What Christianity Is Not Quotes

“Where are the moderate Muslims?, many Christians ask. But Muslims might just as legitimately ask, Where are the moderate and responsible Christians? For in large areas of the Muslim world the Christians, when they do not show up as plain proselytizers, seem the chief spiritual force of imperial Western societies that want to rob Eastern and other peoples of their birthright, and thus foment hostilities.”
― Douglas John Hall, What Christianity Is Not: An Exercise in “Negative” Theology

“there must always be a prominent element of modesty, or even tentativeness and hesitancy, in what we profess concerning the knowledge of God. The Creed (any Christian creed!) should be whispered, not shouted.”
― Douglas John Hall, What Christianity Is Not: An Exercise in “Negative” Theology

“It strikes many of us, I think, that too much Western theology knows a lot more about God than it should—or could! It lacks the kind of humility that contemplation of the Infinite ought surely to induce in finite creatures; and at a time when (as I’ve already suggested) modesty on the part of religion is no longer a bourgeois nicety but a condition for human survival, this theological omniscience of Western Christendom gives one pause.”
― Douglas John Hall, What Christianity Is Not: An Exercise in “Negative” Theology

“But the greatest humiliations of Christianity have not originated with worldly doubters and critics. They have arisen within the Christian churches themselves. Too many avowed Christians, often the most enthusiastic among them, have mistaken some aspect of the Christian faith for its very center.”
― Douglas John Hall, What Christianity Is Not: An Exercise in “Negative” Theology

“If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing him. Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved, and to be steady on all the battlefield besides is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.”
― Douglas John Hall, What Christianity Is Not: An Exercise in “Negative” Theology