Quotes about Religious

Michael Green cuts through church cant: "God's church exists not for itself but for the benefit of those who are not yet members. . . . [and] the church which lives for itself will be sure to die by itself." The church is not a religious club and it does not have a secular mission. Instead, it is a worshipping and sending community.

Calling God "Father" (Abba) is not unique to Jesus,15 and neither is it a revelation of a religious profundity that Judaism had not yet comprehended (what can be more intimate than Hosea 1—2 or 11:1—4?). Instead of its being unique, "Father" is characteristic of Jesus but would not have been at all offensive in Judaism.

I cannot call to mind a single instance where I have ever been irreverent, except toward the things which were sacred to other people.

But making the greater mistake of being paralyzed to inaction—for fear of making a mistake—for fear of stepping outside some false religious boundary, is something else. For that kind of inaction reveals what we really think of God, that he is a legalistic moral policeman waiting for us to slip up just so that he can make his arrest quota for the day.

We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Bonhoeffer recognized that standard-issue "religion" had made God small, having dominion only over those things we could not explain. That "religious" God was merely the "God of the gaps," the God who concerned himself with our "secret sins" and hidden thoughts. But Bonhoeffer rejected this abbreviated God.

is far too easy for us to base our claims to God on our own Christian religiosity and our church commitment, and in so doing utterly to misunderstand and distort the Christian idea.

As always, Paula Bonhoeffer's annual orchestrations of the Christmas holidays were especially beautiful, incorporating Bible reading and hymns in such a way that even those who were not particularly religious felt included.

It is a religious spirit that is dedicated to what God has done in order to resist or reject what He is doing. What He is presently doing He is doing through His body.

When a person has fallen in love with God, both his ethical commitments and aesthetical pleasures become focused and satisfying. But when the religious is lost, ethics devolves into, first, a fussy legalism, and then is swallowed up completely by the lust for personal satisfaction.

She'd been real melancholy in the fall — religious melancholy — it ran in her family. Her father worried so much over believing that he had committed the unpardonable sin that he died in the asylum.

There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse.