Christianity And Liberalism Quotes

it is absolutely vital that we never forget as believers that it is ultimately the Holy Spirit who is responsible and able to bring people to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ. It is one thing to argue and to defend the gospel message and the intellectual validity of Christianity as a worldview and religion, it is quite another to think that we actually have the ability to save people within ourselves. ~ Trevor Slone

In a word, live together in the forgiveness of your sins, for without it no human fellowship, least of all a marriage, can survive. Don't insist on your rights, don't blame each other, don't judge or condemn each other, don't find fault with each other, but accept each other as you are, and forgive each other every day from the bottom of your hearts ... ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Liberalism is a scourge. It destroys the human spirit. It destroys prosperity. It assigns sameness to everybody. And wherever I find it, I oppose it. ~ Rush Limbaugh

The birth and growth of modern antisemitism has been accompanied by and interconnected with Jewish assimilation, the secularization and withering away of the old religious and spiritual values of Judaism. What actually happened was that great parts of the Jewish people were at the same time threatened by physical extinction from without and dissolution from within. In this situation, Jews concerned with the survival of their people would, in a curious and desperate misinterpretation, hit on the consoling idea that antisemitism, after all, might be an excellent means for keeping the people together so that the assumption of external antisemitism would even imply an external guarantee of Jewish existence. This superstition, a secularized travesty of the idea of eternity inherent in a faith in chosenness and a Messianic hope, has been strengthened through the fact that for many centuries the Jews experienced the Christian brand of hostility which was indeed a powerful agent of preservation, spiritually as well as politically. The Jews mistook modern anti-Christian antisemitism for the old religious Jew-hatred - and this all the more innocently because their assimilation had by-passed Christianity in its religious and cultural aspect. Confronted with an obvious symptom of the decline of Christianity, they could therefore imagine in all ignorance that this was some revival of the so-called "Dark Ages." Ignorance or misunderstanding of their own past were partly responsible for the ~ Hannah Arendt

American labor will realize that its function is not to increase jobs, but to multiply the wealth and to expand the numbers benefited by the wealth at the swiftest possible rate. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

On one occasion, he said "The Son of man [referring to himself] must be killed, and on the 3rd day be raised to life." Peter, in particular, would have no part in such talk, and (can you believe?) he actually took Jesus aside and rebuked him, Jesus, the only begotten Son of God! How would God ever use an obstinate man like this to proclaim the gospel? ~ Marty Engel

I held my heart back from positively accepting anything, since I was afraid of another fall, and in this condition of suspense I was being all the more killed. ~ Augustine Of Hippo

Neo-Liberalism promised us a Global Village and gave us a Potemkin Village. ~ Dean Cavanagh

The good news is that a vast majority of Indians from different religions see no contradiction between religiosity and liberalism, keep India stable. We religious liberals don't talk loudly enough. ~ Amish Tripathi

The greatest factors making for communism, socialism or anarchy among a free people are the excesses of capital. The talk of the agitator does not advance socialism one step. The great captains of industry and finance ... are the chief makers of socialism. ~ Louis D. Brandeis

There are a lot of Christians who are halfway fellows. They stand in the door, holding on to the Church with one hand while they play with the toys of the world with the other. They are in the doorway and we can't bring sinners in. ~ Mordecai Ham

I need a place to confess that I don't have everything figured out. Christianity is not a program for avoiding mistakes; it is a faith of the guilty. There is no "right" or perfect way to be. We learn from our mistakes; we extend grace to others and ourselves. In the same way a lover who loves your body allows you to have grace for it, so is grace the antithesis of rejection. ~ Nadia Bolz-Weber

[In response to atrocities against Armenians] the British government issued a joint memo with France and Russia on 24 May 1915. The first draft, proposed by Russia, contained the phrase "crimes against Christianity and civilization," but France and Britain feared this would offend their own colonial Muslim populations and succeeded in changing the phrase to "crimes against humanity." This paved the way for the concept to assume its place after the war as one of the most important categories in international law. ~ Taner Akcam

I was left an orphan while I was still a child, and we were very poor. Sometimes I would stand for hours on end in ecstasy outside a baker's shop, gazing with burning desire at the cakes. I would say to myself, 'These are not for me. I shall never be able to eat anything like this.' The Bible brings back these memories. Once again I can see wonderful things, but I know that they are not for me, because I am a Jew. I know that there are Jews who have converted to Christianity in order to marry Romanian girls or to escape anti-Semitic persecution. But I have not yet met a Jew who believes in Jesus. ~ Richard Wurmbrand

Christians, indeed, have a special obligation not to forget how great and how inextinguishable the human proclivity for violence is, or how many victims it has claimed, for they worship a God who does not merely take the part of those victims, but who was himself one of them, murdered by the combined authority and moral prudence of the political, religious, and legal powers of human society. ~ David Bentley Hart

A primary purpose of Judeo-Christianity has not been to move us toward a community where the teachings of someone like Jesus - simple and necessary suggestions for how to get along with eachother - are made manifest in all aspects of life, but instead provide a theological framework for a system of exploitation.[ ... ] It is more convenient for exploiter and exploited alike to pretend their parasitic relationship is Natural, ordained by God. It is easier to believe in a logic that leads directly from original sin to totalitarianism. ~ Derrick Jensen

The maker of the stars would rather die for you than live without you. And that is a fact. So if you need to brag, brag about that. ~ Max Lucado

I didn't know that love is not about what we do, but who we are, convincing others of our love for them...and about who loves us. ~ Jack Frost

It has been a great source of sadness to me to see two schools of thought within the evangelical church over many decades. Those who come glorying in manifestations of power sometimes seem dismissive of those whom they regard as "cold theologians." I once heard a man speaking at a large conference say that theology was the enemy of the church and if only we could abandon doctrinal perspectives, the church would be a happier place. What tragic nonsense! We also see and hear those who love theological insight and savour the doctrines of Scripture expressing equally dismissive remarks about Christians who are enjoying God's power, as though they were mere children preoccupied with experience. How I long for a recovery of true biblical Christianity where the apostle Paul, who wrote the book of Romans, also raised the dead! It seems that profound theology and great signs and wonders happily cohabited in Paul's life and ministry. ~ Terry Virgo

Christianity emerged from the religion of Israel. Or rather, it has as its background a persistent strain in that religion. To that strain Christians have looked back, and rightly, as the preparation in history for their faith. ~ Kenneth Scott Latourette

Allow yourself to be possessed by God by receiving Jesus, and you will never be possessed by anything else. ~ Stormie O'martian

The very reason why we object to state ownership, that it puts a stop to individual initiative and to the healthy development of personal responsibility, is the reason why we object to an unsupervised, unchecked monopolistic control in private hands. We urge control and supervision by the nation as an antidote to the movement for state socialism. Those who advocate total lack of regulation, those who advocate lawlessness in the business world, themselves give the strongest impulse to what I believe would be the deadening movement toward unadulterated state socialism. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

Apprenticeship assumes that knowing a trade not only comes by numbers and outlines but also by watching and inhabiting. Knowing is found in these forms, because teaching is. We teach not only by our words and assignments but also by the manner of our words and the ways we ourselves already embody the assignments we give. ~ Zack Eswine

While other creeds endeavor to get us out of the world and into heaven, in Christianity, heaven comes down and Christ comes into this world to get us. To suffer with us. We find favor - only because Christ feels pain. ~ Ann Voskamp

they want us to believe that to be queer, to be trans, to be confused, to be questioning is
equivalent to being a sinner
but conveniently forget that we are all sinners in God's eyes
that every day we all sin
that sin dates all the way back to Adam and Eve, and ever since then we have all been
deemed sinners in God's eyes
but sinners can be forgiven ~ Courtney Carola

We're a part of the insurrection, trying to turn Christianity upside down. We're an experimental church: God's research and development arm. ~ Erwin McManus

I was unable to deny my love for Jesus, but equally unable to make my love toward women disappear. ~ Amber Cantorna

When we're at our weakest, God's at His strongest. We serve a powerful God, boy, and last time I checked, He was still on the throne. ~ Michelle Griep

[Religion is a] primitive insurance against disaster ... Originally religion was merely a function of the self-preservative instinct. Offer sacrifices to the gods and save your crops. And even Christianity, after all, insures heavily against the flaws in this life by belief in another. ~ Rose Macaulay

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

I've been a Christian for a long time, and I think that Christianity gets a bad rap. I think that people's perception of what a Christian is today is something that is close-minded and narrow, and that's not what I am. ~ Andie MacDowell

The philanthropic tradition is older than democracy, older than Christianity, and older than higher education. It gives form and purpose to personal and social life that cannot be provided by the self-interest of economic enterprise or required by the mandate of political institutions. ~ Robert L. Payton

The church's theology bought into this ahistoricism in different ways: along a more liberal, post-Kantian trajectory, the historical particularities of Christian faith were reduced to atemporal moral teachings that were universal and unconditioned. Thus it turned out that what Jesus taught was something like Kant's categorical imperative - a universal ethics based on reason rather than a set of concrete practices related to a specific community. Liberal Christianity fostered ahistoricism by reducing Christianity to a universal, rational kernel of moral teaching. Along a more conservative, evangelical trajectory (and the Reformation is not wholly innocent here), it was recognized that Christians could not simply jettison the historical particularities of the Christian event: the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. However, there was still a quasi-Platonic, quasi-gnostic rejection of material history such that evangelicalism, while not devolving to a pure ahistoricism, become dominated by a modified ahistoricism we can call primitivism. Primitivism retains the most minimal commitment to God's action in history (in the life of Christ and usually in the first century of apostolic activity) and seeks to make only this first-century 'New Testament church' normative for contemporary practice. This is usually articulated by a rigid distinction between Scripture and tradition (the latter then usually castigated as 'the traditions of men' as opposed to the 'God-give' r ~ James K.A. Smith

In the specially Christian case we have to react against the heavy bias of fatigue. It is almost impossible to make the facts vivid, because the facts are familiar; and for fallen men it is often true that familiarity is fatigue. I am convinced that if we could tell the supernatural story of Christ word for word as of a Chinese hero, call him the Son of Heaven instead of the Son of God, and trace his rayed nimbus in the gold thread of Chinese embroideries or the gold lacquer of Chinese pottery, instead of in the gold leaf of our own old Catholic paintings, there would be a unanimous testimony to the spiritual purity of the story. We should hear nothing then of the injustice of substitution or the illogicality of atonement, of the superstitious exaggeration of the burden of sin or the impossible insolence of an invasion of the laws of nature. We should admire the chivalry of the Chinese conception of a god who fell from the sky to fight the dragons and save the wicked from being devoured by their own fault and folly. We should admire the subtlety of the Chinese view of life, which perceives that all human imperfection is in very truth a crying imperfection. We should admire the Chinese esoteric and superior wisdom, which said there are higher cosmic laws than the laws we know. ~ G.K. Chesterton

We say then, that Christianity is adapted to the intellect, because its spirit coincides with that of true philosophy; because it removes the incubus of sensuality and low vice; because of the place it gives to truth; because it demands free inquiry; because its mighty truths and systems are brought before the mind in the same way as the truths and systems of nature; because it solves higher problems than nature can; and because it is so communicated as to be adapted to every mind. ~ Mark Hopkins

I hated the things they believe in, the things they so innocently and charmingly pretended. I hated the sanctimonious piety that let people hurt helpless creatures. I hated the prayers and the hymns - the fountains and the red images that coloured their drab music, the fountains filled with blood, the sacrifice of the lamb. ~ Ellen Glasgow

Even if you're going through hardships, it doesn't mean that God isn't with you, he doesn't love you, or he isn't watching out for you. He may be testing your faith, seeing if you'll turn TO him in your time of crisis or turn AWAY from him. And if you're a true Christian, then that means that you're his child, and he's your father. And in the end, children always turn to their parents, and they'll forever need them. Just as we will always need God in our life to survive, and live a life as a Christian. Your life may not me extravagant here, but it will be in heaven, where you can be in the Lord's lap. ~ No Longer Available

Henceforward the Christian Churches having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof, came into the hands of the Encratites: and the Heathens, who in the fourth century came over in great numbers to the Christians, embraced more readily this sort of Christianity, as having a greater affinity with their old superstitions, than that of the sincere Christians; who by the lamps of the seven Churches of Asia, and not by the lamps of the Monasteries, had illuminated the Church Catholic during the three first centuries. ~ Isaac Newton

More probably, foolish preachers, by always telling you how much Christianity will help you and how good it is for society, have actually led you to forget that Christianity is not a patent medicine. Christianity ~ C.S. Lewis

Over the years, I have come to realize that the greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity, or power, but self-rejection. Success, popularity, and power can indeed present a great temptation, but their seductive quality often comes from the way they are part of the much larger temptation to self-rejection. When we have come to believe in the voices that call us worthless and unlovable, then success, popularity, and power are easily perceived as attractive solutions. The real trap, however, is self-rejection. As soon as someone accuses me or criticizes me, as soon as I am rejected, left alone, or abandoned, I find myself thinking, "Well, that proves once again that I am a nobody." ... [My dark side says,] I am no good ... I deserve to be pushed aside, forgotten, rejected, and abandoned. Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the "Beloved." Being the Beloved constitutes the core truth of our existence. ~ Henri J.M. Nouwen

In Christianity, it's very clear that the god we worship is equal to love. The bible says, 'God is love'. The god we worship was sacrificed, crucified on the cross, tortured, spit on, and was still forgiving. This is our highest example. ~ Mosab Hassan Yousef

The problem then with Jesus is that he cannot be removed from his time and transplanted into our own without simply creating him anew ~ Bart D. Ehrman

Christianity had never been more itself, more consistent with Jesus and more evidently en route to its own future, than in the launching of the world mission. ~ Ben F. Meyer

Christianity is not a doctrine, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For 'consciousness of sin' is a real event an so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Schlesinger was a passionate believer in New Deal liberalism, which he saw as the only way to civilize capitalism. And ~ David Talbot

No wonder the summer solstice had been such a fun day in northern Europe before Christian missionaries arrived from the sunny south. If priests had not driven sex underground, what would the north have been like? Would art have flourished in the absence of sexual repression? What about artillery and fortification? The Reformation? The Thirty Years War? The French Revolution? The final perfection of murder as blood sport at Verdun and Dresden and in the Gulag?

In short, where would we be without Jesus? ~ Charles McCarry

Unlike the doctrines of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the teachings of Buddhism are not considered by their adherents to be the product of infallible revelation. They are, rather, empirical instructions: If you do X, you will experience Y. ~ Sam Harris

So many of the new nations which were established as democracies after the second world war, during the decolonizing process, have now changed their system to state-socialism. Small elites run them, and they aren't sharing societies. They aren't even socialist. The power of the state has been merged with business property and you have the greatest concentration of power that's possible. ~ Daniel Patrick Moynihan