Art Killings > Art's Quotes

“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
― William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

“Far from being an unloving act, a sensitive refusal to condone homosexual conduct is the responsible and loving thing to do. The church deceives the homosexual by affirming a lifestyle that God deems to be sin.”
― Robert A. J. Gagnon, The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics

“It is not a kindness for a parent to allow a child to play with a scorpion or touch a hot radiator; nor is it a kindness for the church to give its blessing to forms of sexual expression that, as Paul notes, degrades the body created by God.”
― Robert A. J. Gagnon, The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics

“As these quotations are examined and exposed, it will become quite clear that those Jesus mythicists citing the Church Fathers in such a fashion are not competent students on the subject of Christianity's origins. They have merely copied accusations from less than reliable sources without concern for whether their citations were interpreted properly or even existed. Nor have they ever bothered investigating the responses given by Christian apologists to these quotes. That it attacks Christianity is enough for them.”
― Albert McIlhenny, Neither New Nor Strange: How Jesus Mythicists Misrepresent the Church Fathers

“We live in a Jesus haunted culture that is Biblically illiterate, and so unfortunately at this point in time, almost anything can pass for knowledge of the historical Jesus from notions that he was a a Cynic sage to ideas that he was a Gnostic guru to fantasies that he didn't exist, to Dan Browne's Jesus of hysterical (rather than historical) fiction.”
― Ben Witherington

“Not only were science and religion compatible, they were inseparable--the rise of science was achieved by deeply religious Christian scholars. ”
― Rodney Stark

“I play the notes as they are written, but it is God who makes the music.”
― Johann Sebastian Bach

“What was paramount in the apostles' earliest motives was oral proclamation of the gospel. They wanted to disseminate the word as quickly as possible.”
― J. Ed Komoszewski, Reinventing Jesus: How Contemporary Skeptics Miss the Real Jesus and Mislead Popular Culture

“Just because something is normal, does not make it morally justified. Case in point: Antisemitism in Nazi Germany.”
― Narcissismus Decimus Maximus

“Its main thesis is that not only the emerging Christianity drew on contemporary Judaism but that rabbinic Judaism, too, tapped into ideas and concepts of Christianity to shape its own identity; that, far from being forever frozen in ingrained hostility, the two sister religions engaged in a profound interaction during late antiquity.”
― Peter Schäfer, The Jewish Jesus: How Judaism and Christianity Shaped Each Other

“Both the structuralist and the individualist definitions ignore the spiritual dimensions of racism. They are secular definitions. Neither definition speaks to the nature of humanity or to spiritual forces that transcend individuals and society. Christians should not be limited to thinking only about the spiritual dimensions of racism, but racism must ultimately be defined as a result of our human sin nature. The sin nature of both majority and minority group members leads to racial conflict and tensions. We cannot end racism until we confront our own sin nature.”
― George Yancey, Beyond Racial Gridlock: Embracing Mutual Responsibility

“Cut Africa out of the Bible and Christian memory, and you have misplaced many pivotal scenes of salvation history. It is the story of the children of Abraham in Africa; Joseph in Africa; Moses in Africa; Mary, Joseph and Jesus in Africa; and shortly thereafter Mark and Perpetua and Athanasius and Augustine in Africa.”
― Thomas C. Oden, How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind: Rediscovering the African Seedbed of Western Christianity

“The early Christian historical memory was formed on three land masses -Asia, Africa and Europe. In this respect it does not differ
from textually recorded human history, which formed in the conjunction between these three great spaces. Only three, not seven.”
― Thomas C. Oden, How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind: Rediscovering the African Seedbed of Western Christianity

“In the name of anti-discrimination those who uphold moral values are discriminated against while those who violate such values receive affirmative action.”
― Robert A. J. Gagnon, The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
― George Orwell

“the work of salvation, in its full sense, is (1) about whole human beings, not merely souls; (2) about the present, not simply the future; and (3) about what God does through us, not merely what God does in and for us.”
― N.T. Wright

“To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.”
― C.S. Lewis

“The irony is that while God doesn’t need us but still wants us, we desperately need God but don’t really want Him most of the time.”
― Francis Chan

“Suffering is not an embarrassment to the Christian faith. It is the thread with which Christ's name is stitched into our lives.”
― Rebecca McLaughlin, Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion

“If Jesus is the Bread of Life, loss of Jesus means starving. If Jesus is the Light of the World, loss of Jesus means darkness. If Jesus is the Good Shepherd, loss of Jesus means wandering alone and lost. If Jesus is the resurrection and the life, loss of Jesus is eternal death. And if Jesus is the Lamb of God, sacrificed for our sins, loss of Jesus means paying that price for ourselves.”
― Rebecca McLaughlin, Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion

“I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross. The only God I believe in is the One Nietzsche ridiculed as 'God on the cross.' In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it? I have entered many Buddhist temples in different Asian countries and stood respectfully before the statue of the Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world. But each time after a while I have had to turn away. And in imagination I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn-pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in Godforsaken darkness. That is the God for me! He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us. Our sufferings become more manageable in the light of his. There is still a question mark against human suffering, but over it we boldly stamp another mark, the cross that symbolizes divine suffering. 'The cross of Christ ... is God’s only self-justification in such a world” as ours....' 'The other gods were strong; but thou wast weak; they rode, but thou didst stumble to a throne; But to our wounds only God’s wounds can speak, And not a god has wounds, but thou alone.”
― John Stott, Cross

“A myth, though, is not a lie. At its most profound—as Tolkien, that devout Catholic, always argued—a myth can be true. To be a Christian is to believe that God became man and suffered a death as terrible as any mortal has ever suffered. This is why the cross, that ancient implement of torture, remains what it has always been: the fitting symbol of the Christian revolution. It is the audacity of it—the audacity of finding in a twisted and defeated corpse the glory of the creator of the universe—that serves to explain, more surely than anything else, the sheer strangeness of Christianity, and of the civilization to which it gave birth. Today, the power of this strangeness remains as alive as it has ever been. It is manifest in the great surge of conversions that has swept Africa and Asia over the past century; in the conviction of millions upon millions that the breath of the Spirit, like a living fire, still blows upon the world; and, in Europe and North America, in the assumptions of many more millions who would never think to describe themselves as Christian. All are heirs to the same revolution: a revolution that has, at its molten heart, the image of a god dead on a cross.”
― Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“Specialization is for insects.”
― Robert Heinlein

“Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics is not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything will really do.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“Never confuse education with intelligence, you can have a PhD and still be an idiot.”
― Richard P. Feynman