Christian thought Quotes

“The topic was eloquence, something Christians had been conflicted about since the first-century church when Paul wrote that in bringing the gospel, he did not come with “eloquence.” A few centuries later, Saint Augustine wrestled with the value of eloquence, associating it with his pagan background and training in Greek rhetoric while simultaneously employing it winsomely in his Christian writings. Such suspicion of beauty and form, whether in art, literature, speech, or human flesh, has shadowed Christian thought throughout the history of the church; sadly so, considering God is the author of all beauty.”

“The apostle Paul often appears in Christian thought as the one chiefly responsible for the de-Judaization of the gospel and even for the transmutation of the person of Jesus from a rabbi in the Jewish sense to a divine being in the Greek sense. Such an interpretation of Paul became almost canonical in certain schools of biblical criticism during the nineteenth century, especially that of Ferdinand Christian Baur, who saw the controversy between Paul and Peter as a conflict between the party of Peter, with its 'Judaizing' distortion of the gospel into a new law, and the party of Paul, with its universal vision of the gospel as a message about Jesus for all humanity. Very often, of course, this description of the opposition between Peter and Paul and between law and gospel was cast in the language of the opposition between Roman Catholicism (which traced its succession to Peter as the first pope) and Protestantism (which arose from Luther's interpretation of the epistles of Paul). Luther's favorite among those epistles, the letter to the Romans, became the charter for this supposed declaration of independence from Judaism.”

“Justification has so dominated the landscape of Christian thought that adoption has been marginalized. We don't hear much about our adoption at all. We hear a lot about forgiveness, but very little about the staggering reality of our inclusion in Jesus' relationship with his Father in the Spirit.”

“The world’s sewage system threatens to contaminate the stream of Christian thought. Satan will contest every hour you spend in Bible reading or prayer.”

“The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah...and died to give his work its final consecration never existed. ["Modern Christian Thought: The twentieth century, Volume 2" by James C. Livingston, Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, p.13]”

“In Europe, what seems to bond toads and toadstools strongly is their shared role as potentially toxic "agents of death", and their close associations with magic and the supernatural. In Christian thought, both were seen to represent the dark and evil threads of nature's tapestry. Both appeared in late medieval art in representations of hell, particularly in the work of Flemish artists.”