Christianity Quotes

If he had given away anything else, he would have been charged with indecent exposure.

~ Edmund Campion

If you want to consume the cream of Christ's philosophy, then don't read the Bible, read Tolstoy.

~ Abhijit Naskar

The sure path to tomorrow was plotted in a manger and paved on a cross. And although this sturdy byway is mine for the taking, I have incessantly chosen lesser paths. And maybe it is time to realize that Christmas is a promise that I can walk through the world and never get lost in the woods.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Although it pains me, I must admit that I have never found what I ‘need.’ And I am in this place because long ago I took it upon myself to decide what I ‘want’ to need, verses surrendering to what I ‘need’ to need. And thankfully I have realized that God made Christmas everything that I ‘want,’ but more so He made it everything that I ‘need.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

When it comes to worry, our problem is we fear an invisible future that a timeless God has seen. Perhaps you should talk to Him about it.

~ Eddie Capparucci

In the thoughtlessness of my incessant hurry, I have made God an ‘addendum in’ my life verses the ‘agenda of’ my life. And what I need to hurry up and realize is that with these priorities positioned as such, what I am hurrying to is my own demise.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Despite my incessant desperation, I simply cannot paint the perfect picture within which I would wish to live out my life. And because I cannot, God picked up the brush of love, positioned the canvas of history and painted a manger.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Reason may win truths, without Faith she will retain them just so long as Satan pleases.

~ C.s. Lewis

Theology is the systematic inquiry into Scripture. Theology is a human attempt to make sense of and draw conclusions from God's special revelation.

~ Perry G. Downs

Helping people to know God and to be obedient to him is perhaps the greatest gift we can bestow. Understood in this way, Christian education can be be one of the most compassionate ministries of the church.

~ Perry G. Downs

In many people Christ lives the life of the Host. Our life is a sacramental life.This Host life is like the Advent life, like the life of the Child in the womb, the Child in the swaddling bands, the Christ in the tomb. It is a life of dependence upon creatures, of silence and secrecy, of hidden light. It is the life of a prisoner.

~ Caryll Houselander

We could scrub the floor for a tired friend, or dress a wound for a patient in a hospital, or lay the table and wash up for the family; but we shall not do it in martyr spirit or with that worse spirit of self-congratulation, of feeling that we are making ourselves more perfect, more unselfish, more positively kind.We shall do it just for one thing, that our hands make Christ's hands in our life, that our service may let Christ serve through us, that our patience may bring Christ's patience back to the world.

~ Caryll Houselander

If we repay evil with good, then how do we repay the good?

~ Henryk Sienkiewicz

Say, you teach a five year old child a few verses from the Bible. And after memorizing them, he will become a part scholar in Christian theology. But that won’t make him realize what Jesus actually meant when he said 'love thy neighbor'.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Authority, reason, experience; on these three, mixed in varying proportions all our knowledge depends.

~ C.s. Lewis

I find that I spend a tremendous amount of time chasing the praises of men rather than sitting with the praises of God. The former is something I attempt to catch, the latter catches me.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

If my decisions constantly heed the voice of the world, I can be completely assured that I’m going to end up in a ‘world of hurt.’ If my decisions heed the word of God, I can be completely assured that this ‘world of hurt’ isn’t anywhere near my solar system.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

I huddle in the dark with a mass of burnt matches strewn at my feet. And yet, for all of those matches I’ve not been able to light a single candle. And huddled in such deep darkness, I’ve somehow yet to realize that Christmas made both matches and candles forever obsolete.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

I do not regard the limits of the past and present as the limits of humanity of the future

~ Ludwig Feuerbach

If you leave off looking at books about beasts and men, if you begin to look at beasts and men then (if you have any humour or imagination, any sense of the frantic or the farcical) you will observe that the startling thing is not how like man is to the brutes, but how unlike he is. It is the monstrous scale of his divergence that requires an explanation. That man and brute are like is, in a sense, a truism; but that being so like they should then be so insanely unlike, that is the shock and the enigma. That an ape has hands is far less interesting to the philosopher than the fact that having hands he does next to nothing with them; does not play knuckle-bones or the violin; does not carve marble or carve mutton. People talk of barbaric architecture and debased art. But elephants do not build colossal temples of ivory even in a roccoco style; camels do not paint even bad pictures, though equipped with the material of many camel's-hair brushes. Certain modern dreamers say that ants and bees have a society superior to ours. They have, indeed, a civilization; but that very truth only reminds us that it is an inferior civilization. Who ever found an ant-hill decorated with the statues of celebrated ants? Who has seen a bee-hive carved with the images of gorgeous queens of old? No; the chasm between man and other creatures may have a natural explanation, but it is a chasm. We talk of wild animals; but man is the only wild animal. It is man that has broken out. All other animals are tame animals; following the rugged respectability of the tribe or type. All other animals are domestic animals; man alone is ever undomestic, either as a profligate or a monk. So that this first superficial reason for materialism is, if anything, a reason for its opposite; it is exactly where biology leaves off that all religion begins.

~ G.k. Chesterton

Those countries in Europe which are still influenced by priests, are exactly the countries where there is still singing and dancing and coloured dresses and art in the open-air. Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls; but they are the walls of a playground. Christianity is the only frame which has preserved the pleasure of Paganism. We might fancy some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea. So long as there was a wall round the cliff's edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries. But the walls were knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice. They did not fall over; but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in terror in the centre of the island; and their song had ceased.

~ G.k. Chesterton

[This philosophy] … is antagonistic to minds perverted and crippled by a superhuman

~ Ludwig Feuerbach

The most formidable way to lead is to serve. And while the perplexing oxymoron of such a grinding statement absolutely cripples us, it birthed a Savior.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

We should not...think of our fellowship with other Christians as a spiritual luxury, an optional addition to the exercises of private devotion. We should recognise rather that such fellowship is a spiritual necessity, for God has made us in such a way that our fellowship with himself is fed by our fellowship with fellow Christians, and requires to be so fed constantly for its own deepening and enrichment.

~ J.i. Packer

A Christian sits in his or her well and thinks that the whole world is his or her well. The Jew sits in his or her little well and thinks that it is the whole world. A Muslim sits cooped up in his or her tiny well and believes it to be the whole universe. The same goes for a Hindu and all others. Also, atheists are no different from all those orthodox believers.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Why in the world have we never found what we’re really looking for? Because what we need is often the very thing we won’t accept. And sadly, in turning away the God we need, we need to understand that we have chosen to live without everything we need.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

To try to talk about art and about Christianity is for me one and the same thing, and it means attempting to share the meaning of my life, what gives it, for me, its tragedy and its glory.

~ Madeleine L'engle

Peter Brown, that great historian of early Christianity, has given the most cogent explanation for the arising of the cult of the saints in the late Roman world. He explains that the emphasis of early Christian preaching on judgment, on the human need for redemption from sin, brought to the minds of common people — among whom Christianity was early successful — their social and political condition. Having strictly limited powers to remedy any injustice they might suffer, or to clear themselves of any charges of wrongdoing, they turned, when they could, to their social betters in hope of aid. If a local patrician could befriend them — could be, at least for a time, their patron — then they had a chance, at least, of receiving justice or at least escaping punishment. “It is this hope of amnesty,” Brown writes, “that pushed the saint to the foreground as patronus. For patronage and friendship derived their appeal from a proven ability to render malleable seemingly inexorable processes, and to bridge with the warm breath of personal acquaintance the great distances of the late-Roman social world. In a world so sternly organized around sin and justice, patrocimium [patronage] and amicitia [friendship] provided a much-needed language of amnesty.”As this cult became more and more deeply entrenched in the Christian life, it made sense for there to be, not just feast days for individual saints, but a day on which everyone’s indebtedness to the whole company of saints — gathered around the throne of God, pleading on our behalf — could be properly acknowledged. After all, we do not know who all the saints are: no doubt men and women of great holiness escaped the notice of their peers, but are known to God. They deserve our thanks, even if we cannot thank them by name. So the logic went: and a general celebration of the saints seems to have begun as early as the fourth century, though it would only be four hundred years later that Pope Gregory III would designate the first day of November as the Feast of All Saints.

~ Alan Jacobs

I felt in my bones; first, that this world does not explain itself. It may be a miracle with a supernatural explanation; it may be a conjuring trick, with a natural explanation. But the explanation of the conjuring trick, if it is to satisfy me, will have to be better than the natural explanations I have heard. The thing is magic, true or false. Second, I came to feel as if magic must have a meaning, and meaning must have some one to mean it. There was something personal in the world, as in a work of art; whatever it meant it meant violently. Third, I thought this purpose beautiful in its old design, in spite of its defects, such as dragons. Fourth, that the proper form of thanks to it is some form of humility and restraint: we should thank God for beer and Burgundy by not drinking too much of them. We owed, also, an obedience to whatever made us. And last, and strangest, there had come into my mind a vague and vast impression that in some way all good was a remnant to be stored and held sacred out of some primordial ruin. Man had saved his good as Crusoe saved his goods: he had saved them from a wreck...And all this time I had not even thought of Christian theology.

~ G.k. Chesterton

Is my faith so terribly pathetic that I have diminished God to the point that I doubt His ability to survive in the very world that He came to save? Indeed, I have done exactly that. And all I need to do to beat that mentality is to remember that a baby born in a manger with every disadvantage imaginable stills lives today.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

We have to allow God to do a work in us before He can do a work through us.

~ Wendy Pope

The worst defeat of all is to surrender without having been defeated. And it is Christmas that obliterates both.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Islam is not the greatest threat facing Christianity in the west. The biggest threat facing Christianity in the west is Scripture illiterate believers who are asleep while a world waits to here the Gospel...

~ Pastor Steve Bainbridge

Certainly If John moschos where to come back today it is likely that he would find much more than that was familiar and the practices of a modern Muslim Sufi then he would with those of, say, a contemporary American evangelical. Yet the simple truth has been lost by our tendency to think of Christianity as a western religion rather than the Oriental faith it actually is. Moreover the modern demonization of Islam in the west, and the recent growth of Muslim fundamentalism (itself in many ways a reaction to the West's repeated humiliation of the Muslim world), have led to an atmosphere where few are aware of, or indeed wish to be aware of, the profound kinship of Christianity and Islam.

~ William Dalrymple

There may be a theology without the Scriptures — a theology of nature, gathered by painful, and slow, and sometimes doubtful processes from what man sees around him in external nature and the course of history, and what he sees within him of nature and of grace. In like manner there may be and has been an astronomy of nature, gathered by man in his natural state without help from aught but his naked eyes, as he watched in the fields by night. But what is this astronomy of nature to the astronomy that has become possible through the wonderful appliances of our observatories? The Word of God is to theology as, but vastly more than, these instruments are to astronomy. It is the instrument which so far increases the possibilities of the science as to revolutionize it and to place it upon a height from which it can never more descend. What would be thought of the deluded man, who, discarding the new methods of research, should insist on acquiring all the astronomy which he would admit, from the unaided observation of his own myopic and astigmatic eyes? Much more deluded is he who, neglecting the instrument of God’s Word written, would confine his admissions of theological truth to what he could discover from the broken lights that play upon external nature, and the faint gleams of a dying or even a slowly reviving light, which arise in his own sinful soul. Ah, no! The telescope first made a real science of astronomy possible: and the Scriptures form the only sufficing source of theology.

~ Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield

The white man's god is just like the white man. He thinks he is the only god, just like the white man thinks he is the only man. But the only reason he is god instead of Nyame or Chukwu or whoever is because we let him be. We do not fight him. We do not even question him. The white man told us he was the way, and we said yes, but when has the white man ever told us something was good for us and tat thing was really good?

~ Yaa Gyasi

Growing up I sometimes imagined that for Christ's return perhaps He would appear as 'Black Jesus' to white people and 'White Jesus' to black people just to screw with the racists.

~ Criss Jami

To grasp love, I must grasp the fact that it is a creation of God and therefore it is forever beyond me. But the very fact that it is forever beyond me is the very thing that prompts me to forever pursue it.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Did he who made the lamb make thee?

~ William Blake

Leadership calls for both wisdom and courage, the wisdom to know what to do is only half the battle. We must be courageous enough to actually do it.

~ Kellen Roggenbuck