quotations about Christianity
The way to begin a Christian life is not to study theology. Piety before theology. Right living will produce right thinking. Yet many men, when their consciences are aroused, run for catechisms, and commentaries, and systems. They do not mean to be shallow Christians. They intend to be thorough, if they enter upon the Christian life at all. Now, theologies are well in their place; but repentance and love must come before all other experiences. First a cure for your sin-sick soul, and then theologies. Suppose a man were taken with the cholera, and, instead of sending for a physician, he should send to a bookstore, and buy all the books which have been written on the human system, and, while the disease was working in his vitals, he should say, "I'll not put myself in the hands of any of these doctors. I shall probe this thing to the bottom." Would it not be better for him first to be cured of the cholera?
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
What could make me love
my fellow Christian better
than to see that God loves us all
as we were all one soul?
JULIAN OF NORWICH
Meditations with Julian of Norwich
Indeed, for us alone, who are called the enemies of the Christian religion, for us alone it is reserved, and even made the highest duty ... really to exercise love, this highest commandment of Christ and this only way to true Christianity.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
"The Reaction in Germany"
The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians: who acknowledge Jesus with their lips, walk out the door, and deny Him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.
BRENNAN MANNING
attributed, Jesus Loves You ... This I Know
We travel ... about four international trips a year and it's funny, when I go around the world I kind of divide the church up into three stages: the honeymoon, the divorce stage, and the 25-year marriage stage. So you go to Europe and they're pretty much in the divorce stage. Now there's still the shell of churches but tourists, not worshippers. You go to a place like Brazil, where we were, or the Philippines, China and you see the church in the honeymoon stage -- It's all new, they're excited, it's thrilling, it sounds like good news. The United States I put more in the 25-year anniversary stage where we've been here, few people get all that excited about going to church. It operates more like a corporation, an institution than a live vibrant movement. Lots of exceptions of course to each of those, but that's kind of the general feeling that I get. It's fun for me, actually, to go into places like Brazil and Argentina and in this case where there's a lot of evident life and partly because of the Latin personality you get strong feedback. It's a joyous place to visit.
PHILIP YANCEY
"Interview: Philip Yancey on U.S. Christianity, Faith That Matters", Christian Post, Oct. 2, 2010
Christianity is a system of life communicated from God to the soul of man, embodied in Jesus Christ, who is himself the essential revelation.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
Christians! It is your duty not only to be good, but to shine; and, of all the lights which you kindle on the face, Joy will reach farthest out to sea, where troubled mariners are seeking the shore.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
There are many Christians who like, about once in twelve months, to have a good revival in their hearts. They think that, like the year, they can make up for freezing and snowing all winter by a period of intense heat in the summer. The remedy for such is not to chill the revivals, but to shorten the intervals between them, and to endeavor to make their life equatorial and tropical all the year round.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
To be the instrument of converting a single soul, is so great a blessing and honor, that if there were no other way to accomplish it, any true Christian would be willing to lay down his life.
JAMES WADDEL ALEXANDER
The Revival and Its Lessons
I consider Western Christianity in its practical working a negation of Christ's Christianity.
MAHATMA GANDHI
The Message of Jesus Christ
Religion is not the tame and sleepy thing which some suppose. This misapprehension is derived partly from erroneous views of doctrine, but yet more from the examples of actual Christianity among us, which fall so far short of the biblical standard.
JAMES WADDEL ALEXANDER
Faith
To put it at its most basic: the resurrection of Jesus offers itself, to the student of history or science no less than the Christian or theologian, not as an odd event within the world as it is but as the utterly characteristic, prototypical, and foundational event within the world as it has begun to be. It is not an absurd event within the old world but the symbol and starting point of the new world. The claim advanced in Christianity is of that magnitude: Jesus of Nazareth ushers in not simply a new religious possibility, not simply a new ethic or a new way of salvation, but a new creation.
N.T. WRIGHT
Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church
Christianity isn't looking for a rainbow. If it were ... we'd pass out opium at services. We're trying to serve God, not be God.
JOHN UPDIKE
Rabbit, Run
When I compare the clamorous preaching and passionate declamation, too common in the Christian world, with the composed dignity, the deliberate wisdom, the freedom from all extravagances, which characterized Jesus, I can imagine no greater contrast; and I am sure that the fiery zealot is no representative of Christianity.
WILLIAM E. CHANNING
Thoughts
You see, we're all born sinful except for Jesus who was perfect, of course. And he was sent to save us. But how could he save us unless we're sinning? So we have to go on sinning in order to be saved and go to Heaven. That's how Christianity works. That's why it suits so many people.
CHARLIE MCMANUS
Nuns on the Run
Did Christians live according to their Religion, they would do nothing but what Truth, Righteousness, and Goodness do, according to their understanding and ability: and then one man would be a God unto another.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
I'm a pretty solid Christian. But even as an altar boy, I was always asking the bigger questions--you know: if God is, in fact, good, what is all this death I see? And if God is gentle, what is all this suffering I see? I've found some of the answers in Eastern religion. It explained my Christianity to me. Good and evil are the same thing. You can't have one without the other. It’s the balance, it’s the temperance of things.
TIM ALLEN
Mr. Showbiz, 1996
Christianity came into existence to lighten the heart, but now it needs to burden the heart to start with so it can lighten it afterwards. Consequently, it will perish.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Human, All Too Human
Christianity is haunted by the theory of a God with a craving for bloody sacrifices.
J.B.S. HALDANE
Possible Worlds and Other Papers
For many centuries after the establishment of Christianity, mankind became more barbarous, ignorant, and miserable than before, instead of assisting the human mind in its progress to improvement, that system completely retarded it; a gloomy superstition, which sprung out of these gospels, cramped its energies, and fettered its exertions; instead of guiding society to freedom, peace, and happiness, there was founded on the authority of these writings a system of the most horrible and debasing oppression.
ETHAN ALLEN
Reason: The Only Oracle of Man