quotations about Christianity
No man can be any greater of any stronger, in Christianity, than his faith.
JAMES WADDEL ALEXANDER
Faith
I want to take the word Christianity back to Christ himself, back to that mighty heart whose pulse seems to throb through the world to-day, that endless fountain of charity out of which I believe has come all true progress and all civilization that deserves the name .. I go back to that great Spirit which contemplated a sacrifice for the whole of humanity. That sacrifice is not one of exclusion, but of an infinite and endless and joyous inclusion. And I thank God for it.
JULIA WARD HOWE
What is Religion?
No public man in these islands ever believes that the Bible means what it says: he is always convinced that it says what he means.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
"The Living Pictures,", Saturday Review, Apr. 6, 1895
For those who care, and I understand if you don't: Today I quit being a Christian. I'm out. I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being "Christian" or to being part of Christianity. It's simply impossible for me to "belong" to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I've tried. I've failed. I'm an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else.... In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.
ANNE RICE
The Huffington Post, Jul. 29, 2010
If I could put it simply, I would say that I believe there's a force of love and logic in the world, a force of love and logic behind the universe. And I believe in the poetic genius of a creator who would choose to express such unfathomable power as a child born in "straw poverty"; i.e., the story of Christ makes sense to me. ... As an artist, I see the poetry of it. It's so brilliant. That this scale of creation, and the unfathomable universe, should describe itself in such vulnerability, as a child. That is mind-blowing to me. I guess that would make me a Christian. Although I don't use the label, because it is so very hard to live up to.
BONO
Rolling Stone, Nov. 3, 2005
These Christian groups ... have no right to call themselves Christians, because they have no Christianity to them. They have no kindness, they have no compassion, they have no charity. I want Jesus to come back and say "That's not what I meant!"
MARGARET CHO
Margaret Cho: Assassin
The prime reason the Savior personally acts as the gatekeeper of the celestial kingdom is not to exclude people, but to personally welcome and embrace those who have made it back home.
TAD R. CALLISTER
attributed, "70 Faith Strengthening Christian Quotes", Planet of Success, December 1, 2018
Christians ought not to slander God by looking as if they were at an everlasting funeral.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Christianity, it is thine alone to lift the poor from the dunghill, and the needy out of the dust, and set them among princes!
WILLIAM MCEWEN
Select Essays Doctrinal & Practical on a Variety of the Most Important and Interesting Subjects in Divinity
How many there are that spend their lives in the midst of all the pleasing trifles of that vast museum of curiosities which are labeled religious, and think themselves Christians!
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
The hearer of God's word is a tree planted; but the doer is a fruitful one.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY
Proverbs
What is a Christian? Not a man who is perfectly conformed to the image of Christ, who does all that Christ would have him do, and never does anything that Christ would not have him do (certainly that man would be a Christian if he could be found--but if only that kind of man were a Christian, there are none). A Christian is one who is following after Christ; who is conforming himself to Christ; who is still doing the things he would not do and leaving undone the things he would do; who still has to battle within himself against appetite and pride and corruption, and yet who is making a brave battle.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Problems of Life: Selections from the Writings of Rev. Lyman Abbott
I am fallen, flawed and imperfect. Yet drenched in the grace and mercy that is found in Jesus Christ, there is strength.
ADAM YOUNG
attributed, Struggling Well: Balancing the Love and Grace of God with the Pain and Questions of Life
What kind of Christian are you? Did you ever lose a job, or lose a night's sleep, or lose a friend for God? If your Christianity never costs you a dollar, never cost you a friend, never cost any tears or broken heart, then can you really say that you love the Lord very much? To be a really good Christian is going to cost you.
JOHN R. RICE
What It Costs to Be a Good Christian
A Christian has no need of any law in order to be saved, since through faith we are free from every law. Thus all the acts of a Christian are done spontaneously, out of a sense of pure liberty.
MARTIN LUTHER
The Freedom of a Christian
Christianity as a specific doctrine was slain with Jesus, suddenly and utterly. He was hardly cold in his grave, or high in his heaven (as you please), before the apostles dragged the tradition of him down to the level of the thing it has remained ever since.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
preface, Androcles and the Lion
I am no friend of present-day Christianity, though its Founder was sublime.
VINCENT VAN GOGH
letter to Theo van Gogh, Oct. 1884
The great honor of Christianity, its incontestable merit, and the whole secret of its unprecedented and yet thoroughly legitimate triumph, lay in the fact that it appealed to that suffering and immense public to which the ancient world, a strict and cruel intellectual and political aristocracy, denied even the simplest rights of humanity.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
God and the State
Christianity is most admirably adapted to the training of slaves, to the perpetuation of a slave society; in short, to the very conditions confronting us today.... The rulers of the earth have realized long ago what potent poison inheres in the Christian religion. That is the reason they foster it; that is why they leave nothing undone to instill it into the blood of the people. They know only too well that the subtleness of the Christian teachings is a more powerful protection against rebellion and discontent than the club or the gun.
EMMA GOLDMAN
"The Failure of Christianity,", Mother Earth, Apr. 1913
So now -- cut to 1980. Irish rock group, who've been through the fire of a certain kind of revival, a Christian-type revival, go to America. Turn on the TV the night you arrive, and there's all these people talking from the Scriptures. But they're quite obviously raving lunatics. Suddenly you go, what's this? And you change the channel. There's another one. You change the channel, and there's another secondhand-car salesman. You think, oh, my God. But their words sound so similar . . . to the words out of our mouths. So what happens? You learn to shut up. You say, whoa, what's this going on? You go oddly still and quiet. If you talk like this around here, people will think you're one of those. And you realize that these are the traders -- as in t-r-a-d-e-r-s -- in the temple.
BONO
Rolling Stone, Nov. 3, 2005