Emergent Christianity Quotes

As they seek authenticity, Emerging Evangelicals seek freedom - from loneliness, convention, unwanted authority, dominant paradigms, the prevailing social climate, and impersonal bureaucracies. Ironically, in this sense, their preferred narrative and their desired subjectivity are just as modern as what they seek to distance themselves from: the conservative Christian subculture, including its born-again narrative of awakening and transformation. ~ James S Bielo

One of the many burdens of the person professing Christianity has always been the odium likely to be heaped upon him by fellow Christians quick to smell out, denounce and punish fraud, hypocrisy and general unworthiness among those who assert the faith. In ruder days, disputes about what constituted a fully qualified Christian often led to sordid quarrels in which the disputants tortured, burned and hanged each other in the conviction that torture, burning and hanging were Christian things to do ... ~ Russell Baker

Not by discussions nor by argument, but by lifting up Christ shall we draw men unto Him. ~ James Hudson Taylor

No one who has not examined patiently and honestly the other religions of the world can know what Christianity really is, or can join with such truth and sincerity in the words of St. Paul, I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ. ~ Max Muller

You do not need to be perfect to be the best ~ Ikechukwu Joseph

Christianity, unlike any other religion in the world, begins with catastrophe and defeat. Sunshine religions and psychological inspirations collapse in calamity and wither in adversity. But the Life of the Founder of Christianity, having begun with the Cross, ends with the empty tomb and victory. ~ Fulton J. Sheen

I have yet to find a rationale in evolutionary naturalism - the survival of the fittest - that suggests why we ought to care for the weak and suffering. Nature is stern: the herd advances by abandoning those who would hinder it. Lewis, however, understood that Christianity includes both an appreciation for quality (all good things are gifts of the Father in heaven) and compassion for those who lack it.

"How, then, can we honor both Miss Universe and Miss Nobody, Bill Gates and his garbageman? I believe Lewis would answer such a question by first acknowledging the image of God in every person. "There are no ordinary people," Lewis said in a sermon. "You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendours." That startling truth applies equally to a caretaker and a scholar." Philip Yancey, What Good is God? ~ Eleanor Gustafson

My goal is to destroy Christianity. ~ Erwin McManus

You can see the same immorality or amorality in the Christian view of guilt and punishment. There are only two texts, both of them extreme and mutually contradictory. The Old Testament injunction is the one to exact an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth (it occurs in a passage of perfectly demented detail about the exact rules governing mutual ox-goring; you should look it up in its context (Exodus 21). The second is from the Gospels and says that only those without sin should cast the first stone. The first is a moral basis for capital punishment and other barbarities; the second is so relativistic and "nonjudgmental" that it would not allow the prosecution of Charles Manson. Our few notions of justice have had to evolve despite these absurd codes of ultra vindictiveness and ultracompassion. ~ Christopher Hitchens

We love God by loving his people. ~ Jefferson Bethke

It is not being in Jerusalem, but living a good life there that is praiseworthy. ~ St. Jerome

Faith is about submission and trust, not about will and determination. ~ David Megill

Science! He [Dr. MacBride] doesn't know what Christianity is yet. I've entertained many guests, but none - The whole secret," broke off Judge Henry, "Lies in the way you treat people. As soon as you treat men as your brothers, they are ready to acknowledge you - if you deserve it - as their superior. That's the whole bottom of Christianity, and that's what our missionary will never know. ~ Owen Wister

The most total opposite of pleasure is not pain but boredom, for we are willing to risk pain to make a boring life interesting. ~ Peter Kreeft

Sufism, emphasizing the personal experience of the divine, could be the leading inspiration that will bring the next wave of enlightened Islam into the next evolutionary development, just as mystic Christians could breathe new life into Christianity. ~ Stephen Poplin

The vows of God are on me. I may not stay to play with shadows or pluck earthly flowers till I my work have done and rendered up account. ~ Amy Carmichael

Sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll is easy. True christianity ... that's rebellion. ~ Alice Cooper

As the shape of Christianity changes and our churches adapt to a new world, we have a choice: we can drive our hearses around bemoaning every augur of death, or we can trust that the same God who raised Jesus from the dead is busy making something new. As long as Christians are breaking the bread and pouring the wine, as long as we are healing the sick and baptizing sinners, as long as we are preaching the Word and paying attention, the church lives, and Jesus said even the gates of hell cannot prevail against it. We might as well trust him, since he knows a thing or two about the way out of the grave. ~ Rachel Held Evans

Gravity is not a force, it is emergent. A region of space with less matter has denser time and a region of space with more matter has denser space, a pressure gradient. You can't unify gravity with the other three forces. The other three forces are probably emergent as well. ~ R.A. Delmonico

Most Kids Are Confused Whether School Is More Important Than God Or God Is More Important. ~ Cyc Jouzy

Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd, and bloody religion that has ever infected the world.
[In a letter to Frederick the Great] ~ Voltaire

The Bible is the means through which we are introduced to Jesus and invited to follow Him in the life of humility and service. ~ Richard Foster

Christianity has secured for itself a continuing place, at the cost of surrendering the crucial battle field. ~ Newbigin

It is Jesus that you seek when you dream of happiness; He is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; He is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is He who provoked you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is He who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is He who reads in your heart your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle.
It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be ground down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal. ~ Pope John Paul II

Social responsibility becomes an aspect not of Christian mission only, but also of Christian conversion. It is impossible to be truly converted to God without being thereby converted to our neighbor. ~ John R.W. Stott

Ron Karenga wrote a book back in 1968, and in that book, he said that the reason, part of his motivation for starting Kwanzaa was because he felt that Christianity was the white man religion, and he didn't like Jews, and so he made up this lie. And he called it an African holiday because he was concerned that if he didn't call it an African holiday, that black Americans would not participate in it. ~ Tucker Carlson

Modern man has lost any sense of God's nearness, but Christianity teaches that God reveals himself through every single thing he has ever brought into being, whether a created object or historical event. ~ R.C. Sproul

Despair sees no hope, while hope sees no despair. ~ Jim George

Once Christianity became acceptable, and even mandatory, it lost the early poverty of spirit which sustained it when any group gathered together for bread and wine in his Name had to have one ear open for the knock on the door. But don't we ever have opportunities for poverty of spirit, we middle-class, comfortable Americans? We do, though what is asked of us is not as spectacular or as dangerous as what was asked of the first Christians. But it is our response to the small things which conditions our response to the large. If I am unable to be poor in spirit in the small tests, I will be equally unable in the great. There ~ Madeleine L'Engle

It has always seemed unfair to me that many churches (and some individual Christians) keep careful records on how many converts they make to Christianity, but never keep any record of how many they drive away from Christ! ~ Ray Stedman

It has been left to the last Christians, or rather to the first Christians fully committed to blaspheming and denying Christianity, to invent a new kind of worship of Sex, which is not even a worship of Life. It has been left to the very latest Modernists to proclaim an erotic religion which at once exalts lust and forbids fertility ... The new priests abolish the fatherhood and keep the feast - to themselves. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

Reading God's Word and receiving the knowledge of Jesus Christ renews the believer's mind and transforms it to His mind. The minds of immature believers will be focused on selfish ambitions, but as they open themselves up to read the Word concerning Jesus, they enter into fellowship with Him and their thinking begins to change--to be renewed. As a result of such a renewing of the mind, they spontaneously start to look out for the interest of others and to genuinely and unselfishly care for others; they do not consider themselves better than everyone else. ~ Henry Hon