#christianity

In the early days of Christianity the exercise of chastity was frequently combined with a close and romantic intimacy of affection between the sexes which shocked austere moralists. ↗

— Havelock Ellis

#austere #between #chastity #christianity #close

It is closer to the truth to say that God is crazy than that God is reasonable. I suspect God merely smiles when someone calls him crazy, but shakes His head and frowns when someone calls Him reasonable. ↗

— Peter Kreeft

#christianity #crazy #god #jesus-shock #philosophy

Most theists are deists most of the time, in practice if not in theory. They practice the absence of God instead of the presence of God. ↗

— Peter Kreeft

#catholicism #christianity #deism #deist #god

Like apes, we breed, sleep, and die. Yet like God we say, "I am." We are ontological oxymorons. ↗

— Peter Kreeft

#christianity #god #jesus-shock #ontological-oxymoron #ontology

God defines himself as "I am who I am", which also means: My being is such that I shall always be present in every moment of becoming. ↗

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

#christianity #eternal-father #god #god-father #spirituality

One of the most amazing and perplexing features of mainstream Christianity is that seminarians who learn the historical-critical method in their Bible classes appear to forget all about it when it comes time for them to be pastors. They are taught critical approaches to Scripture, they learn about the discrepancies and contradictions, they discover all sorts of historical errors and mistakes, they come to realize that it is difficult to know whether Moses existed or what Jesus actually said and did, they find that there are other books that were at one time considered canonical but that ultimately did not become part of Scripture (for example, other Gospels and Apocalypses), they come to recognize that a good number of the books of the Bible are pseudonymous (for example, written in the name of an apostle by someone else), that in fact we don't have the original copies of any of the biblical books but only copies made centuries later, all of which have been altered. They learn all of this, and yet when they enter church ministry they appear to put it back on the shelf. For reasons I will explore in the conclusion, pastors are, as a rule, reluctant to teach what they learned about the Bible in seminary. ↗

— Bart D. Ehrman

#church #god #ministry #pastor #religion

Our identity rests in God's relentless tenderness for us revealed in Jesus Christ. ↗

— Brennan Manning

#christianity #gentleness #god #identity #tenderness

If we who follow Christ, with all the facts before us and knowing what we are about, deliberately choose the kingdom of God as our sphere of interest, I see no reason why anyone should object. If we lose by it, the loss is our own; if we gain, we rob no one by so doing. ↗

— A.W. Tozer

#life #religion #religion

In fact, I thought that Christianity was very a good and a very valuable thing for us. But after a while, I began to feel that the story that I was told about this religion wasn't perhaps completely whole, that something was left out. ↗

— Chinua Achebe

#after #began #christianity #completely #fact

My parents were early converts to Christianity in my part of Nigeria. They were not just converts; my father was an evangelist, a religious teacher. He and my mother traveled for thirty-five years to different parts of Igboland, spreading the gospel. ↗

— Chinua Achebe

#converts #different #different parts #early #father