We live in an age where. . . Christian bashing is a popular indoor sport; and films mocking Jesus Christ are considered avant-garde.
One may well find oneself beginning to doubt whether all this could conceivably be the product of an enormous lottery presided over by natural selection, blindly picking the rare winners from among numbers drawn at utter random. . . nevertheless although the miracle of life stands "explained" it does not strike us as any less miraculous. As Francois Mauriac wrote, What this professor says is far more incredible than what we poor Christians believe.
The Christian Religion as I understand it is the best.
Only when we're thoroughly convinced that the Christian life is entirely of grace are we able to serve God out of a grateful and loving heart.
The greatest threat to mankind comes from the renunciation of individual scruple in favor of institutional denominators. . . . Real heroism lies, as it always will, not in conformity or even patriotism, but in acts of solitary moral courage. Which, come to think of it, is what we used to admire in our Christian savior
Taken as hypotheses, religious claims do very badly. Yet the striking fact is that this does not worry Christians.
Too often an institution serves to bless the majority opinion. Today when too many move to the rhythmic beat of the status quo, whoever would be a Christian must be a nonconformist.
Jesus’ words are inseparable from his person. He himself is the message he proclaims.
Every Christian has a choice between being humble or being humbled.
Without fear I can acknowledge that the authentic Christian tension is not between life and death, but between life and life.
The devil and God are components of a Siamese twin. Neither has any existence apart from the other. In denying the existence of the one, Christians have helped to kill the other. If there need to be no fear of hell, people may well ask what is the attraction of heaven? Gods and devils were born together. Gods and devils will die together.
I believe in God. Maybe not the Catholic God or even the Christian one because I have a hard time seeing any God as elitist. I also have a hard time believing that anything that created rain forests and oceans and an infinite universe would, in the same process, create something as unnatural as humanity in its own image. I believe in God, but not as a he or she or an it, but as something that defines my ability to conceptualize within the rather paltry frames of reference I have on hand.
Prayer is essentially a partnership of the redeemed child of God working hand in hand with God toward the realization of His redemptive purposes on earth.
You cannot open the pages of the New Testament without realizing that one of the things that makes it so 'new,' in every way, is that here men and women call God 'Father. ' This conviction, that we can speak of the Master of the universe in such intimate terms, lies at the heart of the Christian faith.
Christianity, above all, consoles; but there are naturally happy souls who do not need consolation. Consequently Christianity begins by making such souls unhappy, for otherwise it would have no power over them.
We may very well wake up in the not-too-distant future in a culture that is not only unreceptive but openly hostile to the church and the gospel of Jesus Christ, a culture in which those who proclaim the gospel will be labeled as bigots and fanatics, a culture in which persecution of Christians will be not only allowed but applauded.
Before I can preach love, mercy, and grace, I must preach sin, Law, and judgment. Preach 90% Law and 10% grace.
I'm not a dogmatic Christian and I don't believe in the Bible literally, but I realized that Jesus is basically a very Zen dude.
Eastern meditation is an attempt to empty the mind; Christian meditation is an attempt to fill the mind. The two ideas are quite different
I lived in a house in the East Bronx, a totally Jewish neighborhood on East 172nd Street. You didn't see Christians much, although one lived next door. We thought they were kind of a minority.
