Contemporary Christian Suspense Quotes

God had certainly not abandoned her."
(Finding Margo) ~ Jen Turano

In grades 1 through 4 these books introduce the child to U.S. society - to family life, community activities, ordinary economic transactions, and some history. None of the books covering grades 1 through 4 contain one word referring to any religious activity in contemporary American life. ~ Paul Vitz

All your doing is keeping wayward teenage punks off the street. You should leave the real investigative work to us big girls with the pens and paper. ~ Diane Moore

The contemporary Christian Church, precisely, has understood them in this' 'wrong way, to the letter, 'like the Jews,' exoterically, not esoterically. Nevertheless to say 'like the Jews' is an error. One would have to say 'as the Jews want.' Because they also possess an exotericism, for their masses, represented by the Torah and Talmud, and an esotericism, in the Cabala (which means: 'Received Tradition'), in the Zohar ('brightness'), the Merkaba or Chariot being the most secret part of the Cabala which only initiated rabbis know and use as the powerful tool of their magic. We have already said that the Cabala reached them from elsewhere, like everything else, in the Middle Ages, even though they tell us otherwise, using and transforming it in concordance with their Archetype. The Hasidim, from Poland, represent an exclusively esoteric sect of Judaism.

Islam also has its esoteric magic, represented by Sufism and the sect of the Assassins, Hassanists, oflran. They interpret the Koran symbolically. And it was because of contact with this sect of the 'Old Man of the Mountain' that the Templars felt compelled to secede more and more from the direction of Rome, centering themselves in their Esoteric Kristianity and Mystery of the Gral. This was also why Rome destroyed them, like the esoteric Cathars (katharos = pure in Greek), the Bogomils, the Manichees and the gnostics.

In the Church of Rome, called Catholic, there only remains a soulless ritual of the Mass ~ Miguel Serrano

We ourselves have so long ceased to use it [the Christian worldview] except for the discussion of the moral, the liturgical, or the spiritual, that it is rusty and out of date. We have no Christian vocabulary to match the complexities of contemporary political, social, and industrial life. We have long ceased to bring Christian judgement to bear upon the secular public world. ~ Harry Blamires

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

As a historian, I confess to a certain amusement when I hear the Judeo-Christian tradition praised as the source of our concern for human rights. In fact, the great religious ages were notable for their indifference to human rights in the contemporary sense. They were notorious not only for acquiescence in poverty, inequality, exploitation and oppression but for enthusiastic justifications of slavery, persecution, abandonment of small children, torture, genocide. ~ Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

The contemporary quarrel over church and state is not really about whether a wall of separation of church and state should exist or not ... The real question is what does 'separation' mean? ~ James Davison Hunter

To be free, one must have the critical-thinking skills that inoculate against the alluring rhetoric that pervades contemporary society, rhetoric that is constantly seeking to undermine freedom for the sake of varied narrow interests. It is an old story, and Daniel Scoggin, the CEO of Great Hearts, recognizes this reality when he reminds his constituency that "each generation must earn its freedom anew". ~ Gene Edward Veith Jr.

Contemporary Christian proclamation is faced with the question whether, when it demands faith from men and women, it expects them to acknowledge this mythical world picture from the past. If this is impossible, it has to face the question whether the New Testament proclamation has a truth that is independent of the mythical world picture, in which case it would be the task of theology to demythologize the Christian proclamation. ~ Rudolf Bultmann

If I have so far argued that Foucault is a kind of closet liberal and thus deeply modern, I need to be equally critical of evangelical (and especially American) Christianity's modernity and its appropriation of Enlightenment notions of the autonomous self. Indeed, many otherwise orthodox Christians, who recoil at the notion of theological liberalism, have unwittingly adopted notions of freedom and autonomy that are liberal to the core. Averse to hierarchies and control, contemporary evangelicalism thrives on autonomy: the autonomy of the nondenominational church, at a macrocosmic level, and the autonomy of the individual Christian, at the microcosmic level. And it does not seem to me that the emerging church has changed much on this score; indeed, some elements of emergent spirituality are intensifications of this affirmation of autonomy and a laissez-faire attitude with respect to institutions. ~ James K.A. Smith

It's so funny being a Christian musician. It always scares me when people think so highly of Christian music, Contemporary Christian music especially. Because I kinda go, I know a lot of us, and we don't know jack about anything. Not that I don't want you to buy our records and come to our concerts. I sure do. But you should come for entertainment. If you really want spiritual nourishment, you should go to church ... you should read the Scriptures. ~ Rich Mullins

It is impossible for any Christian who spends the bulk of his evenings, month after month, week upon week, day in and day out watching the major TV networks or contemporary videos to have a Christian mind. This is always true of all Christians in every situation! A Biblical mental program cannot coexist with worldly programming. ~ R. Kent Hughes

On January 21, with the murder of the King-priest, was consummated what has significantly been called the passion
of Louis XVI. It is certainly a crying scandal that the public assassination of a weak but goodhearted man has been
presented as a great moment in French history. That scaffold marked no climax - far from it. But the fact remains
that, by its consequences, the condemnation of the King is at the crux of our contemporary history. It symbolizes the
secularization of our history and the disincarna-tion of the Christian God. Up to now God played a part in history
through the medium of the kings. But His representative in history has been killed, for there is no longer a king.
Therefore there is nothing but a semblance of God, relegated to the heaven of principles. ~ Albert Camus

Most televangelists, popular Christian preacher icons, and heads of those corporations that we call megachurches share an unreflective modern view of Jesus--that he translates easily and almost automatically into a modern idiom. The fact is, however, that Jesus was not a person of the twenty-first century who spoke the language of contemporary Christian America (or England or Germany or anywhere else). Jesus was inescapably and ineluctably a Jew living in first-century Palestine. He was not like us, and if we make him like us we transform the historical Jesus into a creature that we have invented for ourselves and for our own purposes.

Jesus would not recognize himself in the preaching of most of his followers today. He knew nothing of our world. He was not a capitalist. He did not believe in free enterprise. He did not support the acquisition of wealth or the good things in life. He did not believe in massive education. He had never heard of democracy. He had nothing to do with going to church on Sunday. He knew nothing of social security, food stamps, welfare, American exceptionalism, unemployment numbers, or immigration. He had no views on tax reform, health care (apart from wanting to heal leprosy), or the welfare state. So far as we know, he expressed no opinion on the ethical issues that plague us today: abortion and reproductive rights, gay marriage, euthanasia, or bombing Iraq. His world was not ours, his concerns were not ours, and--most striking of all-- ~ Bart D. Ehrman

Who could ever understand why life unraveled beneath them? No one. She wouldn't ask the creator of the universe why, because there would be no way to comprehend His answer. All she could do was trust Him to make a way for her. To hold her in the palm of His hand. ~Rae ~ Elizabeth Goddard

What are we, Charlie's Angels? ~ Terri Blackstock

When you give voice to your fear, when you expose it, as vulnerable as that makes you, you give others the same permission. You give them courage to believe there's more to life than cowering. You give hope. And my guess is, when you tackle your inner fears, you will eventually tackle what's hold you back from who God intended you to be. Your fears lead you to who you really are. ~ Chris Fabry

To be a Christian is to be a theologian - a student of God and his will. The church is where believers should be nurtured in the practice of correct theology. The contemporary disdain for theological content and emphasis on self-image and emotions were not shared by the apostolic church. ~ R.C. Sproul

Because we lack a divine Center our need for security has led us into an insane attachment to things. We really must understand that the lust for affluence in contemporary society is psychotic. It is psychotic because it has completely lost touch with reality. We crave things we neither need nor enjoy. 'We buy things we do not want to impress people we do not like'. Where planned obsolescence leaves off, psychological obsolescence takes over. We are made to feel ashamed to wear clothes or drive cars until they are worn out. The mass media have convinced us that to be out of step with fashion is to be out of step with reality. It is time we awaken to the fact that conformity to a sick society is to be sick. Until we see how unbalanced our culture has become at this point, we will not be able to deal with the mammon spirit within ourselves nor will we desire Christian simplicity. ~ Richard J. Foster

The most powerful anti-Christian movement is the one that takes over and "radicalizes" the concern for victims in order to paganize it. The powers and principalities want to be "revolutionary" now, and they reproach Christianity for not defending victims with enough ardor. In Christian history they see nothing but persecutions, acts of oppression, inquisitions.

This other totalitarianism presents itself as the liberator of humanity. In trying to usurp the place of Christ, the powers imitate him in the way a mimetic rival imitates his model in order to defeat him. They denounce the Christian concern for victims as hypocritical and a pale imitation of the authentic crusade against oppression and persecution for which they would carry the banner themselves. In the symbolic language of the New Testament, we would say that in our world Satan, trying to make a new start and gain new triumphs, borrows the language of victims.

...

The Antichrist boasts of bringing to human beings the peace and tolerance that Christianity promised but has failed to deliver. Actually, what the radicalization of contemporary victimology produces is a return to all sorts of pagan practices: abortion, euthanasia, sexual undifferentiation, Roman circus games galore but without real victims, etc.

Neo-paganism would like to turn the Ten Commandments and all of Judeo-Christian morality into some alleged intolerable violence, and indeed its primary objective is their ~ Rene Girard

Hiding had been effortless in New York City. Getting lost in a sea of people was as easy as stepping onto a crowded Subway car. Sweet Laurel Cove would be very different. Generations of families filled its church pews, ran its farms, and schooled its children. Anonymity was as rare as lightning bugs in wintertime - as her grandmother would say. ~ Teresa Tysinger

Will I see you again?"
His grin had lost its wild flair. Instead, it was limp and very small. "Sure you will." A pause. "In my next movie." With one last look, he climbed in his car and drove away. ~ Willowy Whisper

There is more suspense, more dramatic torque, in one page of [Nathaniel] Hawthorne's heart-racked ruminations onthe Christian consciencethaninall Demi Moore's woodland gallops and horizontal barn dancing. ~ Anthony Lane

You're not so tough. No tougher than the man whose blood will spill from your veins. ~ Dawn M. Turner

Ultimately our claim to know the one God only gains credence in the contemporary world as he demonstrates the divine presence through the way we live- through our lives as we connect our Christian belief with true Christian living. ~ Stanley J. Grenz

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability -
and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually - let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don't try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete. ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

I am an archaeologist of mature vintage. Rapid descents are not my specialty. I am the plodding type."
~ Grace Madison, PhD. ~ N.L.B. Horton

Two murders. One bridge. And the truth as elusive as the fog. ~ Abigail Wilson

The government silenced a lotta those fellas. They even erased some of 'em's memory. They've spent a ton of money on all that alien technology research. It's why the federal deficit's so big. And then there's Elvis. ~ Angela Mullins

In itself this Christian education is partly the product of the retreat of biblical scholarship from the faith community to the academy. In removing themselves to the academy biblical scholars have ceased to engage with the people of the issues of the contemporary faith context. ~ Janet Lees (p. 84). In Reading Other-Wise ~ Gerald O. West

Sin is the monster we love to deny. It can stalk us, bite a slice out of our lives, return again and again, and even as we bleed and hobble, we prefer to believe nothing has happened. In Jesus Christ we are forgiven and empowered to overcome sin ... but toying with an animal that is actually toying with us is a sure way to lose part of ourselves. ~ Frank E. Peretti

Livy hadn't anticipated meeting anyone and wasn't ready to explain why the last few years
of her life had worn her so much, leaving her searching for home. Surely, Jack didn't care to hear a sob story from a perfect stranger. Actually, Livy wasn't sure she believed that. Something whispered inside her soul that Jack was just the person she needed to tell. ~ Teresa Tysinger

It's funny how after all those years attending youth events with light shows and bands, after all the contemporary Christian music and contemporary Christian books, after all the updated technology and dynamic speakers and missional enterprises and relevant marketing strategies designed to make Christianity cool, all I wanted from the church when I was ready to give it up was a quiet sanctuary and some candles. All I wanted was a safe place to be. Like so many, I was in search of sanctuary. ~ Rachel Held Evans

He is conscious of the past and present injustices, but he knows that real remedies are to be found in contemporary Christian compassion, and not in compensatory justice. ~ Neal A. Maxwell

Marriage isn't about avoiding discomfort. It's about commitment. ~ Cynthia Ruchti

we do not have time to waste. We do not have time to play artificial games in contemporary culture or wage artificial wars in comfortable churches. We have been compelled by a God-centered passion, and we have been created for a global purpose. Every Christian and every church has been called to participate on the front lines of this mission. Together we sacrifice our lives and our churches in death-defying obedience to His commands, confident that one day soon we will gather with a ransomed people from every nation, tribe, and tongue; and we will declare His praises for all of eternity. ~ David Horner

In the political and theological realms we are still stuck on the merry-go-round of church and state, capitalism and communism, Christian or Jew, Catholic or Protestant. We seem incapable of envisioning anything other than the dualistic and tired stalemate of contemporary patriarchal polity... ~ Mary Condren

Critics often point to historical issues such as slavery, upon which many Christians did act inconsistently, in an effort to invalidate Christian participation in contemporary social issues. ~ H. Wayne House

If it's true there's a beginning to the universe, as modern cosmologists now agree, then this implies a cause that transcends the universe. If the laws of physics are fine-tuned to permit life, as contemporary physicists are discovering, then perhaps there's a designer who fine-tuned them. If there's information in the cell, as molecular biology shows, then this suggests intelligent design. To get life going in the first place would have required biological information; the implications point beyond the material realm to a prior intelligent cause. -Stephen C Meyer, PHD ~ Lee Strobel