Quotes about Christianity

If she wanted to write Christian fiction, how was she to go about it? I told her that if she is truly and deeply a Christian, what she writes is going to be Christian, whether she mentions Jesus or not. And if she is not, in the most profound sense, Christian, then what she writes is not going to be Christian, no matter how many times she invokes the name of the Lord.

To try to talk about art and about Christianity is for me one and the same thing, and it means attempting to share the meaning of my life, what gives it, for me, its tragedy and its glory.

Strangely, as much as I heard the word secular as a label on things that should be avoided by good Christians, I don't ever remember hearing the word sacred as its opposite. Instead, I heard the words clean and safe to describe what was not deemed worldly. Clean and safe. How puny those words are. What a pitiful reduction of the grandeur of the created world and its inhabitants. What a sad commentary on the church's understanding of the God of the universe.

But I have to accept the fact that I am often unwise; that I am not always loving; that I make mistakes; that I am, in fact, human. And as Christians we are not meant to be less human than other people, but more human, just as Jesus of Nazareth was more human.

We live by revelation, as Christians, as artists, which means that we must be careful never to get set into rigid molds. The minute we begin to think we know all the answers, we forget the questions, and we become smug like the Pharisee who listed all his considerable virtues and thanked God that he was not like other men.

I am grateful, too, to Lewis for having the courage to yell, to doubt, to kick at God with angry violence. This is part of a healthy grief not often encouraged. It is helpful indeed that C.S. Lewis, who has been such a successful apologist for Christianity, should have the courage to admit doubt about what he has so superbly proclaimed. It gives us permission to admit our own doubts, our own angers and anguishes, and to know that they are part of the soul's growth.

But an acceptable Christianity is not Christian; a comprehensible God is no more than an idol. I don't want that kind of God.

Christendom is something quite different from Christianity, being the administrative or power structure, based on the Christian religion and constructed by men. (...) The founder of Christianity was, of course, Christ. The founder of Christendom I suppose could be named as the Emperor Constantine.

The early Christians had the great advantage of believing that the world would soon come to an end. That was a sort of miracle in their favour because it prevented them occupying their minds with irrelevant matters.

Religious enthusiasm among students is now an embarrassment; belief in the authority of the Bible and the deity of Jesus Christ is treated as naivety to be enlightened rather than life to be nourished. Scholars in the arts, letters, and sciences who show signs of Christian devotion are likely to be shrugged off as simplistic and eccentric.

Christendom has also retreated from freedom. In the much talk today about human rights, we forget that our human rights are derived from the Christian faith. In Christian terms every single human being, whoever he or she may be, sick or well, clever or foolish, beautiful or ugly, every single human being is loved of his Creator, who has, as the Gospels tell us, counted the hairs of his head.

Another area of the moral and spiritual decline of Christendom is the abandonment of Christian mores. The movement away from Christian moral standards has not meant moving to an alternative humanistic system of moral standards as was anticipated, but moving into a moral vacuum, especially in the areas of eroticism.