Quotes about Christianity

One of the embarrassing problems for the early nineteenth-century champions of the Christian faith was that not one of the first six Presidents of the United States was an orthodox Christian.

Many people think that being Christian makes you sort of subhuman or, at least, less than fully human. Guys out there on the street (people think) are having a wonderful time enjoying human life to the fullest, and we in the church are sort of cramped and constricted. Well, things shouldn't be that way. Being a Christian is supposed to make you more truly human , more fully yourself. That means that you are supposed to become somebody who is reflecting the image of God.

If you're a Christian you're just a shadow of your future self.

Christian ethics is not a matter of discovering what's going on in the world and getting in tune with it. It isn't a matter of doing things to earn God's favor. It is not about trying to obey dusty rulebooks from long ago or far away. It is about practicing, in the present, the tunes we shall sing in God's new world.

The point [of the gospels] is not whether Jesus is God, but what God is doing in and through Jesus. What is this embodied God up to?

When 'biblical' theologies ignore the gospels, something is clearly very wrong." (on atonement theories)

Christian living means dying with Christ and rising again. That, as we saw, is part of the meaning of baptism, the starting point of the Christian pilgrimage.

At the heart of Christian ethic is humility; at the heart of its parodies, pride. Different roads with different destinations, and the destinations color the character of those who travel by them.

In the same way many Christians--whole generations of them, sometimes entire denominations--have in their possession a book which will do a thousand things not only in and for them but through them in the world. And they use it to sustain only three or four things they already do.

Take Christmas away, and in biblical terms you lose two chapters at the front of Matthew and Luke, nothing else. Take Easter away, and you don't have a New Testament; you don't have a Christianity; as Paul says, you are still in your sins.

The New Testament's vision of Christian behavior has to do, not with struggling to keep a bunch of ancient and apparently arbitrary rules, nor with "going with the flow" or "doing what comes naturally", but with the learning of the language, in the present, which will equip us to speak it fluently in God's new world.

Forget happiness. You were called to a throne. How will you prepare for it? That is the question of virtue, Christian style.