Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The church is not going to survive if they are going to tell people that they have to twist their minds into 1st century pretzels.
You can't have a world where 50 percent of the people are dieting and 50 percent of the people are starving if you want stability.
The Sins of Scripture is an interesting title; most people don't put sins and scripture together in the same title. It jars people.
[Charles] Darwin, for example, is the one who made us face the fact that the primary way we tell the Christ story doesn't work anymore.
In fact, in 1724 the Western world learned that women were co-creators of life that's when it was discovered that women had an egg cell.
Prayer is not adult letters written to Santa Claus, and God is not some parent-like figure up in the sky who's going to take care of us.
The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God and must be dismissed.
My sense is if the Episcopal Church can't stand challenge within its own ranks, then it is not a church I would want to be a member of anyway.
Apologetic explanations do not develop unless there is a reality that has to be explained and defended. Jesus was undeniably a figure of history.
Toward the end of his life, [Arnold] Toynby said the Christianity he saw developing was brittle, imperialistic and incapable of reforming itself.
Christianity is not about the divine becoming human so much as it is about the human becoming divine. That is a paradigm shift of the first order.
A lot of people hear me attacking their certainty. I don't have any interest in doing that. I'm interested in penetrating the meaning of certainty.
I live on the other side of Copernicus and Galileo; I can no longer conceive of God as sort of above the sky, looking down and keeping record books.
I experience God as the power of life, the power of love and the ground of being. I don't say that's what God is; I say that's my experience of God.
I don't make that decision [what next book will be] until I've read enough to know that I've got something different to say and I know how to say it.
The priesthood in many ways is the ultimate closet in Western civilization, where gay people particularly have hidden for the past two thousand years.
The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity.
In the private arena, you can do whatever you wish, and people do. These crazy evangelical preachers get on the radio and TV and say incredible things.
I think I could make the case for any kind of organized religion, but I'm not an expert in those, so let me narrow my focus to talk about Christianity.
The great danger... in believing yourself especially chosen is that it becomes easy to view those who are not your people as God's especially unchosen.
Terrorism is a real despair. These are people for whom life has been so negative that they're willing to die if they can take down some of their enemies.
The Christ path is the path I've walked all my life, so it's normal and natural. And I have no reason to abandon it because it leads to where I want to go.
In academia, I discovered that issues and insights, commonplace among the scholars, are viewed as highly controversial and even as 'heresy' in the churches.
Benedict XVI kept saying that homosexuals are deviant. They're not deviant. They're deviant only if you say that anyone who is different from me is abnormal.
There's no way a human being can escape his or her human-ness to be able to imagine God. We can talk about how we've experienced God, not what or who God is.
The Bible tells me that every life is holy; the Bible tells me that every life is loved; the Bible tells me that every life is called to be all that it can be.
We're either going to be driven to a whole new sense of radical interdependence where we are, in the Bible's words, our neighbor's keeper, or destroy ourselves.
Some people think prayer stops bullets or rockets or land mines. It doesn't. That's magic, that's not God. Sometimes, you're just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
If you want to be a Roman Catholic scholar and write, you've got to write in such a way that nobody understands what you're saying, and then you're thought to be profound.
We have a democracy within the bounds of a constitution which provides certain guarantees related to the basic humanity of every person. I think that's the best way to go.
We are in a survival mentality, and that's hard-wired into our humanity, because we are the winners of an evolutionary struggle of millions and millions and millions of years.
What kind of god is it that some human brain can shatter the illusions that have been built up around such a deity? God's a mystery. I'll never be able to tell you what God is.
Now, if Mary has an egg cell, then Jesus gets 50 percent of his genetic make up from his mother. And if his mother is a child of Adam, she, too,is fallen so Jesus is not perfect.
I still hope. I wouldn't be in this position if I didn't. I love the church. I love the Bible. But I think we're in a time where we're desperately in need of a great reformation.
One of my professors said to me once, "Any god that can be killed off will be killed, but if I can shake up your faith in your god, it means you already don't have much of a god."
There are some great values in Christianity, but I think the values are located more deeply in our humanity than they are in our religion. There are certainly some survival values.
The biblical texts that we Christians have used for centuries to justify our hostility toward the Jews need to be banished forever from the sacred writings of the Christian church.
What happened in the Western world was that Plato ceased to be the way people thought. Aristotle was rediscovered, and the modern, educated world moved toward Aristotelian thinking.
Almost any poll of regular churchgoers will reveal that their favorite book in the New Testament is the Gospel of John. It is the book that is most often used at Christian funerals.
It's not going to be a straight upward progression, but there's no doubt that consciousness is growing. Prejudices die regularly in the Western world. We don't burn witches anymore.
Pat Robertson said the feminist movement was just a bunch of lesbians who wanted to leave their husbands and kill their children. I quoted him in my book. It's a fantastic statement.
If I were a child of Tibet or of Arabia, I suspect the path I'd walk would be the Buddhist path or the Muslim path. And I don't mind saying that I don't invalidate any of those paths.
I'm not writing for fundamentalists. I'm writing for the people who have been repelled by that kind of thinking and yet who think there might be something they haven't yet discovered.
I think the worst way to go is to have somebody think they speak for God. If you look at history, every nation that has operated as if it spoke for God has become violently destructive.
I do assert that one prepares for eternity not by being religious and keeping the rules, but by living fully, loving wastefully, and daring to be all that each of us has the capacity to be.
All religion seems to need to prove that it's the only truth. And that's where it turns demonic. Because that's when you get religious wars and persecutions and burning heretics at the stake.
Many of the characters who appear in the pages of the Fourth Gospel are literary creations of its author and were never intended to be understood as real people, who actually lived in history.
The thing that intrigues me about Matthew is that I don't believe anybody would read it if they aren't Jewish and understand it. And so to say that publicly as a Christian is kind of interesting.
The audience that I try to reach are members of what I call the church alumni association. Now they are people who have not found in institutional religion a God big enough to be God for their world.
I think the story of the Christian faith is how you can become more deeply and fully human, not how you can become religious. And I don't see any indication that being religious makes you more moral.