white and colored—then Christians had no business owning slaves or benefitting from their labor and suffering, and slavery itself was a crime against God.

It was the work of all true Christians, Wesley urged, to act as instruments of God for the suppression of slavery.