Top stanley Quotes Collection
Discover a curated collection of stanley quotes. Find inspiration, motivation, and wisdom from the best quotes in this category.
In Britain, when someone says they do not believe in God, they stop going to church. In the U.S., many who may have doubts about Christian orthodoxy may continue to go to church. They do so because they assume that a vague god vaguely prayed to is the god that is needed to support family and nation.Collection: Stanley
I am an enthusiastic participant in a church, but I have never been particularly concerned with denominational identity.Collection: Stanley
I am a Congregationalist with Catholic sensibilities. Which probably explains how I ended up in a Episcopal church.Collection: Stanley
I confess I take perverse delight as a theologian in the controversies surrounding postmodernism.Collection: Stanley
From my perspective, 'postmodernism' merely names an interesting set of developments in the social order that is based on the presumption that God does not matter.Collection: Stanley
Liberal Christianity, of course, has enemies, but they are everyone's enemies - sexism, racism, homophobia. But liberal versions of Christianity, which can be both theologically and politically conservative, assume that what it means to be Christian qua Christian is to have no enemies peculiar to being Christian.Collection: Stanley
Americans assume that we never go to war to sustain our wealth, because war must be understood as a moral enterprise commensurate with our being a democracy.Collection: Stanley
Theological writing is usually done in essays or books, but I hope to show that if we concentrate on sentences, we may well learn something we might otherwise miss.Collection: Stanley
I should like to think how we write as theologians would reflect our confidence in the One who makes that writing possible. That is one of the reasons, moreover, that the scriptures remain paradigmatic for how we are to write.Collection: Stanley
I want to challenge the presumption that the world cannot know it is the world unless there is an alternative to the world.Collection: Stanley
When love becomes what Christianity is all about, we can make no sense of Jesus's death and resurrection.Collection: Stanley
Ask yourself: if that is what Jesus is all about - that is, getting us to love one another - then why did everyone reject him?Collection: Stanley
The 'Cold War' impinged on the daily lives of Americans. The wars after 11 September 2001 have been fought without the general American population having to make any sacrifices. It goes on, and so do we.Collection: Stanley
To be sure, those who are actually engaged in combat - those who actually see the maimed bodies and mourning mothers - struggle more than the rest of us to make sense of the reality of war.Collection: Stanley
I do not want to convince Christians to work for the abolition of war, but rather I want us to live recognizing that in the cross of Christ, war has been abolished.Collection: Stanley
The world has already been saved from war. The question is how Christians can and should live in a world of war as a people who believe that war has been abolished.Collection: Stanley
Just as an athlete with natural gifts may fail to develop the fundamental skills necessary to play their sport after their talent fades, so people naturally disposed to faith may fail to develop the skills necessary to sustain them for a lifetime.Collection: Stanley
One of the challenges Christians confront is how the politics we helped create has made it difficult to sustain the material practices constitutive of an ecclesial culture to produce Christians.Collection: Stanley
Civil religion is the attempt to empower religion, not for the good of religion, but for the creation of the citizen.Collection: Stanley
American Protestants do not have to believe in God because they believe in belief. That is why we have never been able to produce an interesting atheist in America.Collection: Stanley
The god most Americans say they believe in is just not interesting enough to deny. Thus the only kind of atheism that counts in America is to call into question the proposition that everyone has a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.Collection: Stanley
Protestantism came to America to make America Protestant. It was assumed that was to be done through faith in the reasonableness of the common man and the establishment of a democratic republic.Collection: Stanley
Protestantism became identified with the republican presumption in liberty as an end in itself. This presumption was then reinforced by an unassailable belief in the common sense of the individual.Collection: Stanley
Conservatives and liberals understand the Christian faith as a set of ideas because, so understood, Christianity seems to be a set of beliefs assessable to anyone upon reflection.Collection: Stanley
Christianity is not some ideal toward which we ought always to strive even though the ideal is out of reach. Christianity is not a series of slogans that sum up our beliefs.Collection: Stanley
Time is a gift and a threat because we are bodily creatures. We only come into existence through the bodies of others, but that very body destines us to death. We must be born and we must die.Collection: Stanley
I am often criticized, or at least questions are raised, about what appears to be the absence of the Holy Spirit in my work.Collection: Stanley
The very fact that doctrine is hewn from bitter controversy and tested through time is sufficient reason to make them a focus of theology.Collection: Stanley
I have no doubt that for some to become a Christian may involve an experience of ecstasy. Yet I do not think such an experience is necessary for someone to be a Christian.Collection: Stanley
William James was not a prophet. He was a philosopher whose philosophy reflected his profound humanity.Collection: Stanley
It turns out that the God whose word will stand forever does not exist to insure our fantasies that we will not have to die as individuals or as a species. Such a God, moreover, does not invite us to presume we can comprehend God's creation.Collection: Stanley
Whatever it means for us to exist, we do so as creatures created, as the universe has been created, to glorify God.Collection: Stanley
We, like the people of Israel, would like to think we get to name God. By naming God, we hope to get the kind of god we need; that is, a god after our own likeness.Collection: Stanley
To know God's name is to know God.Collection: Stanley
Israel knew that there was no greater gift than to be given God's name, but that gift was a frightening reality that threatened to consume her. Israel, who would be tempted by the idolatrous presumption she possessed God's name, rightly never forgot she could not say God's name.Collection: Stanley
The mentally ill may have shattered lives, but how that is different than the way sin distorts our ability to comprehend who we are as God's creatures is not clear.Collection: Stanley
Our sin is exactly the presumption that we can know God or ourselves through our own capacities.Collection: Stanley
To come to terms with our beginning requires a truthful story to acquire the skills to live in gratitude rather than resentment for the gift of life.Collection: Stanley
'The Chronicles of Narnia' are war-determined stories. I do not think Lewis could have written well or truthfully if he had tried to avoid the reality of war.Collection: Stanley
I think the language of sacrifice is particularly important for societies like the United States in which war remains our most determinative common experience, because states like the United States depend on the story of our wars for our ability to narrate our history as a unified story.Collection: Stanley
It is often observed that the first casualty of war is truth, but how do you tell the truth without betraying the sacrifice of those who accepted the terms of battle? War is a sacrificial system that creates its own justification.Collection: Stanley
I think it is a mistake to focus - as we most often do - only on the sacrifice of life that war requires. War also requires that we sacrifice our normal unwillingness to kill.Collection: Stanley
To kill, in war or in any circumstance, creates a silence. It is right that silence should surround the taking of life. After all, the life taken is not ours to take.Collection: Stanley
To be a Christian is to be obligated to be charitable. This is true whether you are rich or poor, healthy or ill, old or young, male or female, oppressed or free, established or disestablished.Collection: Stanley
Though the world may often appear to be more charitable than the church, it is crucial to remember that, for the church, the care of the poor cannot be separated from the worship of God.Collection: Stanley
The world does not have time to be with the poor, to learn with the poor, to listen to the poor. To listen to the poor is an exercise of great discipline, but such listening surely is what is required if charity is not to become a hatred of the poor for being poor.Collection: Stanley
From the beginning, Christianity has struggled to sustain the creative tension between the personal appropriation of the gospel and the gospel's universal reach.Collection: Stanley
The fundamental character of our faith means an extensive diversity is required not only within local community, but between communities.Collection: Stanley
The fact that monasticism preceded the identification of greed as a primal sin is an important reminder that our very ability to name sin is a theological achievement.Collection: Stanley
The very fact that we find it hard to conceive of an alternative to limitless economic growth is an indication of our spiritual condition.Collection: Stanley