Peter L. Berger Quotes

Evangelicalism as a movement is rushing headlong toward theological ambiguity, which is another way of saying apostasy.

If we do not find a solution quickly the land where our faith was born and survived for two thousand years will soon be empty of indigenous Christians. The living faith will only be represented by dead stones and Imported custodians.

The idea that America has some distinctive role to play in the unfolding of God's plan is compatible with orthodox Christianity. But it should be tempered by recognizing that America is not the church.

Is it not worrying in itself that European Christianity is now barely able to keep Europe Christian? If we lose sight of this, the idea of Europe could become a minority interest in its own continent.

In France, even heresy rapidly hardens into dogma.

I know the greatness of Christianity; it is a past greatness.. I live in 1924, and the Christian venture is done.

It is the function of the Church to oppose all original experience, because this can only be unorthodox.

Men have left GOD not for other gods, they say, but for no God; and this has never happened before.

This is how you know religion is failing because people think you're bonkers if you believe in God and also because it's so uncool believing in Jesus and everything.

The world needs to see Christians burning, not with self-righteous fury at the sliding morals in our country, but with passion for God.

Toleration made the world anti-Christian.

Our ordinary abilities will never worship God unless they are transformed by the indwelling Son of God.

But we have nothing of the Spirit except through regeneration. Everything, therefore, which we have from nature is flesh.

Revival is an infusion of new spiritual life imparted by the Holy Spirit to existing parts of Christ's body.

One reason education undoes belief is its teaching of evolution; Darwin's own drift from orthodoxy to agnosticism was symptomatic. Martin Lings is probably right in saying that more cases of loss of religious faith are to be traced to the theory of evolution ... than to anything else.

I'm very optimistic that there are sincere believers out there that are okay with tradition but don't want to endorse traditionalism for the sake of traditionalism but want to embrace tradition because it's God-honoring. I think that's a beautiful thing.

Revival is not just a feeling of excitement of the Lord. We get excited about many things, but excitement is not a revival if God is not the thing that gets us excited.

The fields are still ripe for harvesting (cf. Jn 4:35); God continues to give the growth (cf. 1 Cor 3:6). We can and must believe, with the late Pope John Paul II, that God is preparing a new springtime for Christianity (cf. Redemptoris Missio, 86). What is needed above all, at this time in the history of the Church in America, is a renewal of that apostolic zeal which inspires her shepherds actively to seek out the lost, to bind up those who have been wounded, and to bring strength to those who are languishing (cf. Ez 34:16).

The Christian test was a willingness to believe in the one Jesus Christ and His Message of salvation. What was demanded was not criticism but credulity. The Church Fathers observed that in the realm of thought only heresy had a history.

My deep religiosity [...] found an abrupt ending at the age of twelve, through the reading of popular scientific books.

There is something sadly wrong when it is more important to us whether others are a part of our denomination, rather than whether they repent of sin, believe on Christ and live holy lives.

Jesus still has a really great reputation and the Spirit is still moving. I've got a lot of hope for a generation that takes Jesus seriously, once again.

As a social and as a personal force, religion has become a dependent variable. It does not originate; it reacts. It does not denounce; it adapts. It does not set forth new models of conduct and sensibility; it imitates. Its rhetoric is without deep appeal; the worship it organizes is without piety. It has become less a revitalization of the spirit in permanent tension with the world than a respectable distraction from the sourness of life.

Whatever we once were, we are no longer a Christian nation

If the Christian religion, as I understand it, or as you understand it, should maintain its ground, as I believe it will, yet Platonic, Pythagoric, Hindoo, and cabalistical Christianity, which is Catholic Christianity, and which has prevailed for 1500 years, has received a mortal wound, of which the monster must finally die. Yet so strong is his constitution, that he may endure for centuries before he expires.