Quotes about Imitation

Pinchas Lapide, toward the end of his book that develops what he calls a theo-politics of loving small steps, finds in these words of Jesus six pillars that can help each of us reshape our culture from hate toward love: (1) Jesus is a realist who knows a world of evil; (2) Jesus has a faith that humans can change; (3) Jesus humanizes haters and their hatred; (4) Jesus calls us to imitate God; (5) Jesus knows this is a battle to fight; and (6) this theo-politics moves in small steps:

The end of all learning is to know God, and out of that knowledge to love and imitate Him.

We become like the God/god we behold. We appear like the God/god we admire. We duplicate the God/god we deify. We favor the God/god we follow. We match the God/god we magnify.

There is always a danger that in our asceticism we shall be tempted to imitate the sufferings of Christ. This is a pious but godless ambition, for beneath it there always lurks the notion that it is possible for us to step into Christ's shoes and suffer as he did and kill the old Adam. We are then presuming to undertake that bitter work of eternal redemption which Christ himself wrought for us. The motive of asceticism was more limited--to equip us for better service and deeper humiliation.

The scriptures do not present us with a series of Christian types to be imitated according to choice; they preach to us in every situation the one Jesus Christ.

It is only because he became like us that we can become like him.

My central claim is that we can become like Christ by doing one thing -- by following him in the overall style of life he chose for himself.

There are powers that can counterfeit almost everything in the Christian life.

The end of learning, he said, is to "repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him" by acquiring "true virtue" (Hughes 631). This reinforces and expands Sidney's point that the end of learning is virtuous action.

The essential element of Christian truth is that the risen Christ is not something you mimic but someone you manifest.

You are made in the image of what you desire.

Christlike in my behavior Like any good believer I imitate the Savior And cultivate a beaver