Quotes about Christianity

It is easy for Christians to have the false impression that once we have established a relationship with Christ, which we believe sets us right with God, the problems of life will somehow scoot away or they will slowly be removed from our lives.

In the final analysis, the only available options are either to reject the cross and with it the core of the Christian faith or to take up one's cross, follow the Crucified-and be scandalized ever anew by the challenge.

The cure against Christian violence is not less of the Christian faith, but, in a carefully qualified sense, more of the Christian faith. I don't mean, of course, that the cure against violence lies in increased religious zeal; blind religious zeal is part of the problem. Instead, it lies in stronger and more intelligent commitment to the Christian faith as faith.

Our theology is insufficiently Christian—and less revealing of the truth than it should be, if Christian claims are indeed true (as we believe them to be)—when we repeat in religious idiom normative stances that nontheologians advocate, often with better arguments and greater rhetorical power.

This is why we believe in Jesus Christ—to help us see that we are not what we ought to be and to help us become what we ought to be.

Christian faith is therefore a "prophetic" faith that seeks to mend the world. An idle or redundant faith—a faith that does not seek to mend the world—is a seriously malfunctioning faith

the central question was how to remember rightly. And given my Christian sensibilities, my question from the start was, How should I remember abuse as a person committed to loving the wrongdoer and overcoming evil with good?

If Christianity is a mere invention of man, and the Bible is not from God, how can infidels explain Jesus Christ? His existence in history they cannot deny. How is it that without force or bribery, without arms or money, He has made such an immensely deep mark on the world as He certainly has?

If one does away with the fact of the Resurrection, one also does away with the Cross, for both stand and fall together, and one would then have to find a new center for the whole message of the gospel.

The Mass would be sterile and futile if it were locked and sealed inside one magic hour of the week. Like Calvary itself, the whole point of it is that it overflow. Our Lord's life (his Blood) was poured out, spilled onto the ground; and, says faith, from the soil on Golgotha it spread to cover the whole earth. Just so, you and I take our own place at Calvary so that our whole life may be spilled as an oblation to God for the life of the world.

By the same token, Christians find that, insofar as the "prayers, works, joys, and sufferings of this day" (the ordinary stuff of life) are taken and offered up to God in union with Jesus Christ's own self-offering, they are transfigured—transubstantiated—and restored to us, not as the inert routines of the day, or as sheer, intractable adversity, or as boredom, which they might otherwise appear to be, but rather as vessels for grace.

To the corruptions of christianity I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian in the only sense in which he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence, and believing he never claimed any other.