Religious Relevance Quotes

The Christian religion seems to have fulfilled its great biological purpose, in so far as we are able to judge. It has led human thought to independence, and has lost its significance, therefore, to a yet undetermined extent.... It seems to me that we might still make use in some way of its form of thought, and especially of its great wisdom of life, which for two thousand years has proven to be particularly efficacious.

A religion true to its nature must also be concerned about man's social conditions. […] Any religion that professes to be concerned with the souls of men and is not concerned with the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them, is a dry-as-dust religion.

The study of theology, as it stands in the Christian churches, is the study of nothing.

When I arrived in America, I experienced serious culture shock. For someone with a religious upbringing, the 1960s were an extremely difficult time. Even though religion was a big part of the civil rights and peace movements, in my college religion was treated as irrelevant, hopelessly stodgy, and behind the times.

What we need in Europe is to push back against the idea that religion is so farfetched that it's not worth talking about.

The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.

The thing that alarms me is that there are so many clergymen who say that the so-called 'new morality' is all right. They say we're living in a new generation; let's be relevant, let's change God's law. Let's say that adultery is all right under certain circumstances; fornication's all right under certain circumstances. If it's 'meaningful.'

If Jesus were here today, he wouldn't be riding around on a donkey. He'd be taking a plane, he'd be using the media.

In a way, technologies have negated the transcendental God in order to invent the machine-God. However, these two gods raise similar questions.

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.

After listening to modern tirades against the great creeds of the Church, one receives a shock when one turns to the Westminster Confession... and discovers that in doing so one has turned from shallow modern phrases to a "dead orthodoxy" that is pulsating with life in every word. In such orthodoxy there is life enough to set the whole world aglow with Christian love.

I would like the secular world to know that the Scriptures are about the things that we wrestle with every day. The Scriptures are not ignorant. Life is really hard. We know that things don't always go well and that our hearts don't naturally obey God.

Religion is a valid inquiry; whether society accepts it or rejects it, it doesn't matter. Man is a religious animal and is going to remain that way. Religion is something natural. To ask from where you come is relevant; to ask, 'Who am I?' is going to remain relevant always. But the modern mind has created a climate of atheism so you cannot ask such questions. If you ask, people laugh. If you talk about such things, people feel bored If you start inquiring in these ways, people think you are slipping out of your sanity. Religion is no longer a welcome inquiry.

In England, we have a curious institution called the Church of England. Its strength has always been in the fact that on any moral or political issue it can produce such a wide divergence of opinion that nobody -- from the Pope to Mao Tse-tung -- can say with any confidence that he is not an Anglican. Its weaknesses are that nobody pays much attention to it and very few people attend its functions.

Medicine, electronic communications, space travel, genetic manipulation . . . these are the miracles about which we now tell our children. These are the miracles we herald as proof that science will bring us the answers. The ancient stories of immaculate conceptions, burning bushes, and parting seas are no longer relevant. God has become obsolete. Science has won the battle.

The Bible was written two thousand years ago. The world is a different place now. Stories that had meaning then are meaningless now. Beliefs that might have been valid then are invalid now. Those books should be looked at in the same way we look at anything of that age with interest with an acknowledgement of the historical importance but they should not be thought of as anything that has any value.

The Gospel never grows old. It applies to every generation alike. We have to make a choice.

Christianity, boring? So is television...if we don't plug in.

My faith is whatever makes me feel good about being alive. If your religion doesn't make you feel good to be alive, what the hell is the point of it?

What is happening within Christianity is that it doesn't know it needs to promote itself.

The church that weds itself to the culture of the day, will be a widow with each succeeding age.

I agree with those who argue that it is possible to distil from the religions of the world their common values and relevance. As far as I'm concerned I am involved in a complementary process with people who have a moral or spiritual commitment to human rights.

You can adhere to your faith, but that faith needs to march in line with the rest of the world and needs to find a way of expressing itself in the modern world.

We were facing a situation where some preachers have completely alienated themselves from the everyday concerns of the ordinary Muslim. Despite the fact that there are social issues that local preachers are in the best position to address because of the huge influence they wield, particularly in rural areas, they simply were not doing so. We did not want them to preach hellfire but rather to restore hope for Muslims.

If you want a religion that makes sense, then I suggest something other than Christianity. But if you want a religion that makes life, then, I think this is the one.