Faith Complexity Quotes

I'm in favour of religion as a tamer of arrogance. For a Greek Orthodox, the idea of God as creator outside the human is not God in God's terms. My God isn't the God of George Bush.

I believe in mystery and multiplicity. To religious believers this may sound almost pagan. But I don't think so.

Religion of every kind involves the promise that the misery and futility of existence can be overcome or even transfigured. One might suppose that the possession of such a magnificent formula, combined with the tremendous assurance of a benevolent God, would make a person happy. But such appears not to be the case.: unease and insecurity and rage seem to keep up with blissful certainty, and even to outpace it.

Bring me a worm that can comprehend a man, and then I will show you a man that can comprehend the Triune God.

If God were small enough to be understood, He would not be big enough to be worshipped.

An enormously vast field lies between "God exists" and "there is no God." The truly wise man traverses it with great difficulty. A Russian knows one or the other of these two extremes, but is not interested in the middle ground. He usually knows nothing, or very little.

God may be a human creation, but He goes His way, not ours.

All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.

If you understand, it is not God.

I don't want to give the illusion that one day God came down and I was healed.

Would you respect a God you could comprehend? And yet very often that’s what we want - a God who reflects our culture, our biases, our economic, political, and military systems.

Americans have perfected the art of reducing complicated truths into formulas and products. We're desperate for instant, visible, measurable ways of knowing God, instead of trusting that it's complicated and a mystery.

The mysteries of the faith are not to [be] explained rashly to anyone. Usually in fact, they cannot be understood by everyone but only by those who are qualified to understand them with informed intelligence. The depth of the divine Scriptures is such that not only the illiterate and uninitiated have difficulty understanding them, but also the educated and the gifted.

The moment God is figured out with nice neat lines and definitions, we are no longer dealing with God.

A religion that is small enough for our understanding would not be big enough for our needs.

Blasphemy? No, it is not blasphemy. If God is as vast as that, he is above blasphemy; if He is as little as that, He is beneath it.

Every man or woman who loves Him, they hate Him too, because He's a hard God, a jealous God.

Faith, like a guillotine. As heavy, as light.

If God is vast and boundless as the ocean, how can a tiny drop like man imagine what He is?

We may have the best of intentions in trying to discern God's will, but we should really stop putting ourselves through the misery of overspiritualizing every decision. Our misdirected piety makes following God more mysterious than it was meant to be

Sometimes you ask God for something and you don't know what you're asking.

We can understand that the Fathers of the Church in the East wanted Apocalypse left out of the New Testament. But like Judas among the disciples, it was inevitable that it should be included. The Apocalypse is the feet of clay to the grand Christian image. And down crashes the image, on the weakness of these very feet. There is Jesus--but there is also John the Divine. There is Christian love--and there is Christian envy. The former would "save" the world--the latter will never be satisfied till it has destroyed the world. They are two sides of the same medal.

Reality, truth, and Jesus Christ are incredibly open-ended

God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from.