Famous Quotes & Sayings

Frank A. Clark

To feel sorry for the needy is not the mark of a Christian - to help them is.

George Crabbe

What is a church? Let Truth and reason speak, They would reply, "The faithful, pure and meek, From Christian folds, the one selected race, Of all professions, and in every place.

Elaine Pagels

Jesus Christ rose from the grave.' With this proclamation, the Christian church began. This may be the fundamental element of Christian faith; certainly it is the most radical.

Elaine Pagels

Rediscovering the controversies that occupied early Christianity sharpens our awareness of the major issue in the whole debate, then and now: What is the source of religious authority? For the Christian the question takes more specific form: What is the relation between the authority of ones own experience and that claimed for the scriptures, the ritual and the clergy?

Elaine Pagels

Why did the consensus of Christian churches not only accept these astonishing views but establish them as the only true form of Christian doctrine? . . . these religious debates - questions of the nature of God, or of Christ - simultaneously bear social and political implications that are crucial to the development of Christianity as an institutional religion. In simplest terms, ideas which bear implications contrary to that development come to be labeled as 'heresy'; ideas which implicitly support it become 'orthodox.'

Elaine Pagels

Contemporary Christianity, diverse and complex as we find it, actually may show more unanimity than the Christian churches of the first and second centuries. For nearly all Christians since that time, Catholics, Protestants, or Orthodox, have shared three basic premises. First, they accept the canon of the New Testament; second, they confess the apostolic creed; and third, they affirm specific forms of church institution. But every one of these - the canon of Scripture, the creed, and the institutional structure - emerged in its present form only toward the end of the second century.

Elaine Pagels

The idea that each individual has intrinsic, God-given value and is of infinite worth quite apart from any social contribution - an idea most pagans would have rejected as absurd - persists today as the ethical basis of western law and politics. Our secularized western idea of democratic society owes much to that early Christian vision of a new society - a society no longer formed by the natural bonds of family, tribe, or nation but by the voluntary choice of its members.

Elaine Pagels

What is clear is that the Gospel of Judas has joined the other spectacular discoveries that are exploding the myth of a monolithic Christianity and showing how diverse and fascinating the early Christian movement really was.

Elaine Pagels

Christians have ... identified their opponents, whether Jews, pagans, or heretics, with forces of evil, and so with Satan... Nor have things improved since. The blood-soaked history of persecution, torture, murder, and destruction perpetrated in the name of religion is difficult to grasp, let alohne summarize, from the slaughter of Christians to the Crusades to the Inquisitiion to the Reformation to the European witchcraze to colonialization to today's bitter coflict in the Middle East.

John Burroughs

The deeper our insight into the methods of nature . . . the more incredible the popular Christianity seems to us.

John Bunyan

To pray rightly, you must make God your hope, stay, and all. Right prayer sees nothing substantial or worth being concerned about except God.

John Bunyan

Thou art beaten that thou mayest be better.

John Bunyan

Therefore, I bind these lies and slanderous accusations to my person as an ornament; it belongs to my Christian profession to be vilified, slandered, reproached and reviled, and since all this is nothing but that, as God and my conscience testify, I rejoice in being reproached for Christ's sake.

John Bunyan

If you are not a praying person, you are not a Christian.

John Bunyan

Christian, let God's distinguishing love to you be a motive to you to fear Him greatly. He has put His fear in your heart, and may not have given that blessing to your neighbor, perhaps not to your husband, your wife, your child, or your parent. Oh, what an obligation should this thought lay upon your heart to greatly fear the Lord! Remember also that this fear of the Lord is His treasure, a choice jewel, given only to favorites, and to those who are greatly beloved.

John Bunyan

It is profitable for Christians to be often calling to mind the very beginnings of grace with their souls.

John Bunyan

Wherefore, though the Christian, as a Christian, is the only man at liberty, as called thereunto of God; yet his liberty is limited to things that are good: he is not licensed thereby to indulge the flesh.

John Bunyan

Take heed of driving so hard after this world, as to hinder thyself and family from those duties towards God, which thou art by grace obliged to; as private prayer, reading the scriptures, and Christian conference. It is a base thing for men so to spend themselves and families after this world, as that they disengage their heart to God's worship.

John Bunyan

…just as Christian came up to the Cross, his burden loosed from off his shoulders, fell from off his back, and began to tumble down the hill, and so it continued to do till it came to the mouth of the sepulchre. There it fell in, and I saw it no more!

John Bunyan

Let dissolution come when it will, it can do the Christian no harm, for it will be but a passage out of a prison into a palace; out of a sea of troubles into a haven of rest; out of a crowd of enemies, to an innumerable company of true, loving, and faithful friends; out of shame, reproach, and contempt, into exceeding great and eternal glory.

John Bunyan

No man, without trials and temptations, can attain a true understanding of the Holy Scriptures.

John Bunyan

I have often thought that the best Christians are found in the worst of times.

John Bunyan

If you have sinned, do not lie down without repentance; for the want of repentance after one has sinned makes the heart yet harder and harder.

John Bunyan

Christians are like the several flowers in a garden that have each of them the dew of heaven, which, being shaken with the wind, they let fall at each other's roots, whereby they are jointly nourished, and become nourishers of each other.

John Bunyan

The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, and they that lack the beginning have neither middle nor end

John Bunyan

The reason why the Christians in this day are at such a loss as to some things is that they are contented with what comes from man's mouth, without searching and kneeling before God to know of Him the truth of things.

Joel Salatin

I'm a Christian-libertarian-environmentalist-capitalist-lunatic. It's a humorous way for me to describe that I'm not stereotypical.

Joel Osteen

The main rule to me is to honor God with your life. To life a life of integrity. Not be selfish. You know, help others. But that's really the essence of the Christian faith.

Joel Osteen

When you give up yourself, that's when you will feel the true spirit of Christmas. And that's giving that's serving others and that's when you feel fulfilled.

Joel Osteen

Take the limits off of yourself. You will never rise higher than your thinking. Create a great vision for your life.

Joel Osteen

My belief as a Christian is when we receive Christ as salvation, that that gives us a guarantee for Heaven.

Joel Osteen

People define Christianity differently. I think a large portion of our population are Christians, they're not all growing in their faith, they're not all active, but I believe that a lot of people believe in Jesus and believe that he is their Lord and Savior.

Joan Crawford

If I weren't a Christian Scientist, and I saw "Trog" advertised on a marquee across the street, I'd think I'd contemplate suicide.