Joseph Campbell Quotes

As I've taught our congregation, within the Christian faith the question of homosexuality is not a question of biblical authority, but biblical interpretation.

Wouldn't you like to contribute to an event that is part of Christ's own prediction, "I will build my church"?

In a country where Christians were looked upon with suspicion and disfavor, a government leader said to me with a twinkle in his eye, 'Christians seem to thrive under persecution. Perhaps we should prosper them, and then they would disappear.'

The Protestant reformation was an attempt to recast the Christian faith in terms of the new learning of the 16th century, the enlightenment learning. It was the first time that the Christian church did not have the capacity to keep itself unified as it recast itself, so it split into Protestant and Catholic traditions.

The Church of Christ has been founded by shedding its own blood, not that of others; by enduring outrage, not by inflicting it. Persecutions have made it grow; martyrdoms have crowned it.

The early Christians rejoiced when they were deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the Church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles o popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society.

The principle of the Inquisition was murderous. . . . The popes were not only murderers in the great style, but they also made murder a legal basis of the Christian Church and a condition of salvation.

Christianity or any religion doesn't necessarily have to be about a church. You carry your God inside you... But when you're famous and the word gets out that you're a Christian, every church is saying, "Even Jane Fonda." People come up to me in airports and throw their arms around me.

When we reduce the notion of “calling” to work inside the church, we fail to equip our people to apply their Christian faith to everything they do, everywhere they are.

Quite apart from the Church's financial self-interest in getting me out of the way, Baltimore is an overwhelmingly Catholic city and like most good Christians, they felt we ought to be punished for our unorthodox views.

The old Catholic parties hounded me with a Christian hatred from station to station, city to city, one stage to another.

Let us receive nothing, believe nothing, follow nothing which is not in the Bible, nor can be proved by the Bible.

With the help of pressure groups, government now has crossed over into the final frontier of bigotry, what writer and Catholic theologian Michael Novak calls 'Christophobia .' Traditional Christians and Jews are the new counterculture - aliens in a land their forefathers' beliefs and values established and built.

Pope is questioning my faith. I was very surprised to see it. But I am a Christian, and I'm proud of it.

The Christians who engaged in infamous persecutions and shameful inquisitions were not evil men but misguided men. The churchmen who felt they had an edict from God to withstand the progress of science, whether in the form of a Copernican revolution or a Darwinian theory of natural selection, were not mischievous men but misinformed men. And so Christ's words from the cross are written in sharp-edged terms across some of the most inexpressible tragedies of history: 'They know not what they do'.

We want to fan the flames of Christians for whom inerrancy and the authority of Scripture are not mere shibboleths, but part of her life beat, part of the beating heart of what makes them tick. They revere Scripture, not because Scripture becomes an idol, but because it discloses God who is especially come after us in salvation and redemption through the person of his son, his cross, his resurrection, the full sweep of the gospel.

A coat that is not used, the moths eat; and a Christian who is hung up so that he shall not be tempted-the moths eat him; and they have poor food at that.

I do not believe one can experience conversion or the fullness of the Christian life apart from the church.

Hope, for the Christian, is not wishful thinking or mere blind optimism. It is a mode of knowing, a mode within which new things are possible, options are not shut down, new creation can happen.

Sunday is the best day of the week because we celebrate the risen Christ of the cross in the local church, the dearest place on earth.

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.

There is no doctrine which I would more willingly remove from Christianity than the doctrine of hell, if it lay in my power. But it has the support of Scripture and, especially, of our Lord's own words; it has always been held by the Christian Church, and it has the support of reason.

The task of the church is to make the invisible Kingdom visible through faithful Christian living and witness-bearing .

All the modern christian churches, who deny new revelation, have no more authority to preach, baptize, or administer any other ordinance of the gospel than the idolatrous Hindoos have; indeed all their administrations are worse than in vain — they are a solemn mockery in the sight of God.

We need a leader who won't be silent - as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have been - as millions of Christians are persecuted throughout the Middle East.