Christianity As A World Quotes & Sayings

Moreover God hath ordained man in this world, as it were, the very image of himself, to the intent, that he, as it were a god on earth, should provide for the wealth of all creatures. — Desiderius Erasmus

The most critical of these new religious developments for twentieth-century religious liberalism were a renewed and transformed emphasis on mystical practice and experience, the healing ministry known as mind cure, and the rise of modern psychology. These three interrelated spiritual innovations spread as significant components of popular religion in large part through the mass print media. Rather than religious movements dependent on revivalism or church life, these were first and foremost discourses, creatures of the printed word. Initially explored only by an avant-garde of liberal intellectuals late in the nineteenth century, the new books and ideas emerging at the margins of liberal Protestantism eventually reached a nation-wide middle-class audience. The mass media unleashed by nineteenth-century evangelicalism enabled the alternative spiritualities of the twentieth century to flourish, especially with the rise of religious middlebrow culture in the decades after World War I. — Matthew Hedstrom

Pessimism, feelings of worthlessness and lack of entitlement, inability to derive satisfaction from pleasure, a tormenting awareness of the world's general crappiness: for Katz's Jewish paternal forebears, who'd been driven from shtetl to shtetl by implacable anti-Semites, as for the old Angles and Saxons on his mother's side, who'd labored to grow rye and barley in the poor soils and short summers of northern Europe, feeling bad all the time and expecting the worst had been natural ways of equilibriating themselves with the lousiness of their circumstances. Few things gratified depressives, after all, more than really bad news. This obviously wasn't an optimal way to live, but it had its evolutionary advantages. Depressives in grim situations handed down their genes, however despairingly, while the self-improvers converted to Christianity or moved away to sunnier locales. — Jonathan Franzen

At the heart of racism stands Satan, not man. No one is more pleased by the racial tension in the world than God's ultimate enemy. I'm sure he marvels at how shallow we humans tend to be, by hating one another simply because of skin color! If you are a child of the Most High God and you are fighting in this war of division and hatred (even if only in thought), you are fighting for the enemy.

If this is you, you need to repent of this sin and start seeing others the way God sees them, as made in His image. If not, Satan will keep stirring your mind with thoughts that will not only further stoke the burning hatred of racism deep within you, it will put even more distance between you and the One who saw your unformed body before the foundations of the world, and knit you together in your mother's womb. — Patrick Higgins

Among Evangelical Christians, all of whom await the Second Coming of Jesus, there are historically two camps: postmillennialists and premillennialists. For most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most were of the "post" variety, meaning that they expected the Messiah's return after the thousand-year reign of peace. In order to hasten His arrival, they set out to create that harmonious world here and now, fighting for the abolition of slavery, prohibition of alcohol, public education, and women's literacy.
The chaos of the Civil War and industrialization caused many evangelicals to rethink their optimism. They determined that Jesus would actually arrive before the final judgment. Therefore any efforts toward a just society here on earth were futile; what mattered was perfecting one's faith. As historian Randall Balmer writes, these believers "retreated into a theology of despair, one that essentially ceded the temporal world to Satan and his minions. — Mark Sundeen

There is much: recognition of the fact that human beings live indeterminate and incomplete lives; recognition of the power exerted over and upon us by our own habits and memories; recognition of the ways in which the world presses in on all of us, for it is an intractable place where many things go awry and go astray, where one may all-too-easily lose one's very self. The epistemological argument is framed by faith, but it stands on its own as an account of willing, nilling, memory, language, signs, affections, delight, the power and the limits of minds and bodies. To the extent that a prideful philosophy refuses to accept these, Augustine would argue, to that extent philosophy hates the human condition itself. — Jean Bethke Elshtain

There is no imagination wherewith man is besotted, more foolish, none so pernicious as this,- that persons not purified, not sanctified, not made holy in their life, should afterwards be taken into that state of blessedness which consists in the enjoyment of God. Neither can such persons enjoy God, nor would God be a reward to them. Holiness is perfected in heaven: but the beginning of it is invariably confined to this world. — John Owen

Now I think ultimately our hope is certainly that people can feel and taste the goodness of God and to find the salvation in Jesus's love and sacrifice. Sometimes the biggest barrier to that has been Christians and has been a Church that is numb to the poverty of the world or just sees our Christianity as a ticket into heaven while ignoring the hells of the world around us. And we're not willing to settle for that kind of Christianity. We believe in a kingdom that begins now and that the kingdom of God Jesus preached is not just something we're to go to when we die but that we're to bring down on earth as it is in heaven. — Shane Claiborne

Many in our world today want us to believe that we can except Christ simply as a Savior from sin, but not the Lord of our lives. They teach essentially that a person can perform an act of believing on Christ once, and after this, they can fall away even into total unbelief and yet still supposedly be "saved". Christ does not call men in this way. Christ does not save men in this way. The true Christian is the one continually coming, always believing in Christ. Real Christian faith is an ongoing faith, not a one-time act. If one wishes to be eternally satiated, one meal is not enough. If we wish to feast on the bread of heaven, we must do so all our lives. We will never hunger or thirst if we are always coming and always believing in Christ. He's our sufficiency. Christ the bread from heaven. We must feed on all of Christ, not just the parts we happen to like. Christ is not the Savior of anyone unless He is their Lord as well. — James R. White

I couldn't but surmise that the devil, looking at the cruel wars that Christianity has occasioned, the persecutions, the tortures Christian has inflicted on Christian, the unkindness, the hypocracy, the intolerance, must consider the balance sheet with complacency. And when he remembers that it has laid upon mankind the bitter burden of the sense of sin that has darkened the beauty of the starry night and cast a baleful shadow on the passing plesures of a world to be enjoyed, he must chuckle as he murmurs: give the devil his due. — W. Somerset Maugham

Can Christian preaching expect modern man to accept the mythical view of the world as true? To do so would be both senseless and impossible. It would be senseless, because there is nothing specifically Christian in the mythical view of the world as such. It is simply the cosmology of a pre-scientific age. — Rudolf Karl Bultmann

Christ has lifted woman to a new place in the world. And just in proportion as Christianity has sway, will she rise to a higher dignity in human life. What she has now, and what she shall have, of privilege and true honor, she owes to that gospel which took those qualities peculiarly and which had been counted weak and unworthy, and gave them a Divine glory in Christ. — Herrick Johnson

And yet if anything in the world can save you, it is not a convent and not Catholicism, but simply an active interest in your fellow-creatures. When experience and observation have taught us love and charity, we are saved, and life is no longer terrible. Fate may be as cruel as she pleases ; but if we have warmth and love in our hearts, we shall never be alone, never in despair, and shall never think of self-destruction, if only out of pity for all our suffering brothers, whom, as long as we live, we have always the chance of helping. — Aimee Dostoyevsky

Part of the scandal of American Christianity is that statistically the U.S. is the most Christian country in the world, and yet as a country we have the greatest income inequality in the world. And as a country we are uncritically committed, not simply to being the most powerful nation in the world militarily, but to being as militarily powerful as the rest of the world combined.
We Christians live in a tradition that is passionate about issues of economic justice and peace and yet at least half of American Christians, probably even more, think it's really important that we be as powerful as the rest of the world put together. — Marcus J. Borg

This is therefore a time, not for unkindly criticism of fellow Christians, but for friendly conference; not for disputing over divergent views, but for united action; not for dogmatic assertion of prophetic programs, but for the humble acknowledgment that "we know in part;" not for idle dreaming, but for the immediate task of evangelizing a lost world. For such effort, no one truth is more inspiring, than that of the return of Christ. None other can make us sit more lightly by the things of time, none other is more familiar as a Scriptural motive to purity, holiness, patience, vigilance, love. — Charles R. Erdman

Above all the studies in the world, study your own hearts; waste not a minute more of your precious time about frivolous & unsubstantial controversies. My dear flock, I have, according to the grace given me, labored in the course of my ministry among you, to feed you with the heart strengthening bread of practical doctrine, and I do assure you, it is far better you should have the sweet and saving impressions of gospel truths, feelingly and powerfully conveyed to your hearts, than only to understand them by a bare ratiocination, or a dry syllogistical inference. Leave trifling studies to such as have time lying on their hands and know not how to employ it. Remember you are at the door of eternity, and have other work to do. Those hours you spend upon heart-work in your closets, are the golden spots of all your time and will have the sweetest influence up to your last hour. — John Flavel

We are compelled by reflection to recognize that God is not to be placed against the material world [as in Christianity], but must be placed as a 'divine power' or 'moving spirit' within the cosmos itself ... All the wonderful phenomena of nature around us, organic as well as inorganic, are only various products of one and the same original force. — Ernst Haeckel

As I stumbled into confusion about what was real and what was not, the strangest thing happened: The world disintegrated. Reality collapsed, or my perception of it. It ripped apart like a dry skin under pressure, giving way to something I can only describe as ineffable dimensions, depths upon depths. — Stefan Emunds

The idea that Christianity is basically a religion of moral improvement ... has its roots in the liberal Protestantism of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century ... It is this stereotype which continues to have influence today ... But then came the First World War ... What had gone wrong was that the idea of sin had been abandoned by liberal Christianity as some kind of unnecessary hangover from an earlier and less enlightened period in Christian history. — Alister E. McGrath

The High Cost of Servanthood
Jesus warned, however, that this life of servanthood is not lived without cost. He said, "The servant is not greater than his Lord" (John 13:16) and, if the persecuted and hated Him, we can expect no better treatment.
In 2 Timothy 3:12 Paul wrote, " All that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persectution," so this is also the cost we as servants must be willing to pay.
This is so difficult for us to accept in our world of man-pleasing, "I'm OK, you're OK" Christianity. No one wants to be disliked, hated or misunderstood
especially by family, friends and loved ones. But this of often exactly the price to be paid by anyone seriously wanting to follow Jesus into a life of servanthood. — K.P. Yohannan

Frankly, I am quite tired of those who tout Christianity as a way to stop smoking or drinking or break wild habits of the world. Is that all Christianity is, to keep us from some bad habit? Of course, regeneration will clean us up, and the new birth will make a man right. If that is what Christianity is all about, what about the person whose life is not that bad? The purpose of God in redemption is to restore us again to the divine imperative of worship. We were created to worship, but sin destroyed that ability. Jesus Christ, on the cross, redeemed us and brought us back to the place where we now can worship and have fellowship with God Almighty. My clean life is a by-product of my conversion. My life may have pointed out to me that I needed a drastic change, but that is not the purpose for which I was converted. The essence of conversion is to bring me into a right relationship with God and have fellowship with Him. — A.W. Tozer

If we're not careful, our individualistic assumptions about church can lead us to think of the church as something like a health club. We're members because we believe in the mission statement and want to be a part of the action. As long as the church provides the services I want, I'll stick around. But when I no longer approve of the vision, or am no longer "being fed," I'm out the door. This is not biblical Christianity. Scripture is clear that when we become Christians, we become-permanently and spiritually-a part of the church. We become part of the family of God, with all the responsibilities and expectations that word connotes in the non-Western world. — E. Randolph Richards

If you live in such a manner as to stand the test of the last judgment, you can depend upon it that the world will not speak well of you. — Alistair Begg

Certainly If John moschos where to come back today it is likely that he would find much more than that was familiar and the practices of a modern Muslim Sufi then he would with those of, say, a contemporary American evangelical. Yet the simple truth has been lost by our tendency to think of Christianity as a western religion rather than the Oriental faith it actually is. Moreover the modern demonization of Islam in the west, and the recent growth of Muslim fundamentalism (itself in many ways a reaction to the West's repeated humiliation of the Muslim world), have led to an atmosphere where few are aware of, or indeed wish to be aware of, the profound kinship of Christianity and Islam. — William Dalrymple

Followers of Jesus stake their claim on the firm belief that God will one day heal the planet of pain and death. Until that day arrives, the case against God must rely on incomplete evidence. We cannot really reconcile our pain-wracked world with a loving God because what we experience now is not the same as what God intends. Jesus himself prayed that God's will "be done, on earth as it is in heaven," a prayer that will not be fully answered until evil and suffering are finally defeated. — Philip Yancey

unusual in the Roman period.2 In the eyes of many of that time, early Christianity was odd, bizarre, in some ways even dangerous. For one thing, it did not fit what "religion" was for people then. Indicative of this, Roman-era critics designated it as a perverse "superstition." Yet the very features of early Christianity that made it odd and objectionable in the ancient Roman setting have become now unquestioned assumptions about religion in much of the modern world. — Larry W. Hurtado

There is a God to love and there is a God to fear, and He is one and the same! Did He not judge His own Son as a demonstration of His love for the world? And did He not then show His love for the Son He judged by raising Him from the dead? How silly to think that if He is a loving God, He cannot also be a fearsome God. The two attributes complement each other. — David Jeremiah

The problem is that our world and our education remain focused exclusively on external, materialistic values. We are not concerned enough with inner values. Those who grow up with this kind of education live in a materialistic life and eventually the whole society becomes materialistic. But this culture is not sufficient to tackle our human problems. The real problem is here," the Dalai Lama said, pointed to his head.

The Archbishop tapped his chest with his fingers to emphasize the heart as well.

"And here," the Dalai Lama echoed. "Mind and heart.. — Dalai Lama XIV

It is a bitter thought, how different a thing the Christianity of the world might have been, if the Christian faith had been adopted as the religion of the empire under the auspices of Marcus Aurelius instead of those of Constantine. — John Stuart Mill

I would make it a rule to eradicate from my patient any strong personal taste which is not actually a sin, even if it is something quite trivial such as a fondness for county cricket or collecting stamps or drinking cocoa. Such things, I grant you, have nothing of virtue in them; but there is a sort of innocence and humility and self-forgetfulness about them which I distrust. The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring twopence what other people say about it, is by that very fact fore-armed against some of our subtlest modes of attack. You should always try to make the patient abandon the people or food or books he really likes in favour of the "best" people, the "right" food, the "important" books. — C.S. Lewis

There are sincere and reputable people on both sides. They disagree, but their disagreement has not undone Christianity. And neither side is blowing anyone else up over it. Week in and week out, rabbis, ministers, and priests do not stand before their congregations, preaching about the world to come and exhorting them to seek martyrdom as a fast track to heaven. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Evil is the most difficult problem in the world. It is also the strongest objection to God's existence. If God does exist, it is also the most problematic challenge to his nature and power. As a Christian, it is my greatest temptation for doubt and unbelief. — Jon Morrison

The work of Christ on the cross did not influence God to love us, did not increase that love by one degree, did not open any fount of grace or mercy in His heart. He had loved us from old eternity and needed nothing to stimulate that love. The cross is not responsible for God's love; rather it was His love which conceived the cross as the one method by which we could be saved. God felt no different toward us after Christ had died for us, for in the mind of God Christ had already died before the foundation of the world. God never saw us except through atonement. The human race could not have existed one day in its fallen state had not Christ spread His mantle of atonement over it. And this He did in eternal purpose long ages before they led Him out to die on the hill above Jerusalem. All God's dealings with man have been conditioned upon the cross. — A.W. Tozer

If the requirements of world-structure are so inexorable, what scope is there for a free providence in distributing pleasures and pains? If pains are the natural rubs of a world-structure bearing on sentient creatures, what need have we to view them as instruments of a disciplinary providence? — Jocelyn Gibb

One area of the Book of Mormon that does bother some is what they see as anachronistic doctrine; that the Book of Mormon has Christian doctrine prior to the coming of Christ; that it has seemingly New Testament doctrines appearing centuries before Jesus arrives, and it seems to be representing a form of Christianity existing in the New World where there doesn't seem to be much evidence of that archaeologically. Christianity is invisible in the New World prior to the coming of Columbus, and so those things seem like clear anachronisms to people looking at it in that way. — Daniel C. Peterson

You see, the bodily resurrection of Jesus isn't a take-it-or-leave-it thing, as though some Christians are welcome to believe it and others are welcome not to believe it. Take it away, and the whole picture is totally different. Take it away, and Karl Marx was probably right to accuse Christianity of ignoring the problems of the material world. Take it away, and Sigmund Freud was probably right to say that Christianity is a wish-fulfillment religion. Take it away, and Friedrich Nietzsche was probably right to say that Christianity was a religion for wimps. Put it back, and you have a faith that can take on the postmodern world that looks to Marx, Freud and Nietzsche as its prophets, and you can beat them at their own game with the Easter news that the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. — N. T. Wright

Christianity, just as much as Islam, teaches children that unquestioned faith is a virtue. You don't have to make the case for what you believe. If somebody announces that it is part of his faith, the rest of society, whether of the same faith, or another, or of none, is obliged, by ingrained custom, to "respect" it without question; respect it until the day it manifests itself in a horrible massacre like the destruction of the World Trade Center, or the London or Madrid bombings. — Richard Dawkins

Christians have no business thinking that the good life consists mainly in not doing bad things. We have no business thinking that to do evil in this world you have to be a Bengal tiger, when, in fact, it is enough to be a tame tabby - a nice person but not a good one. In short, Pentecost makes it clear that nothing is so fatal to Christianity as indifference. — William Sloane Coffin Jr.

His story is colored by the murder of a brother, the rape of a sister, the betrayal of a friend, the pounding of nails into flesh and bone, and the darkening of the sky. A world of what-ifs and could-have-beens, peopled by has-beens and might-have-beens. It is a world soaked in fear and drenched by the blood of a million martyrs. A world of men burned at the stake and babes slaughtered at their mother's breasts. A dark history with pain oozing into all its hidden corners. At the center of history is a death. Christ's death, the decisive point of history. Christianity is perhaps the most morbid religion of the world. Perpetually meditating upon death with little crosses hung around their necks, Christian disciples sing their way to martyrdom. Anticipating death and calling it gain, Christians are evangelists of the grotesque. The very hope of the Gospel rests directly upon our ability to imagine a world in which suffering serves as the soil from which resurrection springs. — Ben Palpant

For centuries, pilgrims have travelled to Ayodhya identifying it as a birthplace of Ram. But the exact location is a subject of dispute and political turmoil. Ever since colonial times, Hinduism has felt under siege, forced to explain itself using European templates, make itself more tangible, more structured, more homogenous, more historical, more geographical, less psychological, less emotional, to render itself as valid as the major religions of the world like Christianity, Judaism and Islam. The fallout of this pressure is the need to locate matters of faith in a particular spot. What used to be once a matter of faith becomes a territorial war zone where courts have to intervene — Devdutt Pattanaik

The city of man requires idolatry. All must bow before the symbol of its total claim. Religion is tolerated when it supports the claims of the state, party, the institutional hierarchy. But those who say, "We must obey God rather than men" are always condemned as traitors or exiled as aliens. Yet the calling of Christ's kingdom no only separates a man from the world, it also sends him to the world. In this time of the kingdom we are pilgrims, for the mountain of Christ's rule is the heavenly Zion; but in the task of the kingdom we are ambassadors, for we have been sent by the King to proclaim his terms of peace to his rebellious realm. — Edmund P. Clowney

Those who withdraw Christianity from the social order to "focus on evangelism" narrow down our engagement in a similar way. I hope it goes without saying that evangelism is a critical aspect of the life of the church! But when evangelism is the only way in which Christians seek social influence, the world encounters the church in two ways: gospel presentations, and activities designed to manipulate people into hearing gospel presentations. In the eyes of the world, the church comes across as a sort of spiritual Amway. — Greg Forster

The change that is coming to the body of Christ is so profound that the world will have a new definition of Christianity ... Those who submit to Him in truth ... will be the most dangerous and powerful people on earth, and will be the greatest threat to the Antichrist spirit that now sits in the church as a substitute for Him. — Rick Joyner

If, therefore, a man will so live as to show that he feels and believes the most fundamental doctrines of Christianity, he must live above the world. — William Law

Thus, in truth, a sojourn in Rome means an expansion of view that is beyond words. Whereas up to that time I had been accustomed to image Christianity to myself as a delicate flower, divine because of its supernatural fragility, now I saw that it was a tree in whose branches the fowls of the air, once the enemies of its tender growth, can lodge in security - divine since the wideness of its reach and the strength of its mighty roots can be accounted for by nothing else. Before I had thought of it as of a fine, sweet aroma, to be appreciated apart; now I saw that it was the leaven, hid in the heavy measures of the world, expressing itself in terms incalculably coarser than itself, until the whole is leavened. — Robert Hugh Benson

Why dost thou not see that on earth they desires fly from thee? Art thou a not as a child that thinketh to travel to the sun, when he seeth it rising or setting, as it were close to the heart ; but as he traveleth toward it, it seems to go from him ; and when he hath long wearied himself, it is as far off as ever, for the thing he seeketh is in another world? Even such hath been thy labour in seeking for so holy, so pure, so peaceable as society, as might afford thee a contented settlement here. Those that have gone as far as America for satisfaction, have confessed themselves unsatisfied still (643). — Richard Baxter

The modern Gamaliel should teach ethics. Ethics is the science of human duty. Arithmetic tells man how to count his money; ethics how he should acquire it, whether by honesty or fraud. Geography is a map of the world; ethics is a beautiful map of duty. This ethics is not Christianity, it is not even religion; but it is the sister of religion, because the path of duty is in full harmony, as to quality and direction, with the path of God. — David Swing

During the Roman occupation of Palestine, Christianity was founded by Paul of Tarsus as a less ruthlessly monotheistic sect of Judaism and a less exclusive one, which looked outwards from the Jews to the rest of the world. — Richard Dawkins

When you're a teenager - How do you determine what being a Christian looks like, if you're not willing to be as transparent as the realty TV world we live in? If we are to make it easy for others to find God, we must be more diligent about sharing our stories, openly and honestly. — Sarah Jakes

Colonization of the world, more often than not by robbery and warfare, spread Christianity into the Americas and other corners of the earth, just as Islam was spread throughout Asia and Africa. lt is not a coincidence that the two most widespread religions in the world today are the most warlike and intolerant religions in history. Before the rise of Christianity, religious tolerance, including a large degree of religious freedom, was not only custom but in many ways law under the Roman and Persian empires. They conquered for greed and power, rarely for any declared religious reasons, and actually sought to integrate foreign religions into their civilization, rather than seeking to destroy them. People were generally not killed because they practiced a different religion. Indeed, the Christians were persecuted for denying that the popular gods existed - not for following a different religion. In other words, Christians were persecuted for being intolerant. — Richard Carrier

According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it. — G.K. Chesterton

No civilisation, not even that of ancient Greece, has ever undergone such a continuous and profound process of change as Western Europe has done during the last 900 years. It is impossible to explain this fact in purely economic terms by a materialistic interpretation of history. The principle of change has been a spiritual one and the progress of Western civilisation is intimately related to the dynamic ethos of Western Christianity, which has gradually made Western man conscious of his moral responsibility and his duty to change the world. — Christopher Dawson

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

Jesus' words are slightly less shocking when you consider that exclusive claims to truth are more common than we know. Truth is, by its nature, exclusive. Two differing claims cannot both be right. Math teachers make exclusive claims all the time. They will tell you that the multiplication table is not up for negotiation. There are right answers and wrong ones. A doctor's prescription is an exclusive claim as well. It excludes every medication except the one that is written on the prescription paper. A person who gives you their phone number is telling you to exclude dialing all other numbers except the digits they have provided you. — Jon Morrison

There is one notable thing about our Christianity: bad, bloody, merciless, money-grabbing, and predatory. The invention of hell measured by our Christianity of today, bad as it is, hypocritical as it is, empty and hollow as it is, neither the deity nor his son is a Christian, nor qualified for that moderately high place. Ours is a terrible religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the innocent blood it has spilled. — Mark Twain

The oldest of the three Abrahamic religions, and the clear ancestor of the other two, is Judaism: originally a tribal cult of a single fiercely unpleasant God, morbidly obsessed with sexual restrictions, with the smell of charred flesh, with his own superiority over rival gods and with the exclusiveness of his chosen desert tribe. During the Roman occupation of Palestine, Christianity was founded by Paul of Tarsus as a less ruthlessly monotheistic sect of Judaism and a less exclusive one, which looked outwards from the Jews to the rest of the world. Several centuries later, Muhammad and his followers reverted to the uncompromising monotheism of the Jewish original, but not its exclusiveness, and founded Islam upon a new holy book, the Koran or Qur'an, adding a powerful ideology of military conquest to spread the faith. — Richard Dawkins

During the nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries, certain politically active religious movements sought to have the United States declared - officially, if possible, but at least unofficially - a "Christian nation." This was an attempt to reverse the church-state separation principles and achievements of such great Founders as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Roger Williams, who was more religiously devout than just about anyone living in later centuries, opposed all attempts to call a particular nation "Christian," just as he opposed the terms "Christendom" and "Christian world." His arguments included a profound analysis of the importance of separation of church and state as well as a deep religious understanding of what Christianity is. — Alan E. Johnson

You Christians look after a document containing enough dynamite to blow all civilisation to pieces, turn the world upside down and bring peace to a battle-torn planet. But you treat it as though it is nothing more than a piece of literature. — Mahatma Gandhi

Among all the many great transitions that have marked the evolution of Western civilisation ... there has been only one - the triumph of Christianity - that can be called in the fullest sense a "revolution": a truly massive and epochal revision of humanity's prevailing vision of reality, so pervasive in its influence and so vast in its consequences as to actually have created a new conception of the world, of history, of human nature, of time, and of the moral good. — David Bentley Hart

All of our faith and practice arise out of the drama of Scripture, the "big story" that traces the plot of history from creation to consummation, with Christ as its Alpha and Omega, beginning and end. And out of the throbbing verbs of this unfolding drama God reveals stable nouns - doctrines. From what God does in history we are taught certain things about who he is and what it means to be created in his image, fallen, and redeemed, renewed, and glorified in union with Christ. As the Father creates his church, in his Son and by his Spirit, we come to realize what this covenant community is and what it means to belong to it; what kind of future is promised to us in Christ, and how we are to live here and now in the light of it all. The drama and the doctrine provoke us to praise and worship - doxology - and together these three coordinates give us a new way of living in the world as disciples. — Michael S. Horton

We were born in a Jewish world, as part of a Jewish faith tradition. We had to translate ourselves into the neo-Platonic thinking Greek world; that took us about 400 years. Then, finally a man named Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, recast Christianity in terms of neo-Platonic thought. — John Shelby Spong

Righteousness and love, law and grace, life and death, as well as time and eternity all intersect at the cross; displaying a divine wisdom that staggers the imagination and leads the humble heart to bow in thankful adoration. To understand the cross of Christ is to understand the heart of God toward a fallen world He wants to save. — Steven Cook

If Christians continue to rely on emotion and ignore evidence, they will continue to lose their children to secularism. As Ravi Zacharias points out, a tepid Christianity cannot withstand a rabid secularism. And make no mistake-secularism is rabid. The world isn't neutral out there. Today's culture is becoming increasingly anti-Christian. — Frank Turek

This notion of the centrality of the church ... could hardly be more pertinent to the perennial question of "Christian culture" and our evaluation of the great figures such as Calvin and Kuyper. Hearing the words "Christian culture" may evoke visions of godly emperors, medieval Madonnas, or Bach cantatas. None of which are really about the church. Or perhaps the phrase "Christian culture" resonates with contemporary Reformed buzzwords like "world and life view," "transformation," and "kingdom vision"
all of which, I fear, are often enlisted in the service of convincing Reformed youth that it is a mistake to think of the church as central to the Christian life. — David VanDrunen

Humankind, which discovers its capacity to transform and in a certain sense create the world through its own work, forgets that this is always based on God's prior and original gift of things that are. People think that they can make arbitrary use of the earth, subjecting it without restraint to their wills, as though the earth did not have its own requisites and a prior God-given purpose, which human beings can indeed develop but must not betray. — Pope John Paul II

The lost self: With the passing of the cosmological myths and the fading of Christianity as a guarantor of identity of the self, the self becomes dislocated, Jefferson or no Jefferson, is both cut loose and imprisoned by its own freedom, yet imprisoned by a curious and paradoxical bondage like a Chinese handcuff, so that the very attempts to free itself, e.g., by ever more refined techniques for the pursuit of happiness, only tighten the bondage and distance the self ever farther from the very world is wishes to inhabit as its homeland. The rational Jeffersonian pursuit of happiness embarked upon in the American Revolution translates into the flaky euphoria of the late twentieth century. Every advance in an objective understanding of the Cosmos and in its technological control further distances the self from the Cosmos precisely in the degree of the advance - so that in the end the self becomes a space-bound ghost which roams the very Cosmos it understands perfectly. — Walker Percy

Just as the church needs members with different skills, our world must have various forms of labor, interdependent and thus valuable. A world full of ministers would be without churches, bread for the Lord's Supper, and printed Bibles to read. — R.C. Sproul Jr.

I recognized that Christianity had taught me that sacrifice is the way of life. I forgot the neighbor who raped me, but I could see that when theology presents Jesus' death as God's sacrifice of his beloved child for the sake of the world, it teaches that the highest love is sacrifice. To make sacrifice or to be sacrificed is virtuous and redemptive.

But what if this is not true? What if nothing, or very little, is saved? What if the consequence of sacrifice is simply pain, the diminishment of life, fragmentation of the soul, abasement, shame? What if the severing of life is merely destructive of life and is not the path of love, courage, trust, and faith? What if the performance of sacrifice is a ritual in which some human beings bear loss and others are protected from accountability or moral expectations? — Rebecca Ann Parker

It became obvious why Catholics had built such beautiful cathedrals and churches throughout the world. Not as gathering or meeting places for Christians. But as a home for Jesus Himself in the Blessed Sacrament. Cathedrals house Jesus. Christians merely come and visit Him. The cathedrals and churches architecturally prepare our souls for the beauty of the Eucharist. — Allen R. Hunt

Tom Wright has reminded us, "There is a persistent untruth which has made its way into the popular imagination in our day: that Christianity means closing off your mind, ceasing all serious thought, and living in a shallow fantasy world divorced from the solid truths of 'real life. ' " "But," he continues, "the truth is that genuine Christianity opens the mind [as Paul has been saying throughout this letter (to the Ephesians), and in its companion piece, the letter to Colossae], so that it can grasp truth at deeper and deeper levels."[11] — Malcolm Jeeves

Christianity is being compared with other religions as never before. Some so-called Christian leaders even advocate the working out of a system of morals, ethics, and religion that would bring together all the religions of the world. It cannot be done. Jesus Christ is unique. — Billy Graham

I maintain that the human mystery is incredibly demeaned by scientific reductionism, with its claim in promissory materialism to account eventually for all of the spiritual world in terms of patterns of neuronal activity. This belief must be classed as a superstition ... we have to recognize that we are spiritual beings with souls existing in a spiritual world as well as material beings with bodies and brains existing in a material world. — John C. Eccles

If a man prefers nothing I can give him nothing. But nearly all people I have ever met in this western society in which I live would agree to the general proposition that we need this life of practical romance; the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure. We need so to view the world as to combine an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome. We need to be happy in this wonderland without once being merely comfortable. It is this achievement of my creed that I shall chiefly pursue in these pages. — G.K. Chesterton

The church exists primarily for two closely correlated purposes: to worship God and to work for his kingdom in the world ... The church also exists for a third purpose, which serves the other two: to encourage one another, to build one another up in faith, to pray with and for one another, to learn from one another and teach one another, and to set one another examples to follow, challenges to take up, and urgent tasks to perform. This is all part of what is known loosely as fellowship. — N. T. Wright

Today (1950), the hatred of the Moslem countries against the West is becoming hatred against Christianity itself. Although the statesmen have not yet taken it into account, there is still grave danger that the temporal power of Islam may return and, with it, the menace that it may shake off a West which has ceased to be Christian, and affirm itself as a great anti-Christian world Power. — Fulton J. Sheen

God of the gaps" Christianity seeks to present Christianity as playing a strong savior role whereby it fills the gaps and provides the missing links for all of society's questions and concerns. This entails the view of God riding into town and miraculously saving the day (deus ex machina). On this view, God delivers his people from their (and his) enemies - in Bonhoeffer's case, the Nazis. In contrast, in Letters and Papers from Prison, Bonhoeffer writes that God allows us to push him out of the world and onto the cross. — Paul Louis Metzger

Let us suppose that such a person began by observing those Christian activities which are, in a sense, directed towards this present world. He would find that this religion had, as a mere matter of historical fact, been the agent which preserved such secular civilization as survived the fall of the Roman Empire; that to it Europe owes the salvation, in those perilous ages, of civilized agriculture, architecture, laws, and literacy itself. He would find that this same religion has always been healing the sick and caring for the poor; that it has, more than any other, blessed marriage; and that arts and philosophy tend to flourish in its neighborhood. In a word, it is always either doing, or at least repenting with shame for not having done, all the things which secular humanitarianism enjoins. If our enquirer stopped at this point he would have no difficulty in classifying Christianity - giving it its place on a map of the 'great religions. — C.S. Lewis

While the West had lulled itself to sleep with the comforting doctrine of man's achievements, a great revolution had been in progress in Russia. The hammer pounded and the sickle gleaned until a new social order called Communism emerged as one of the most powerful ideologies of all time. It challenged every concept man had ever held. It threatened the life of the whole world. It became the greatest challenge Christianity had faced in 2,000 years. It was a fanatic religion that asked questions and demanded answers. — Billy Graham

What does it mean to be human, to continue to live as human, to remain _faithful_ to the Divine while living in a cultural, sociogeopoltical, and religious world where power disparity between/among humans based on religious world where power disparity between/among humans based on their nationality, citizenship, gender, race, class, sexuality, ability, religion and so forth still prevails? The act of _theologizing_ for me involves responding to these questions and stimulating the practice of liberating and enlarging human possibility in our daily reality. — Namsoon Kang

Blake's song isn't really a song for England alone," said Dym. "It's a song for every land. We're all building the unseen Jerusalem together. But the powers of darkness don't want to see a time when the earth shall be filled with the glory of the God as the waters cover the sea. — Constance Savery

There was a time when religion ruled the world. It is known as the Dark Ages. — Ruth Hurmence Green

Neither Bwitists nor Fang felt they could eradicate ritual sin or evil in the world. This incapacity means that men have to celebrate. Good and bad walk together. As Fang frequently enough told missionaries, "We have two hearts, good and bad." Early missionaries, aware of these self-confessed contradictions, evangelized with the promise of "one heartedness" in Christianity. But Fang by and large did not find it there. For many, Christian one heartedness was a constriction of their selves. While "one heartedness" is celebrated in Bwiti, it is a one heartedness which is coagulated out of a flow of many qualities from one state to another. It is goodness achieved in the presence of badness, an aboveness achieved in the presence of belowness. It is an emergent quality energized in the presence of its opposite. — Terence McKenna

In the Christian religion, though perhaps not in any other, we frequently find a conception of god that is selfcontradictory and therefore corresponds to nothing. That is the conception formed by the following three propositions taken together:
1. God is all-powerful.
2. God is all-benevolent.
3. There is much misery in the world.
A god who was all-powerful but left much misery in the world would not be all-benevolent. An all-benevolent god in a world containing much misery would not be an all-powerful god. A world containing a god who was both all-powerful and all-benevolent would contain no misery.
Here, then, we have a mathematical proof bearing on a common religious doctrine. Anyone who is confident that he frequently comes across misery in the world may conclude with equal confidence that there is no such thing as an all-powerful and all-benevolent god. And this mathematically disposes of official Christianity, as has long been known. — Richard Robinson

Luther's early position proclaimed that everyone, including "the humble miller's maid, nay, a child of nine," could interpret the Bible. However, as Christianity began to fracture, he radically altered his position. He called the Bible the "heresy book." In 1525 he wrote: "There are as many sects and beliefs as there are heads. This fellow will have nothing to do with baptism; another denies the sacraments; a third believes that there is another world between this and the Last Day. Some teach that Christ is not God; some say this, some say that. There is no rustic so rude but that, if he dreams or fancies anything, it must be the whisper of the Holy Spirit and he himself is a prophet."104 — James M. Seghers

Christ, for Nietzsche as for Tolstoy, is not a rebel. The essence of His doctrine is
summed up in total consent and in nonresistance to evil. Thou shalt not kill, even to prevent killing. The
world must be accepted as it is, nothing must be added to its unhappiness, but you must consent to suffer
personally from the evil it contains. The kingdom of heaven is within our immediate reach. It is only an
inner inclination which allows us to make our actions coincide with these principles and which can give
us immediate salvation. Not faith but deeds - that, according to Nietzsche, is Christ's message. From then
on, the history of Christianity is nothing but a long betrayal of
this message. The New Testament is already corrupted, and from the time of Paul to the Councils,
subservience to faith leads to the neglect of deeds. — Albert Camus

Seminary also introduced me to the historical study of Jesus and Christian origins. I learned from my professors and the readings they assigned that Jesus almost certainly was not born of a virgin, did not think of himself as the Son of God, and did not see his purpose as dying for the sins of the world.. I also found the claim that Jesus and Christianity were the only way of salvation to be troublesome. — Marcus Borg

Christianity has from its beginning portrayed itself as a gospel of peace, a way of reconciliation (with God, with other creatures), and a new model of human community, offering the 'peace which passes understanding' to a world enmeshed in sin and violence. (1) — David Bentley Hart

[W]e conceive the Devil as a necessary part of a respectable view of cosmology. Ours is a divided empire in which certain ideas and emotions and actions are of God, and their opposites are of Lucifer. It is as impossible for most men to conceive of a morality without sin as of an earth without 'sky'. Since 1692 a great but superficial change has wiped out God's beard and the Devil's horns, but the world is still gripped between two diametrically opposed absolutes. The concept of unity, in which positive and negative are attributes of the same force, in which good and evil are relative, ever-changing, and always joined to the same phenomenon - such a concept is still reserved to the physical sciences and to the few who have grasped the history of ideas. — Arthur Miller

Too many so-called Christians are like the little chameleon which adapts its coloration to that of its surroundings. Even a critical world is quick to recognize a real Christian and just as quick to detect a counterfeit. — Billy Graham

Obviously, if Christianity is going to survive as more than a respecter and comforter of profitable inquiries, then Christians, regardless of their organizations, are going to have to interest themselves in economy-which is to say, in nature and in work. They are going to have to give workable answers to those who say we cannot live without this economy that is destroying us and our world, who see the murder of Creation as the only way of life. — Wendell Berry

In a postmodern world where all religious activity is seen as what we do for God, we need to proclaim Christianity is about what God has done for us. — Jefferson Bethke

For Christianity is a fighting religion. It thinks God made the world - that space and time, heat and cold, and all the colours and tastes, and all the animals and vegetables, are things that God 'made up out of His head' as a man makes up a story. But it also thinks that a great many things have gone wrong with the world that God made and that God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again. — C.S. Lewis

The more ardently I see humanity as a glorious abstract that must conform to my ideal of how the world should be, the harder it is for me to love the person on the other side of the picket line who is holding up progress. I can love the downtrodden in the abstract, but as I shivered under the bridge that night with Jorge, I realized that it's harder to love the illegal immigrant with the bottle-slashed face and the body unwashed for weeks, the workers gathering to eat day-old bread and chicken and rice out of foam containers, the crowd of thousands clamoring for bread and fish and healing, the unclean woman hoping to touch the hem of the Savior's robe. — Alisa Harris

Authentic Christianity and the world are by definition at odds. For most Americans, Christianity has been watered down and rendered innocuous, like so much fast food. It has become easy, upbeat, convenient, and compatible. It does not require self-sacrifice, discipline, humility, and otherworldly outlook, a zeal for souls, a fear as well as love of God. There is little guilt and no punishment, and the payoff in heaven is virtually certain. — Thomas Reeves

It is easier for a Russian to become an Atheist, than for any other nationality in the world. And not only does a Russian 'become an Atheist,' but he actually BELIEVES IN Atheism, just as though he had found a new faith, not perceiving that he has pinned his faith to a negation. Such is our anguish of thirst! — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Don't worry about wearing the sign; be the sign. You don't have to wear a sandwich board saying, "I am religious and spiritual and know what you should do." You do have to be the best of the mystical presence that your tradition brings. Certainly in Christianity, that means that you begin to go through life putting on the mind of Jesus, trying to see the world as Jesus saw the world. — Joan D. Chittister

Christianity does not look on this world as one which God very occasionally invades; it looks on it as a world from which he is never absent. — William Barclay

My goal is to destroy Christianity as a world religion and be a recatalyst for the movement of Jesus Christ ... Some people are upset with me because it sounds like I'm anti-Christian. I think they might be right. — Erwin McManus

Do you see this lantern? cried Syme in a terrible voice.'Do you see the cross carved on it, and the flame inside? You did not make it. You did not light it. Better men than you, men who could believe and obey, twisted the entrails of iron and preserved the legend of fire. There is not a street you walk on, there is not a thread you wear, that was not made as this lantern was, by denying your philosophy of dirt and rats. You can make nothing. You can only destroy. You will destroy mankind, you will destroy the world. Let that suffice you. Yet this one old Christian lantern you shall not destroy. It shall go where your empire of apes will never have the wit to find it. — G.K. Chesterton

I have known a lot of people in my life, and I can tell you this ... Some of the ones who understood love better than anyone else were those who the rest of the world had long before measured as lost or gone. Some of the people who were able to look at the dirtiest, the poorest, the gays, the straights, the drug users, those in recovery, the basest of sinners, and those who were just ... plain ... different.
They were able to look at them all and only see strength. Beauty. Potential. Hope.
And if we boil it down, isn't that what love actually is? — Dan Pearce