All Quotes By Tag: Orthodoxy

“We forgot that there are some things that we cannot get hold of with our minds. The mind is good — God put it there. He gave us our heads, and it was not His intention that our heads would function just as a place to hang a hat. He gave us our heads, and He put brains in our heads, and that faculty we call the intellect has its own work to do. But that work is not the apprehending of divine things — that is of the Holy Spirit. Let me remind you now that modern orthodoxy has make a great blunder in the erroneous assumption that spiritual truth can be intellectually perceived. There have been far-reaching conditions resulting from this concept — and they are showing in our preaching, our praying, our singing, our activity and our thinking.”

“One century’s saint is the next century’s heretic … and one century’s heretic is the next century’s saint. It is as well to think long and calmly before affixing either name to any man.”

“Many [Tudor-era religious radicals] believed then, exactly as Christian fundamentalists do today, that they lived in the ‘last days’ before Armageddon and, again just as now, saw signs all around in the world that they took as certain proof that the Apocalypse was imminent. Again like fundamentalists today, they looked on the prospect of the violent destruction of mankind without turning a hair. The remarkable similarity between the first Tudor Puritans and the fanatics among today’s Christian fundamentalists extends to their selective reading of the Bible, their emphasis on the Book of Revelation, their certainty of their rightness, even to their phraseology. Where the Book of Revelation is concerned, I share the view of Guy, that the early church fathers released something very dangerous on the world when, after much deliberation, they decided to include it in the Christian canon.”[From the author’s concluding Historical Note]”

“I will raise up prophets to make conflicting pronouncements that inevitably will be garbled in transcription, resulting in mutually exclusive definitions of orthodoxy from which the open-minded will flee in dismay.”

“Accumulating orthodoxy makes it harder year-by-year to be a Christian than it was in Jesus’ day.”

“Heresy is the life of a mythology and orthodoxy is the death.”

“And we cannot keep our balance. Myth gives way to Reason. Revelation to Orthodoxy. We must dance or go mad.”

“Have you ever thought what a God would be like who actually ordained and executed the cruelty that is in [the biblical Book of Revelation]? A holocaust of mankind. Yet so many of these Bible-men accept the idea without a second thought.”

“Orthodoxy as right belief will cost us little; indeed, it will allow us to sit back with our Pharisaic doctrines, guarding the ‘truth’ with the purity of our interpretations. But orthodoxy, as believing in the right way, as bringing love to the world around us and within us … that will cost us everything. For to live by that sword, as we all know, is to die by it.”

“Atheism, true ‘existential’ atheism burning with hatred of a seemingly unjust or unmerciful God, is a spiritual state; it is a real attempt to grapple with the true God.… Nietzsche, in calling himself Antichrist, proved thereby his intense hunger for Christ.”

“Everything in this life passes away — only God remains, only He is worth struggling towards. We have a choice: to follow the way of this world, of the society that surrounds us, and thereby find ourselves outside of God; or to choose the way of life, to choose God Who calls us and for Whom our heart is searching.”

“As I ponder my pilgrim’s progress to Orthodoxy, however, I realize that I didn’t make the trip alone, but in a two-seater. And I wasn’t the one driving.”

“Could a body broken and blood spilled two thousand years ago restore my own damaged life?”

“Orthodoxy is idolatry if it means holding the ‘correct opinions about God’ – ‘fundamentalism’ is the most extreme and salient example of such idolatry – but not if it means holding faith in the right way, that is, not holding it at all but being held by God, in love and service. Theology is idolatry if it means what we say about God instead of letting ourselves be addressed by what God has to say to us. Faith is idolatrous if it is rigidly self-certain but not if it is softened in the waters of ‘doubt.”

“Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”