Christ Actually Quotes

“Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions. —Joyce Carol Oates”
― James Carroll, Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age

“For Christian faith, the death of God is not a question of his disappearance. On the contrary, it is one of the places where He is most fully present. Jesus is not Man standing in for God. He is a sign that God is incarnate in human frailty and futility.”
― James Carroll, Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age

“Real generosity toward the future,” as Camus famously put it, “lies in giving all to the present.”
― James Carroll, Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age

“Saint Paul lives in the Christian imagination as the chief sponsor of Christian contempt for Jews, the avatar of law versus grace, flesh versus spirit, works versus faith, Moses versus Jesus, the Old Covenant versus the New. This brutal dichotomizing was attributed to Paul most influentially by Martin Luther, who used a perceived Jewish legalism, materialism, and obsession with externals as stand-ins for the decadence of his nemesis, the pope. “Because the Papists, like the Jews,” he wrote, “insist that anyone wishing to be saved must observe their ceremonies, they will perish like the Jews.”39 After Luther, both Protestants and Catholics read Paul as the preeminent tribune of Jewish corruption—a misreading that had terrible consequences, especially in Luther’s Germany, where the Volk were defined in ontological opposition to Juden. Paul’s”
― James Carroll, Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age

“There is no such thing as history undistorted. Decisive transformations of meaning occurred, and are occurring still.”
― James Carroll, Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age

“God suffers with you!”
― James Carroll, Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age

“Experience is a flow from event to consequence, with moral events defined by human choice.”
― James Carroll, Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age

“The absence of Jesus is the mode of his presence.”
― James Carroll, Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age

“To each one, the encounter with Jesus is unique, however it occurs. That no one possesses Jesus, or fully understands him, is why the movement toward Jesus can never be made alone.”
― James Carroll, Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age

“The God who makes the promise keeps the promise.”
― James Carroll, Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age

“Mindful imitation makes Christ actual.”
― James Carroll, Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age

“The I AM of God, of Jesus, is the “I am” of every person, and it consists in every person being aware of herself or himself.”
― James Carroll, Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age

“Jesus was the only point. Imitation was the point.”
― James Carroll, Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age

“Communion over loneliness. Death not an end, but a beginning. At home in the absolute—and absolutely unknown—future.”
― James Carroll, Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age

“Forgiveness as the response to the inevitability of failure. Suffering understood as part of life. Trust as the other side of anguish. A permanent thankfulness.”
― James Carroll, Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age

“Indeed, an ecumenical spirit extending to the worldly, to the flawed, to the politically compromised, and to the sexually stigmatized was what separated Jesus from his rigorously puritanical mentor.”
― James Carroll, Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age

“Human tragedy, of its essence, consists in the denigration of what is in the name of what is to come”
― James Carroll, Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age

“A naive belief in supernatural powers has been dispelled,”
― James Carroll, Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age

“Indeed, by the time of the Temple destruction, which set in motion the separation of “the Jews” from “Christians,” Paul was dead. That is why it is absurd to imagine that he himself caused the separation. Any imagined echo in his multifaceted writing of a distinction between “the Church” and “the Synagogue” resounds anachronistically from a future that did not yet exist—a fully ruptured Israel of which Paul knew nothing. The”
― James Carroll, Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age

“In the beginning was Meaning, and Meaning was with God, and Meaning was God. . . . Meaning became one of us.” That eccentric translation of the opening verse of the Gospel of John—traditionally rendered as “In the beginning was the Word . . .”—points, in an age when the quest for “meaning” has replaced the hope for “salvation,” to a new sense of the relevance of the idea of God, drawing on a particular tradition of Western culture that makes God present.21”
― James Carroll, Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age

“This is the God Nietzsche said had to be killed because nobody can tolerate being made into a mere object of absolute knowledge and absolute control. This is the deepest root of atheism. It is an atheism which is justified as the reaction against theological theism and its disturbing implications.8”
― James Carroll, Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age

“separated Peter from the vile and suicidal Judas was that he, Peter, had lived long enough to find his offense transformed—through no merit of his own—by the loving acceptance of Jesus. The humiliated Peter was, in the same moment, the forgiven Peter.”
― James Carroll, Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age

“Discipleship is a commitment to the memory and presence of Jesus Christ that makes a difference in how a life is lived, driving thought and behavior week in and week out.”
― James Carroll, Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age

“the expectation that he will come again—in fulfillment of all human longing at the end of time. “Parousia” is the technical name for this expectation; “eschatology”
― James Carroll, Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age

“humans are reeds of straw who think. Reeds of straw who know. Reeds of straw who choose. Reeds of straw who love. Reeds of straw who willingly surpass themselves.”
― James Carroll, Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age

“Kierkegaard wrote of “eternal consciousness”; the French sociologist Émile Durkheim of “collective consciousness”; the British writer H. G. Wells of a “world brain”; the French philosopher Edouard Le Roy of the “noosphere”—which the Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called a “new skin” on the earth.”
― James Carroll, Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age

“the way evolution has always worked, a “secular” process in which life’s most sacred secret is embedded.”
― James Carroll, Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age

“To be human, therefore, is to be on the way to becoming something else.”
― James Carroll, Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age

“Compassion: she suffered with. Companion: she broke bread with. Conspiracy: she breathed with. Conscience: she knew with. And finally, consistent with this ethic of imitation,”
― James Carroll, Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age

“Not satisfied with endlessly pulling drowning men from the torrents rushing past, Day went upstream to see who was throwing the poor bastards into the water in the first place—and”
― James Carroll, Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age