Quotes about Belief

But this is real prayer, down and dirty. It is not nice church prayer that refuses to ask anything because we mostly do not believe that prayers are heard or answered.

The church will not have power to act or believe until it recovers its tradition of faith and permits that tradition to be the primal way out of enculturation.

every uncompromising ideology reduces faith to an idolatry

It is most unfortunate that, in the long history of the church, "faith" has been almost everywhere transubstantiated into "belief," which transposes the concrete practicality of trust into a cognitive enterprise. How ludicrous that in the long, oppressive history of orthodoxy—which guards cognitive formulations—that those who enforce right belief seem most often to be themselves unable or unwilling to engage in deep trust.

Cynicism always comes clothed in "realism". The alternatives to begin with an act of imagination. Can we imagine another way?

As every vibrant subcommunity knows, the defining prerequisite for such a subcommunity is a conviction that it can and will be different because of the purposes of God that will not relent.

we have believed that faith does not mean to acknowledge and embrace negativity.

Jesus astonishes his contemporaries by his capacity to see and act beyond conventional assumptions.

Thus the teaching of Jesus attests to the possibility of God that the world has long since taken to be impossible. That is what is wonderful about his teaching.

The old limits of the possible have been exposed as fraudulent inventions designed to keep the powerless in their places. Jesus violates such invented limitations and opens the world to the impossible. He ends that defiant declaration with the admonition: "And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me" (v. 23).

paraphrasing 1 Cor. 1:25) that the fictions of God are truer than the facts of men.13

The contemporary American church is so largely enculturated to the American ethos of consumerism that it has little power to believe or to act.