Quotes about Religion

Why is it that we look upon our salvation as a moment that began our religious life instead of the daily life we receive from God?

It can't be any other way. If salvation is to affect our lives, it can do so only by affecting our bodies. If we are to participate in the reign of God, it can only be by our actions. And our actions are physical—we live only in the processes of our bodies. To withhold our bodies from religion is to exclude religion from our lives. Our life is a bodily life, even though that life is one that can be fulfilled solely in union with God.

Religion as actually lived, not as some figment of the academic imagination, always claims to involve knowledge of how things are.

Bluntly, to serve God well we must think straight; and crooked thinking, unintentional or not, always favors evil. And when the crooked thinking gets elevated into group orthodoxy, whether religious or secular, there is always, quite literally, "hell to pay." That is, hell will take its portion, as it has repeatedly done in the horrors of world history.

Religion as a historical human practice was therefore not of divine origin, and its developments and activities had to be of an entirely human origin.

But what is true of Christianity in its inception and history is true of other religions as well. They all present themselves as providing knowledge of what is real and what is right. To think otherwise is to falsify the very nature of religious consciousness and religious life

It is one of the curiosities of Western intellectual history that, during the last century or so, those with no serious involvement with practical Christianity—maybe totally ignorant of it or even hostile to it—have been allowed, under the guise of "scholarship" or innovative thought, to define what religion is and to reinterpret Christian teachings in the light of their own biased definitions and purposes.

Anger and condemnation like vengeance, are safely left to God. We must beware of believing that it is okay for us to condemn as long as we are condemning the right things. It is not so simple as all that. I can trust Jesus to go into the temple and drive out those who were profiting from religion, beating them with a rope. I cannot trust myself to do so.

Anyone who can find a better way than Jesus, he would be the first to tell you to take it.

The missing note in evangelical life today is not in the first instance spirituality but rather obedience. We have generated a variety of religion to which obedience is not regarded as essential.

Professing to believe has, sadly, played a large role in the practice of religion. It has profoundly stained our understanding of what religion is. Some people seem to profess belief in God "just in case" there is a God. But they neither are committed to nor believe in the idea that God exists.

We settle back into de facto alienation of our religion from Jesus as a friend and teacher, and from our moment-to-moment existence as a holy calling or appointment with God. Some will substitute ritual behavior for divine vitality and personal integrity; others may be content with an isolated string of "experiences" rather than transformation of character.