Idolatry Christian Quotes & Sayings

Why do we idolise Christian singers and speakers? We go from glorifying musicians in the world to glorifying Christian musicians. It's all idolatry!Satan is getting a great victory as we seem to worship these ministers on tapes and records and clammer to get their autographs in churches and concert halls from coast to coast. — Keith Green

Government by kings was first introduced into the world by the Heathens, from whom the children of Israel copied the custom. It was the most prosperous invention the Devil ever set on foot for the promotion of idolatry. The Heathens paid divine honours to their deceased kings, and the Christian world hath improved on the plan, by doing the same to their living ones. How impious is the title of sacred majesty applied to a worm, who in the midst of his splendor is crumbling into dust! — Thomas Paine

By setting such strong, harsh dichotomies God taught Israel that any assimilation to pagan idolatry is intolerable. It was His way of preserving Israel's spiritual health and posterity. God knew that if these Canaanite children were allowed to live, they would spell the undoing of Israel. The killing of the Canaanite children not only served to prevent assimilation to Canaanite identity but also served as a shattering, tangible illustration of Israel's being set exclusively apart for God. — William Lane Craig

Oh shame on you, who call yourself a Christian! Do you not see that it is the grossest idolatry to speak of the market as though it were the rival of God? — Amitav Ghosh

The Christian faith enables, or should enable, a man to stand back from society and its institutions and realize that they all stand under the inscrutable judgment of God and that, therefore, we can never give an unreserved assent to the policies, the programs and the organizations of men, or to "official" interpretations of the historic process. To do so is idolatry, the same kind of idolatry that was refused by the early martyrs who would not burn incense to the emperor. The policies of men contain within themselves the judgment and doom of God upon their society, and when the Church identifies her policies with theirs, she too is judged with them - for she has in this been unfaithful and is not truly "the Church." The power of "the Church" (who is not "the Church" if she is rich and powerful) contains the judgment that "begins at the house of God. — Thomas Merton

Shepard decried the idolatry of the "popish" and non-Christian worlds but also the rampant false Christianity in England's own church. Indeed, it was "a harder matter to convert a man in England than in India" because most of the English assumed themselves to be Christians even though a majority were in fact reprobates.4 Shepard — Peter J. Thuesen

If we esteem them too highly, good works can become the greatest idolatry. — Martin Luther

How the Idolatry of Christian Same-Sex Marriage Advocates Takes Two General Forms — Joe Carter

I am deeply distressed by what I only can call in our Christian culture the idolatry of the Scriptures. For many Christians, the Bible is not a pointer to God but God himself ... God cannot be confined within the covers of a leather-bound book. I develop a nasty rash around people who speak as if mere scrutiny of its pages will reveal precisely how God thinks and precisely what God wants. — Brennan Manning

Christian worship of Jesus is an idolatry much worse than the Israelites' worship of the golden calf, for the Christians err in saying something holy entered into a woman in that stinking place ... full of faeces and urine, which emits discharge and menstrual blood and serves as a receptacle for men's semen. — Geraldine Brooks

The emerging church movement has come to believe that the ultimate context of the spiritual aspirations of a follower of Jesus Christ is not Christianity but rather the kingdom of God ... to believe that God is limited to it would be an attempt to manage God. If one holds that Christ is confined to Christianity, one has chosen a god that is not sovereign. Soren Kierkegaard argued that the moment one decides to become a Christian, one is liable to idolatry. — Samir Selmanovic

Like the people of Israel who created a golden calf to represent God while Moses was away, fundamentalist Christians have built their own idols to represent God until Jesus returns. The religion of fundamentalism is idolatry. — Mel White

Idolatry is not holding on to the wrong things; it is holding on to the good things wrongly, including God," Herbert McCabe, O.P., quoted in Christian Century, August 21, 2013, 21. Any — Rev. Joseph A. Heim

Has what you do for God become more important to you than the Lord Himself? — Colin S. Smith

Modernity has abandoned the household gods, not because we have rejected the idolatry as all Christians must, but because we have rejected the very idea of the household. We no longer worship Vesta, but have only turned away from her because our homes no longer have any hearths. Now we worship Motor Oil. If our rejection of the old idols were Christian repentance, God would bless it, but what is actually happening is that we are sinking below the level of the ancient pagans. But when we turn to Christ in truth, we find that He has ordained every day of marriage as a proclamation of his covenant with the church. A man who embraces what is expected of him will find a good wife and a welcoming hearth. He who loves his wife loves himself. — Douglas Wilson

Wasn't that what Jesus said: do what I do? He was here as an example for us to follow. Same with all prophets. Didn't the prophets tell us to be like them? That's what's wrong with Christianity. They make Jesus and the prophets into icons, take them off of earth, and put them in heaven to worship them, so they're no longer accessible. You've taken a reality and made it into a worthless idol. Christians talk about the idolatry of other religions, but when they no longer live principles and just worship the people who taught them, that's exactly what they're doing. — Daniel Suelo

I tried to close my ears to the strange worshipful chanting and fix my mind on God, but the Egyptians' idolatry weighed down my weary shoulders and brought tears to my closed eyes. — Kristen Reed

The pursuit of autonomous metaphysics is idolatry. — Michael S. Horton

Given the sin of impiety through which they [the Romans] sinned against the divine nature [by idolatry], the punishment that led them to sin against their own nature followed ... I say, therefore, that since they changed into lies [by idolatry] the truth about God, He brought them to ignominious passions, that is, to sins against nature; not that God led them to evil, but only that he abandoned them to evil ... — Thomas Aquinas

Christian consciousness experiences itself in a curious sense as LIBERATED TO FAIL, without intolerable damage to self-esteem and without any reduction of moral seriousness. We are free to be inadequate, free to foul things up, and yet affirm ourselves in a more basic sense than the secular moralist or humanistic idealist (who can affirm themselves only on the basis of merits and accomplishments. We are free to choose and deny finite values, free to take constructive guilt upon us and to see it as an inevitable and providentially given aspect of our fallen human condition.
All that we have said leads us to the pinnacle of this good news: In Jesus Christ we need no longer be guilty before God. It is only before our clay-footed gods that we stand guilty! — Thomas C. Oden

Purge me from every sinful blot;
My idols all be cast aside:
Cleanse me from every evil thought,
From all the filth of self and pride.
The hatred of the carnal mind
Out of my flesh at once remove:
Give me a tender heart, resigned,
And pure, and full of faith and love. — John Wesley

The Christian theory is little else than the idolatry of the ancient mythologists, accommodated to the purposes of power and revenue; and it yet remains to reason and philosophy to abolish the amphibious fraud. — Thomas Paine

Our patriotism comes straight from the Romans. This is why French children are encouraged to seek inspiration for it in Corneille. It is a pagan virtue, if these two words are compatible. The word pagan, when applied to Rome, early possesses the significance charged with horror which the early Christian controversialists gave it. The Romans really were an atheistic and idolatrous people; not idolatrous with regard to images made of stone or bronze, but idolatrous with regard to themselves. It is this idolatry of self which they have bequeathed to us in the form of patriotism. — Simone Weil

A religiously ambiguous Thomas Jefferson is not useful to the Christian right. — Matt McCook