Best Evangelical Quotes & Sayings

A singular confusion exists about the notions of 'culture' and 'civilization'.
Culture began with the 'prologue in heaven.' With its religion, art, ethics, and philosophy, it will always be dealing with man's relation to that heaven from whence he came. Everything within culture means a confirmation or a rejection, a doubt or a reminiscence of the heavenly origin of man. Culture is characterized by this enigma and goes on through all time with the steady striving to solve it.
On the other hand, civilization is a continuation of the zoological, one-dimensional life, the material exchange between man and nature. This aspect of life differs from other animals' lives, but only in its degree, level, and organization. Here, one does not find man embarrassed by evangelical, Hamletian, or Karamasovian problems. The anonymous member of society functions here only by adopting the goods nature and changing the world by his work according to his needs. — Alija Izetbegovic

I feel like one of the things that is central to American life is the religious experience, and I think that the experience of being Muslim in America is as valid and as important a perspective on the religious experience of America as evangelical Christianity or Judaism - whatever it may be. — Ayad Akhtar

The primary narrative that forms our ministry models draws from our evangelical success stories. We are presented with triumphalistic narratives that minimize stories of struggle. Our historical reflection reveals an obsession with success and celebration while stories of survival and suffering are ignored. History is often told by the victorious and therefore favors them. In — Soong-Chan Rah

It seems to me to be the best proof of an evangelical disposition, that persons are not angry when reproached, and have a Christian charity for those that ill deserve it. — Desiderius Erasmus

Then she revived him with an ardor and skill he could not have imagined in the meager pleasures of his solitary lovemaking, and without glory deprived him of his virginity. He was fifty-two years old and she was twenty-three, but age was the least pernicious of the differences between them. They continued to make hurried, heartless siesta love in the evangelical shade of the orange trees. The madwomen encouraged them from the terraces with indecent songs, and celebrated their triumphs with stadium ovations. Before the Marquis was aware of the dangers that pursued him, Bernarda woke him from his stupor with the news that she was in the second month of pregnancy. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

As everyone knows, there is only one way to fry chicken correctly. Unfortunately, most people think their method is best, but most people are wrong. Mine is the only right way, and on this subject I feel almost evangelical. — Laurie Colwin

J.C. Ryle is an evangelical champion ... One of the bravest and best of men. — Charles Spurgeon

In America, evangelical churches have often been bastions of conservatism, providing support for the status quo. — Tony Campolo

To call a man evangelical who is not evangelistic is an utter contradiction. — G. Campbell Morgan

Reverend Easter waved her hand dismissively. "It doesn't matter to God what we call ourselves, or even what we call Him. We're the only ones who care about that. But as an Episcopalian and not an evangelical," she said, with a knowing look at Hannah, "I'll answer your question with another question, or rather, with a bunch of them, which is how we tend to do things. How else do you explain the miracle of your beating heart, the compassion of strangers, the existence of Mozart and Rilke and Michelangelo? How do you account for redwoods and hummingbirds, for orchids and nebulas? How can such beauty possibly exist without God? And how can we see it and know it's beautiful and be moved by it, without God?" Hannah — Hillary Jordan

Most good evangelical Study Bibles have more in common than people sometimes realize. All of them are committed to explaining the Bible to lay readers. — D. A. Carson

Chastity is a monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual sensuality; it strikes at the root of all domestic happiness, and consigns more than half of the human race to misery. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

The God of Evangelical Christianity is a Monster. — William P. Young

As a writer I have received my share of mixed reviews. Even so, as I read through stacks of vituperative letters, I got a strong sense for why the world does not automatically associate the word "grace" with evangelical Christians. Noxious — Philip Yancey

this integration of Jefferson and Jesus is in many ways how members of the evangelical right can oppose abortion yet ignore the needs of disenfranchised members of society, how they can rage against sexual revolutions and offer little critique on economic greed or mass consumption, and how they can keep labor unions and government in check while not doing the same to Wall Street, insurance companies, and other big American businesses. Of course, much of today's evangelical political doctrine has become so radical, so driven by fear and hyperbole that it's more or less a parody of the doctrines of Thomas Jefferson and Jesus, a culture where the poor in spirit are not blessed, they are marginalized and expected to care for themselves. — Matthew Paul Turner

Jesus said whatever you do to the least of these my brothers you've done it to me. And this is what I've come to think. That if I want to identify fully with Jesus Christ, who I claim to be my Savior and Lord, the best way that I can do that is to identify with the poor. This I know will go against the teachings of all the popular evangelical preachers. But they're just wrong. They're not bad, they're just wrong ... Christianity is about learning to love like Jesus loved and Jesus loved the poor and Jesus loved the broken-hearted. — Rich Mullins

The greatest heresy in the American Evangelical and Protestant church is that if you pray and ask Jesus Christ to come into your heart, He will definitely come in! — Paul Washer

My wife, Dixie, is evangelical Christian. We met in the Reagan White House, when she was a student intern. We're members of the Horizon Christian Fellowship Church. — Dinesh D'Souza

But what it was that inscrutable Ahab said to that tiger-yellow crew of his - these were words best omitted here; for you live under the blessed light of the evangelical land. Only the infidel sharks in the audacious seas may give ear to such words, when, with tornado brow, and eyes of red murder, and foam-glued lips, Ahab leaped after his prey. — Herman Melville

Like Nadia, I wrestled with the evangelical tradition in which I was raised, often ungracefully. At times I've tried to wring the waters of my first baptism out of my clothes, shake them out of my hair, and ask for a do-over in some other community where they ordain women, vote for Democrats, and believe in evolution. But Jesus has this odd habit of allowing ordinary, screwed-up people to introduce him, and so it was ordinary, screwed-up people who first told me I was a beloved child of God, who first called me a Christian. I don't know where my story of faith will take me, but it will always begin here. That much can never change. — Rachel Held Evans

There's no stronger bulwark of sound conservatism than the evangelical church, and no better place to make friends who'll help you to gain your rightful place in the community than in your own church-home! — Sinclair Lewis

Lady Harborough ... was on the platform, making a short speech in which she described the valuable work her hospital fund was doing. It seemed to consist largely of rescuing unmarried mothers from poverty and subjecting them to slavery instead, with the additional disadvantage of being preached at daily by evangelical clergymen. — Philip Pullman

We are Christians because we find our identity, life, and purpose in Christ. We are evangelical because we believe the gospel and esteem it as the great central truth of God's revelation to men. — Paul Washer

In that sense at least the rector of Saint Barnabas, a man named Robert MacFarlane, did not strike me as evangelical at all. His sermons were not seamless and armor plated but had spaces in them, spaces of silence as if he needed those spaces to find deep within himself what he was going to say next, as if he was giving the rest of us space to think for a moment about what he had just been trying to say last. There was never any doubt in my mind but that the faith he was laying out before us was a faith that, even as he spoke it, he was drawing out of the raw stuff of his own life. He spoke very quietly, and the church he spoke in was not brilliantly lit but full of shadow, full of secrets. — Frederick Buechner

Alongside the success of much Church marketing, and in the midst of much of the psychologized faith in the evangelical world today, a profound secularization of faith has taken place, and this despite the continued use of good biblical words like sin, grace, Christ, and atonement. This secularization is appealing because it buys the appearance of success, but it also forfeits the nature of biblical faith. The seeds of a full-blown liberalism have now been sown, and in the next generation they will surely come to maturity. — David F. Wells

As with God so with the Bible; just because our tradition tells us that the Bible says and means one thing or another, that does not excuse us from the challenging task of studying it afresh in the light of the best knowledge we have about its world and context, to see whether these things are indeed so. For me the dynamic of a commitment to Scripture is not "we believe the Bible, so there is nothing more to be learned," but rather "we believe the Bible, so we had better discover all the things in it to which our traditions, including our 'protestant' or 'evangelical' traditions, which have supposed themselves to be 'biblical' but are sometimes demonstrably not, have made us blind." And — N. T. Wright

I am a bit odd. I am somewhat evangelical. But I am not crazy. — Gordon Gee

Evangelicalism, as perhaps the strongest Protestant religious movement in the United States, relies heavily on marketing principles for its strength and growth, often intentionally segmenting its market, targeting specific populations, and using homogeneity to its advantage to create religious meaning and belonging and dense ingroup social ties. Although this evangelical vigor can and is used to address racial division in unique ways, the movement also, by its heavy reliance on racially homogenous ingroups and the segmented market, ironically undercuts many of its own best efforts. — Christian Smith

Our passion is to imitate the ministry of Jesus in the power of the Spirit. This requires we must follow Jesus out of baptismal waters, through our personal deserts, and into the harvest. We want to take the ammunition of the balanced evangelical theology with the fire power of Pentecostal practice, loading & readying the best of both worlds to hit the target of making & nurturing disciples ... — John Wimber

The problem with the evangelical homeschool movement was not their desire to educate their children at home, or in private religious schools, but the evangelical impulse to "protect" children from ideas that might lead them to "question" and to keep them cloistered in what amounted to a series of one-family gated communities. — Frank Schaeffer

I don't think that John Kerry is the Messiah or the Democratic Party is the answer, but I don't like the evangelical community blessing the Republican Party as some kind of God-ordained instrument for solving the world's problems. — Tony Campolo

Evangelical Christians, who once were a ridiculed irrelevant sectarian movement, have, over just three decades, become a powerful voting bloc that can no longer be ignored. — Tony Campolo

In short, Calvin has been given too much blame by critics and too much credit by fans. His real genius is to be found in his remarkable ability to synthesize the best thought of the whole Christian tradition and sift it with rigorous exegetical skill and evangelical instincts. His rhetorical rule was "brevity and simplicity," and this, combined with a heart enflamed by truth, draws us back to his wells for refreshment in many times and places - especially when we seem to have lost our way. — Michael S. Horton

Dr. Ockenga had been a student of Machen's at Princeton University and followed him out. But then Ockenga, like Dad, became a critic of the fundamentalist's endless civil wars and started looking for a new way to present a friendlier evangelical faith (and face). He helped invent a movement called the New Evangelicals. Their mascot was Billy Graham. Other figures like Carl Henry, founder of Christianity Today magazine (and a man who became bitterly jealous of my father in later years), criticized fundamentalism's failure to address the world's intellectual and social needs. A movement was born - modern evangelicalism, a fundamentalism-lite where everyone could more or less do their own theological thing, as long as they "named the name of Christ" and paid lip service to the "inerrancy" of the Bible. On — Frank Schaeffer

I still have deep respect for the evangelical tradition and feel, in many ways, close to the Baptist roots of my childhood, although I've been an Episcopalian throughout my adult life and a regular churchgoer. — Jay Parini

In sum, the ability of what had once been a socially responsible, moderately intellectual, Arminian evangelical Methodism and a socially responsible, reasonably comprehensive, Calvinistic Presbyterianism to make any kind of a sharp Christian impact on Christian thought, society, politics, or spirituality was fatally compromised by what Barry Mack has very precisely labelled 'the tragic failure of Church Union. — Mark A. Noll

There is a breeze blowing. I see it in the deep discontent that is being voiced with the threadbare state of the evangelical world, with its empty worship, its market-driven superficiality, and its trivial thought. It is a breeze blowing toward better, deeper, more honest things. I suspect that it is the Holy Spirit who is blowing, that this is his breeze, and that these leaves that are shaking are the signs of better things to come within an evangelical faith that is thus being reformed. Let us all pray that it is so! — David F. Wells

Lordship and rapport are the keys to save us from being combative and make us more attractive in spiritual conversations. — Gary Rohrmayer

He was righteous. He had a sense of duty, of what was right and wrong in the world, and I don't mean that in some evangelical sense of the word. And I don't mean that his world was just black and white. He just had a code, you know? He used to talk about that, about how few people had CODES anymore. It was his thing. He was always reading books about the samurai, about Japanese culture. — Nickolas Butler

All creeds are fallible and uncertain evidences of evangelical piety. — Daniel Webster

To-day if ye shall hear his voice, harden not your hearts" (Heb. 4:7). That is evangelical preaching. Is this ruthless speed? Nothing could be more ruthless than to make men think there is still plenty of time to mend their ways. To tell men that the cause is urgent, and that the kingdom of God is at hand is the most charitable and merciful act we can perform, the most joyous news we can bring. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

It appears that inherited (I should say stale) evangelical apologetics has almost completely displaced any serious attempt to seek the most likely meaning of gospel texts in their own right, in their ancient contexts. — Robert M. Price

If we who self-designate ourselves with terms like "Catholic," "Orthodox," "Protestant," "Evangelical," "Charismatic," "Pentecostal" and others would fully surrender ourselves to The Holy Spirit, we could stop focusing on the secondary words we use to describe the primary experience of The Holy Spirit. — John David Geib

John, let me make one thing clear," Jim said, cutting me off in his most stern, evangelical voice. "Every man is blessed with his gifts from the Lord. One of mine happens to be a penis large enough that, if it had a penis of its own, my penis' penis would be larger than your penis." ...
... "Fuck all of you," John retorted. "You don't even exist. We're all just a figment of my cock's imagination. — David Wong

The therapeutic concerns of the culture too often set the agenda for evangelical preaching. — Albert Mohler

Or take the belief common among some evangelicals that every individual needs an identifiable point of personal faith conversion to create a "personal relationship with Jesus." That's certainly a key to evangelical revivalism, and one can definitely find various Bible verses that seem to buttress such a claim. But, altogether, the direct biblical evidence for that theology and rhetoric is in fact pretty thin. — Christian Smith

The clergy are, practically, the most irresponsible of all talkers.
["Evangelical Teaching: Dr. Cumming," The Westminster Review, 1885.] — George Eliot

Our slower pace of life, our thoughtfulness, our spiritual and intellectual depth, and our listening abilities are prophetic qualities for the evangelical community, calling us to a renewed understanding of God and a fresh reading on the abundant life Jesus came to give us. Yet because of the extroverted bias in many of our churches, introverts are leading double lives. We are masquerading as extroverts in order to find acceptance, yet we feel displaced and confused. We are weary of fighting our introversion, and we long to live faithfully as the people we were created to be. — Adam S. McHugh

The only power God recognizes in His church is the power of His Spirit whereas the only power actually recognized today by the majority of evangelicals is the power of man. — A.W. Tozer

The evangelical task primarily is the preaching of the Gospel, in the interest of individual regeneration by the supernatural grace of God, in such a way that divine redemption can be recognized as the best solution of our problems, individual and social — Carl F. H. Henry