Quotes about Belief

A faith that rests on knowing, where you have to "know what you believe" in order to have faith, is disaster upon disaster waiting to happen. It values too highly our mental abilities. All it takes to ruin that kind of faith is a better argument. And there's always a better argument out there somewhere.

Doubt signals that this process of dying and rising is underway. Though God feels far away, at that moment God may be closer than we realize—especially if "know what you believe" is how we're used to thinking of our faith.

Rather, it was written to tell the Israelites that their God, and not the gods of the other nations, was the chaos tamer, and therefore, this God and this God alone was worthy of worship. And they made this point in ancient terms, using ancient ways of thinking.

We miss what the biblical writers were after if we think of belief and faith as "correct thinking" words. They are deep and hard words, more than we might have been led to expect. And they are beautiful words that move us deeper into the presence of God.

If we toss about the idea of "God in the flesh" as if it were just that thing we believe, we are not tuned in to the shock and even offense that John's opening lines would have generated. Christianity is a weird religion, folks.

I have come to think, as have so many others in the course of history, that the goal of Christian faith is the experience of God, not the comprehension of God.

Being "in" with God is about much more than the thoughts we keep in our heads, the belief systems we hold on to, the doctrines we recite, or the statements of faith we adhere to, no matter how fervently and genuinely we do so, and how important they may be. Being obsessed with making sure we have all our thoughts about God properly arranged and defended isn't faith. How trusting we are of God day to day and how Godlike we live among those around us day to day is.

We do not honor the Lord nor do we uphold the gospel by playing make-believe. Neither are those who engage the kinds of issues discussed in this book necessarily on the slippery slope to unbelief. Our God is much bigger than we sometimes give him credit for. It is we who sometimes wish to keep him small by controlling what can or cannot come into the conversation.

The Bible is not, never has been, and never will be the center of the Christian faith.

that trust means letting go of the need to know, of the need to be certain. And a long and honored Christian practice, diverse as it is, already existed that understood that process.

This is how they connected with God—in their time, in their way.

It may be hard—sometimes impossible—to see the history in Israel's stories, but we do get a good picture of how these ancient Israelites experienced God.