Bart Ehrman Quotes
If there were just 2.5 million to 3.5 million Christians in the year 300, the church would have to grow only at a rate of 26 percent to reach 30 million by the year 400.
For the fourth century, if the rate really was around 25 percent per decade, that would only mean that every hundred Christians would need to convert just two or occasionally three people a year.
Bart Ehrman
Quotes to Explore
But when one identifies the Church with a cultural and political bloc, there is the danger of making difficult the Church's contact with all those outside the bloc.
Karl Lehmann
There's an interesting contrast between born Catholics and converts. Converts are often much more rule-directed. Catholicism isn't something that they breathed in from their childhood, so they think that if you don't toe the line on abstract doctrine you can't be part of the Church.
Garry Wills
Even if we don't believe in church or God, we still believe in things that are bigger than ourselves. We need to believe in those things because if we can't be open to what we don't know, there's no hope for any of us.
Rachel Joyce
I had actually gone to a church-related college, but I went on a football scholarship, not because of any interest in the church.
R. C. Sproul
The limitless loving devotion to God, and the gift God makes of Himself to you, are the highest elevation of which the heart is capable; it is the highest degree of prayer. The souls that have reached this point are truly the heart of the Church.
Edith Stein
It was a real surprise to me to come across the evidence that Christianity might once have been a danced religion. Certainly, some of the early church leaders thought this was great and spoke of what seems to have been circle dancing, perhaps around an altar.
Barbara Ehrenreich
I don't go to church any more, but I think that Catholicism is rather like the brand they use on cattle: I feel so formed in that Catholic mould that I don't think I could adopt any other form of spirituality. I still get feelings of consolation about churches.
Rachel Cusk
When the problems in Northern Ireland started, it was not a question of Protestantism or Catholicism, because the Catholic church was the only church at that time-it was a nationalist conflict.
Harri Holkeri
The reason I always loved 'The Omen' so much, and what has always been scariest to me, is anything to do with God. Anything to do with God is quite frightening because fear is something that's very much expressed in a church environment, and I grew up in one. And the fear of God was very much instilled me at a very young age.
KaDee Strickland
The Church, the organized expression of the religious life of the past, is one of the most potent institutions and forces in Western civilization. ...It cannot help throwing its immense weight on one side or the other. If it tries not to act, it thereby acts; and in any case its choice will be decisive for its own future.
Walter Rauschenbusch
Scientific dogmatics must devote itself to the criticism and correction of Church proclamation and not just to a repetitive exposition of it.
Karl Barth
In the morning, we sliced all the vegetables and layered everything up in a pot with a glass of Riesling. On the way to church, we dropped it off with the baker, who sealed the lid with a strip of dough and put it in his oven for a couple of hours. We picked it up at 12 o'clock and took it home to eat with mustard and salad.
Jean-Georges Vongerichten
I consider myself spiritual and I'm married to a man who is both an atheist and a humanist, and my kids have been raised with the traditions of different religions, but they do not go to church or temple. My feeling is that everyone should be able to believe what they want or need to believe.
Jodi Picoult
I've tried to be active in civic organizations as well as the Church.
Margaret D. Nadauld
We were taught in school, and I was taught at home and in church, that blacks and whites were equal and we should not discriminate based on skin color, even if my school was almost entirely white.
Kevin DeYoung
I grew up in eastern Kentucky, and we would sing in the churches, and there's lots of good mountain church singers out there. Like a lot of folks who turn out to be secular music artists, that's a lot of the training you put in, whether you know it or not.
Chris Stapleton
The Divine Thing that made itself the foundation of the Church does not seem, to judge by his comments on the religious leadership of his day, to have hoped much from officers of a church.
Charles Williams
Just as Cardinal Bernardin proposed that an of ethic of life be consistently applied to unite all the life issues, we need in our day to mine the church's social teaching on solidarity.
Blase J. Cupich
