Joe Davis > Joe's Quotes

“poverty itself is sin. ‘Poverty that results from injustice and exploitation is the most visible and striking sign of the sin of the world.’70”
― Jayakumar Christian, God of the Empty-Handed: Poverty, Power and the Kingdom of God

“The clash between the individual gospel and the social gospel leaves me cold. An individual gospel is a soul without a body, and a social gospel without an individual gospel is a body without a soul. One is a ghost and the other is a corpse. Put the two together and you have a living person.66”
― Jayakumar Christian, God of the Empty-Handed: Poverty, Power and the Kingdom of God

“Poverty mars the identity of the poor and hurts the soul of all involved.”
― Jayakumar Christian, God of the Empty-Handed: Poverty, Power and the Kingdom of God

“Powerlessness is a spiritual disease, the scars of which can be seen on the will and identity of the poor. Principalities and powers play a crucial role in intensifying the powerlessness imposed by society on the poor by reinforcing the oppression and internalising it within poor communities and cultures.”
― Jayakumar Christian, God of the Empty-Handed: Poverty, Power and the Kingdom of God

“The working concept of God for most ordinary Christians is - if one may venture a bold guess- shaped more by the combination of Greek philosophy and Islamic
theology that was powerfully injected into the thought of Christendom at the beginning of the High Middle Ages than by the thought of the fathers of the first four centuries.”
― Lesslie Newbigin, The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission

“It cannot be denied that too often the weight of the Christian movement has been on the side of the strong and the powerful and against the weak and oppressed—this, despite the gospel.”
― Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited

“Too often the price exacted by society for security and respectability is that the Christian movement in its formal expression must be on the side of the strong against the weak.”
― Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited