Quotes by Ethicists - Page 2

Rationality belongs to the cool observer, but because of the stupidity of the average man, he follows not reason, but faith, and the naive faith requires necessary illusion and emotionally potent oversimplifications which are provided by the myth-maker to keep ordinary person on course.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Jim Crow repeated the old strategies of the reptilian powers of the air: to convince human beings simultaneously and paradoxically that they are gods and animals. In the Garden, after all, the snake approached God's image-bearer, directing her as though he had dominion over her (when it was, in fact, the other way around). He treated her as an animal, and she didn't even see it. At the same time, the old dragon appealed to her to transcend the limits of her dignity. If she would reach for the forbidden, she would be "like God, knowing good and evil." He suggested that she was more than a human; she was a goddess.
Russell D. Moore
Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are unsure that we are doubly sure.
Reinhold Niebuhr
The top 10% of the people who are most creative, constructive and thoughtful, do not have much to do with churches. To them the canons of reason come first, making faith secondary and questionable.
Joseph Fletcher
If outrage were a sign of godliness, then the devil would be the godliest soul in Creation.
Russell D. Moore
We don't persuade our neighbors by mimicking their angry power-protests. We persuade them by holding fast to the gospel, by explaining our increasingly odd view of marriage, and by serving the world and our neighbors around us, as our Lord does, with a towel and a foot-bucket.
Russell D. Moore
In his temptation of Jesus, Satan quoted Scripture, and he didn't remember, misquote anything. God wants his children to eat bread, not to starve before stones. God will protect his anointed one with the angels of heaven. God will give his Messiah all the kingdoms of the earth. All this is true. What is satanic about all of this, though, is that Satan wanted our Lord to grasp these things apart from the cross and the empty tomb.
Russell D. Moore
We're a divided country on sexual issues. That's why every news cycle brings more controversy.
Russell D. Moore
The Christian catacombs represent simplicity and earthiness; the cathedrals, transcendence and wonder.
Russell Moore
You learn who you are only by making yourself accountable to the judgment of others.
Stanley Hauerwas
Forgiveness is the final form of love.
Reinhold Niebuhr
In fact, even Tillich's socialism was accommodationist because it continued the Constantinian strategy: The way to make the church radical is by identifying the church with secular "radicals", that is, socialists.
Stanley Hauerwas
We find it difficult to distinguish between spiritual combatants… and their hostages.
Russell D. Moore
Whatever it means to be a Christian, it at least involves the discovery of friends you did not know you had.
Stanley Hauerwas
The Church really does not know what [peace and justice] mean apart from the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth. After all, Pilate permitted the killing of Jesus in order to secure both peace and justice (Roman style) in Judea.
Stanley Hauerwas
All believers in Christ, the Scripture teaches, will suffer-all of us. You will be glorified, Paul says, if you suffer with him. The problem with too many of us is not that we don't suffer, but that we assume that only Third World Christians or heroic missionaries are suffering. My boys didn't know that they were suffering in Russia; they would feel it as suffering now.
Russell D. Moore
When Christians sing about the wrath of God, we are singing about ourselves.
Russell D. Moore
The Bible Belt is collapsing. The world of nominal, cultural Christianity that took the American dream and added Jesus to it in order to say, 'you can have everything you ever wanted and Heaven too,' is soon to be gone. Good riddance.
Russell D. Moore
Humor is a prelude to faith, and laughter is the beginning of prayer.
Reinhold Niebuhr
On the other hand, activist Christians who talk much about justice promote a notion of justice that envisions a society in which faith in God is rendered quite unnecessary, since everybody already believes in peace and justice even when everybody does not believe in God.
Stanley Hauerwas
I close my eyes and melt in its embrace, basking in the sweetest balm of forgiveness: that for which one need not even ask.
Leslie Cannold
Saints cannot exist without a community, as they require, like all of us, nurturance by a people who, while often unfaithful, preserve the habits necessary to learn the story of God.
Stanley Hauerwas
The problem with carnal anger and outrage is that it's one of the easiest sons to commit while convincing oneself that he is being faithful.
Russell D. Moore
The lives of the saints are the hermeneutical key to Scripture.
Stanley Hauerwas
If we survive danger it steels our courage more than anything else.
Reinhold Niebuhr
The unchurched kids laughed at the Bible studies based on television shows or songs of the moment. They weren't impressed at all by the video clips provided by the denomination's publisher, or by the knock-off Christian boy bands crooning about the hotness of sexual purity. What riveted their attention wasn't what was relatable to them but what wasn't.
Russell Moore
I'm not afraid of too many things and I got that invincible kind of attitude from my father.
Reinhold Niebuhr
The tendency to claim God as an ally for our partisan value and ends is the source of all religious fanaticism.
Reinhold Niebuhr
No wonder modern humanity, even as it loudly proclaims its freedom and power to choose, is really an impotent herd drive this way and that, paralyzed by the disconnectedness of it all. It's just one damn thing after another.
Stanley Hauerwas