Quotes about Belief

the word the early Christians used for "faith" can also mean "loyalty" or "allegiance.

Jesus and his first followers, as Second Temple Jews, believed as well in an eschatology of new creation. This did not involve the abolition of the present world and its replacement with a totally different on. Nor did it imply the steady evolution-from-within of the Stoics, let alone the escapist 'eschatology' of the heading-for-heaven Platonists. They believed in the redemptive transformation of the present world into a new one.

Second, the means by which this goal is attained is precisely the "forgiveness of sins." If, as Paul implies in 2:15, the objection of Jews (or Jewish Messiah believers) to the inclusion of Gentiles is that they are "Gentile sinners," then this objection is overturned precisely because the Messiah "gave himself for our sins.

But what Saul believed about Jesus meant that the underlying center of spiritual gravity had shifted.

Resurrection, by contrast, has always gone with a strong view of God's justice and of God as the good creator. Those twin beliefs give rise not to a meek acquiescence to injustice in the world but to a robust determination to oppose it.

Those who choose to live without God will one day find that they have forfeited their likeness to him.

We see through a glass darkly, says St. Paul as he peers toward what lies ahead. All our language about future states of the world and of ourselves consists of complex pictures that may or may not correspond very well to the ultimate reality. But that doesn't mean it's anybody's guess or that every opinion is as good as every other one.

Stories are a basic constituent of human life; they are, in fact, one key element within the total construction of a worldview. I

As with the ascension, there are several things we need to say right away about this extraordinary claim. (By now we ought to be getting used to extraordinary claims, not because we are dealing with fantasy or "supernatural" speculation, but because Jesus himself opens the window on a world that, though real and solid, is very different from the world as most people see it.) And the first thing is: don't believe everything you read about the Rapture.

In fact, once again, the incredulity of many who heard those stories matches the incredulity of people in the first century, as well as in our own, when hearing the story of Jesus's resurrection. And for the same reason. In both cases we are witnessing a new world coming to birth.

We mustn't imagine that our feeling of being close to God is a true index of the reality.

Those who belong to him are to believe and to live by the belief that they died and rose again with him, so that they are no longer under any slavish obligation to obey the old master.