Bible Quote by Philip Jenkins

““In trying to understand the death of churches, several possible explanations come to mind, some much less convincing to modern ears than others. Throughout Christian history, observers seeking to understand catastrophe have turned to the Bible. They have looked in particular at the many cases in the Old Testament in which Israelite kingdoms fell to massacre and exile, leaving only a tiny righteous remnant as the basis for later building. These disasters are generally explained in terms of the failings of those societies, their refusal to obey divine laws, especially to enforce strict monotheism.””

Philip Jenkins

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“Yet even when such languages did not face direct official sanction, speakers of older tongues knew that they had little chance of getting on in an Arabic world. By the eleventh century, Coptic and Syriac were declining as major languages, and the compiler of the History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria translated the work into Arabic because “today Arabic is…

Philip Jenkins

“Christianity offers similar stories, and the global Christianity that perished in the late Middle Ages has revived in the past century. China offers an…

Philip Jenkins

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“Where the African church failed was in not carrying Christianity beyond the Romanized inhabitants of the cities and the great estates, and not sinking…

Philip Jenkins

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“Christians believe that God speaks through history; and only by knowing that history can we hope to interpret momentous events like the Japanese persecutions and the fall of the Asian churches. Yet Christians have systematically forgotten or ignored so very much of their history that it is scarcely surprising that they encounter only a deafening silence. Losing the ancient churches…

Philip Jenkins

“Perhaps theological attempts to explain the destruction of churches or of “Christian nations” are asking the wrong question, if they judge success and failure by the standards of the secular world. When, for instance, a Christian community loses political or cultural hegemony, historians might conventionally think of it as having failed, as if the faith must of necessity be allied…

Philip Jenkins

“Another difficulty with the reservation scheme was that it reinforced the popular association of Christianity with foreign imperialism, and thus with enmity to the…

Philip Jenkins

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“Far from anti-Christian purges ceasing with the official end of war in 1918, they actually intensified during the ensuing war between Greece and Turkey. In its origins, this war stemmed from aggressive Greek claims to territory in Asia Minor, which at their most extreme amounted to a return to something like the Byzantine Empire. As matters turned out, the Turks…

Philip Jenkins

“Middle Eastern Christians, in short, tried every possible tactic to survive and flourish, and their efforts have largely failed. Partly, this is a matter…

Philip Jenkins

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“Besides the missionary theology cultivated by many churches, we also need a theology of extinction.”

Philip Jenkins

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“Our accepted chronology of the ancient church is wrong: ancient Semitic Christianity dies out not in the fourth century, but in the fourteenth.8”

Philip Jenkins

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“Christianity in this region remained as much a colonists’ religion as it would be once again during the French Empire of the twentieth century, and, just as in that later period, when the colonists left, so did the religion. Long wars during the sixth and seventh centuries forced many Romanized Africans to flee to other parts of the Mediterranean, and…

Philip Jenkins

“Any acquaintance with recent history made nonsense of any claim that God was on the side of Christian states. As one scholar suggests, what turned Christians to Islam was “the common acceptance by Muslim and Christian alike of the error that the favor of God is shown by worldly success.”22 Self-evidently, Islam represented growth, expansion, and success, in contrast to…

Philip Jenkins

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I think a new world will arise out of the religious mists when we approach our Bible with the idea that it is not…

Aiden Wilson Tozer

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From Augustine down, theologians have tried to compel people to accept their special interpretation of the Scripture, and the tortures of the inquisition, the rack, the thumb-screw, the stake, the persecutions of witchcraft, the whipping of naked women through the streets of Boston, banishment, trials of heresy, the halter about Garrison's neck, Lovejoy's death, the branding of Captain Walker, shouts…

Matilda Joslyn Gage

“God hates Hell. He hates the idea of people going there. He hates it so much that He was willing to take on human…

Evan Minton

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“The Devil can cite Scripture for his purpose, Sergeant,’ Anthony Payne replied. ‘That is from The Merchant of Venice, but it holds great truth.”

Michael Arnold

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When you put your hand on the Bible, you are saying something much stronger than just telling your peers that you're going to tell…

Lee Greenwood

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“Scripture also teaches that human beings are morally responsible creatures”

Robert A. Peterson

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“The wife of a junior officer cooped up in a horrible canvas partition in steerage for five months wrote: "I had enjoyed much peace there in the absence of every comfort, even of such as are now enjoyed in jail. I used to say that there were four privations in my situation - fire, water, earth and air. No fire…

Stephen Taylor

O Word of God incarnate . . . It is the golden casket Where gems of truth are stored; It is the heaven-drawn picture…

Walsham How

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How can I trust that the Bible is reliable?

Michael Horton

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Every plant which my heavenly father has not planted with be uprooted

Jesus Christ

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Where I come from you're not raised to think on your own. It's not that you're pushed to read the Bible. The Bible is…

Abel Ferrara

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“I felt like praying or something, when I was in bed, but I couldn't do it. I can't always pray when I feel like it. In the first place, I'm sort of an atheist. I like Jesus and all, but I don't care too much for most of the other stuff in the Bible. Take the Disciples, for instance. They…

J.D. Salinger

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