Quotes about Belief

Think of Oscar Wilde's wonderful scene in his play Salome, when Herod hears reports that Jesus of Nazareth has been raising the dead. "I do not wish him to do that," says Herod. "I forbid him to do that. I allow no man to raise the dead. This man must be found and told that

our confidence is not in the solidity of Western culture or the basic goodness of modern democracy. Our confidence is in Jesus and him alone.

Belief in the bodily resurrection includes the belief that what is done in the present in the body, by the power of the Spirit, will be reaffirmed in the eventual future, in ways at which we can presently only guess. RESURRECTION:

In the Lord, your labour is not in vain: what you do here in faith will stand, will last.

Read John 14:1-31. Why does Jesus feel the need to reassure the disciples at this point (v. 1)? 2. What bold claim does Jesus make about himself in verse 6? 3. Why does this kind of claim often make people uncomfortable?

there is no such thing as a god's-eye view (by which would be meant a Deist god's-eye view) available to human beings, a point of view which is no human's point of view.

But from the start within early Christianity it was built in as part of the belief in resurrection that the new body, though it will certainly be a body in the sense of a physical object occupying space and time, will be a transformed body, a body whose material, created from the old material, will have new properties. There has been a dramatic sharpening up of what resurrection itself actually entailed.

Everything possible had to be done to stamp out a movement that would impede the true purposes of the One God of Israel, whose divine plans Saul and his friends believed were at last on the verge of a glorious fulfillment—until, on the Damascus Road, Saul came to believe that these plans had indeed been gloriously fulfilled, but in a way he had never imagined.

The death of Jesus of Nazareth as the king of the Jews, the bearer of Israel's destiny, the fulfillment of God's promises to his people of old, is either the most stupid, senseless waste and misunderstanding the world has ever seen, or it is the fulcrum around which world history turns. Christianity is based on the belief that it was and is the latter.

Saying "It's true for you" sounds fine and tolerant. But it only works because it's twisting the word "true" to mean, not "a true revelation of the way things are in the real world," but "something that is genuinely happening inside you.

Faith can't be forced, but unfaith can be challenged. That is how it has always been, from the very beginning, when people have borne witness to Jesus's resurrection.

My main argument in this book is that when we understand the Christian message, we will see that it does indeed "make sense" of our world, because it helps us both to understand the world the way it is and to be able to contribute fresh "sense" through our own lives.