"Somewhere along the way, Christianity Today exchanged social convenience for the truth. Like many Christians, you have fallen for the mistaken belief that if you present yourself as caring about what progressives care about, then you will be spared from their slander and suppression. You will not. And the Left has made that clear. It has weighed your desperate pleas for acceptance and still has found you wanting."
- CARMEN SCHOBER. May 23, 2020. An Open Letter to Christianity Today: Change Course or Step Aside.
“Unquestionably! No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.”
- Albert Einstein (Interview with Albert Einstein in The Saturday Evening Post 1929)
-Tony Kriz. Aloof
"To attract more millennials to church, our board suggested serving coffee before and after the service. I suggested we proclaim Christ crucified and risen.
We will now have coffee served before and after the service."
@BoringPastor
"Luke’s Gospel presents the same message in the opposite form: “Alas for you when the world speaks well of you! This was the way their ancestors treated the false prophets” (Luke 6:26). Too much praise is probably an indication that it is not the full Gospel. In either case, Jesus himself clearly knew that his teaching would turn conventional values on their head."
~ Richard Rohr
"The church has only one altar, the altar of the Almighty . . . before which all creatures must kneel. Whoever seeks something other than this must keep away; he cannot join us in the house of God . . . The church has only one pulpit, and from that pulpit, faith in God will be preached, and no other faith, and no other will than the will of God, however well-intentioned."
—DIETRICH BONHOEFFER
"Things are not much different in the church. The sermon has been reduced to parenthetical church remarks about newspaper events. As long as I’ve been here, I have heard only one sermon in which you could hear something like a genuine proclamation, and that was delivered by a negro (indeed, in general I’m increasingly discovering greater religious power and originality in Negroes). One big question continually attracting my attention in view of these facts is whether one here really can still speak about Christianity, . . . There’s no sense to expect the fruits where the Word really is no longer being preached. But then what becomes of Christianity per se?"
(Bonhoeffer. Eric Metaxas. Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy)
"There is no theology here. . . . They talk a blue streak without the slightest substantive foundation and with no evidence of any criteria. The students— on the average twenty-five to thirty years old— are completely clueless with respect to what dogmatics is really about. They are unfamiliar with even the most basic questions. They become intoxicated with liberal and humanistic phrases, laugh at the fundamentalists, and yet basically are not even up to their level."
Bonhoeffer. To his superintendent, Max Diestel, he wrote about Theology School in New York.
"In New York they preach about virtually everything; only one thing is not addressed, or is addressed so rarely that I have as yet been unable to hear it, namely, the gospel of Jesus Christ, the cross, sin and forgiveness, death and life."
—DIETRICH BONHOEFFER
"The Judeo-Christian God wanted to give us Godself, but we preferred ideas and laws.'
~ Richard Rohr
"This is the ragamuffin’s secret, which nominal Christians do not understand, but for which martyrs have given their lives. For the sake of the kingdom of God, thousands upon thousands have had their possessions confiscated, homelands seized, and families, careers, and good names sacrificed. The nominal just don’t get it. They hear the Word of God, but it does not speak to them interiorly. The unseen world does not exist. The love story of the Bible is nice for children in Sunday school but not for rational adults. Faith is a relic of the Middle Ages. You can’t pay the rent, cook soup, or purchase a computer with religion. What matters is muscle, intelligence, connections, and stronger battalions. The rest is opium for the people. The nominal do not know the secret. The treasure is hidden from their eyes. The values and lifestyle of the ragamuffin rabble are simply incomprehensible. It is the ragamuffin alone who rightly comprehends what life is really all about. No effort is too great, no venture too daring, no sacrifice too painful for the sake of the kingdom. Her greatest risk is still too small."
(Brennan Manning. The Ragamuffin Gospel)
"THE QUESTION IS COMPELLING. “Do you know where you would end up if you died in a car accident tonight?” The evangelist has already painted the pictures. You could find yourself in an eternal garden of exquisite beauty laced together with winding paths of gold— or writhing in agony amid the leaping sulfuric flames of hell.
If there was ever a choice that defined “no-brainer,” this is it. Once you convince someone that hell and heaven exist, winning a convert is easy. After all, praying for forgiveness and “accepting Jesus” seem like a small price to pay for a get-out-of-hell-free card!
So effective is this appeal to people’s worst fears and insecurities that hell has become the most popular invitation into God’s kingdom. What we have not so critically examined is whether or not threatening people with hell engages them in the relationship God has always wanted with them.
We live in a day when millions of people have made a commitment to Christ and yet few lives are really transformed by his power. It has been said of this generation that our Christianity is a mile wide but only an inch deep. We see effects of it everywhere. People claim to know God but show no evidence of transformation in their daily lives. We challenge them as hypocrites and attempt to badger them into more-righteous lifestyles, but in the end most believers end up as much a part of the world’s ways as their nonbelieving neighbors.
While the threat of hell can stir instant commitments, it does not breed long-term disciples. If you are in this kingdom only because you fear the alternative, you’ve missed the greatest part of what it means to know God."
(He Loves Me. Wayne Jacobsen )
