Being Christian Quotes

“the new humanity that is created around Jesus is not a humanity that is always going to be successful and in control of things, but a humanity that can reach out its hand from the depths of chaos, to be touched by the hand of God.”
― Rowan Williams, Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer

“One of the great tragedies and errors of the way people have understood the Bible has been the assumption that what people did in the Old Testament must have been right ‘because it’s in the Bible’. It has justified violence, enslavement, abuse and suppression of women, murderous prejudice against gay people; it has justified all manner of things we now cannot but as Christians regard as evil. But they are not there in the Bible because God is telling us, ‘That’s good.’ They are there because God is telling us, ‘You need to know that that is how some people responded. You need to know that when I speak to human beings things can go very wrong as well as very wonderfully.’ God tells us, ‘You need to know that when I speak, it isn’t always simple to hear, because of what human beings are like.’ We need, in other words, to guard against the temptation to take just a bit of the whole story and treat it as somehow a model for our own behaviour. Christians have often been down that road and it has not been a pretty sight. We need rather to approach the Bible as if it were a parable of Jesus. The whole thing is a gift, a challenge and an invitation into a new world, seeing yourself afresh and more truthfully.”
― Rowan Williams, Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer

“If all this is correct, baptism does not confer on us a status that marks us off from everybody else. To be able to say, ‘I’m baptized’ is not to claim an extra dignity, let alone a sort of privilege that keeps you separate from and superior to the rest of the human race, but to claim a new level of solidarity with other people. It is to accept that to be a Christian is to be affected – you might even say contaminated – by the mess of humanity. This is very paradoxical. Baptism is a ceremony in which we are washed, cleansed and re-created. It is also a ceremony in which we are pushed into the middle of a human situation that may hurt us, and that will not leave us untouched or unsullied. And the gathering of baptized people is therefore not a convocation of those who are privileged, elite and separate, but of those who have accepted what it means to be in the heart of a needy, contaminated, messy world. To put it another way, you don’t go down into the waters of the Jordan without stirring up a great deal of mud!”
― Rowan Williams, Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer

“Christians will be found in the neighbourhood of Jesus – but Jesus is found in the neighbourhood of human confusion and suffering, defencelessly alongside those in need. If being baptized is being led to where Jesus is, then being baptized is being led towards the chaos and the neediness of a humanity that has forgotten its own destiny.”
― Rowan Williams, Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer

“admire the ingenuity that goes into this but I am not at all convinced that such people have quite got the right end of the stick. Does God really want us to know, in exact detail, ancient Babylonian history? I suspect not. But I am confident that God does want us to know how people in circumstances of acute displacement, living with the fear and the anxiety of a persecuted minority, responded to a hostile state and a pagan power.”
― Rowan Williams, Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer

“To be baptized is to recover the humanity that God first intended. What did God intend? He intended that human beings should grow into such love for him and such confidence in him that they could rightly be called God’s sons and daughters. Human”
― Rowan Williams, Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer

“Some kinds of instruction in prayer used to say, at the beginning, ‘Put yourself in the presence of God.’ But I often wonder whether it would be more helpful to say, ‘Put yourself in the place of Jesus.’ It sounds appallingly ambitious, even presumptuous, but that is actually what the New Testament suggests we do. Jesus speaks to God for us, but we speak to God in him. You may say what you want – but he is speaking to the Father, gazing into the depths of the Father’s love. And as you understand Jesus better, as you grow up a little in your faith, then what you want to say gradually shifts a bit more into alignment with what he is always saying to the Father, in his eternal love for the eternal love out of which his own life streams forth. That, in a nutshell, is prayer – letting Jesus pray in you, and beginning that lengthy and often very tough process by which our selfish thoughts and ideals and hopes are gradually aligned with his eternal action; just as, in his own earthly life, his human fears and hopes and desires and emotions are put into the context of his love for the Father, woven into his eternal relation with the Father – even in that moment of supreme pain and mental agony that he endures the night before his death.”
― Rowan Williams, Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer

“The prophet, therefore, is somebody whose role is always to be challenging the community to be what it is meant to be – to live out the gift that God has given to it. And so the baptized person, reflecting the prophetic role of Jesus Christ, is a person who needs to be critical, who needs to be a questioner. The baptized person looks around at the Church and may quite often be prompted to say, ‘Have you forgotten what you’re here for?’; ‘Have you forgotten the gift God gave you?”
― Rowan Williams, Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer

“It is, as some modern Christian thinkers have said, what makes the Church what it really is. For that short time, when we gather as God’s guests at God’s table, the Church becomes what it is meant to be – a community of strangers who have become guests together and are listening together to the invitation of God.”
― Rowan Williams, Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer

“Rather than get hung up on historical details, we need to keep coming back to the question, ‘What does God want to tell us?’ If we hang our faith on the absolute historical accuracy of Scripture in every detail, we risk making Scripture a sort of ‘magic’ book that turns up the right answers to all sorts of rather irrelevant questions, instead of being a book that gives us, in the wonderful words of the Coronation service, ‘the lively oracles of God’. The Bible is not intended to be a mere chronicle of past events, but a living communication from God, telling us now what we need to know for our salvation.”
― Rowan Williams, Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer

“He has decided to be our friend – indeed, the word in Greek can be even stronger, our lover – the one who really embraces us and is as close as we can imagine. Very near the heart of Christian prayer is getting over the idea that God is somewhere a very, very long way off, so that we have to shout very loudly to be heard. On the contrary: God has decided to be an intimate friend and he has decided to make us part of his family, and we always pray on that basis.”
― Rowan Williams, Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer

“So as we give thanks over bread and wine in the presence of the Lord we are – with him and in him – seeking to make that connection between the world and God, between human experience and the divine and eternal Giver. And that means that we begin to look differently at the world around us. If in every corner of experience God the Giver is still at work, then in every object we see and handle, in every situation we encounter, God the Giver is present and our reaction is shaped by this. That is why to take seriously what is going on in the Holy Eucharist is to take seriously the whole material order of the world. It is to see everything in some sense sacramentally.”
― Rowan Williams, Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer

“We are the guests of Jesus. We are there because he asks us, and because he wants our company. At the same time we are set free to invite Jesus into our lives and literally to receive him into our bodies in the Eucharist.”
― Rowan Williams, Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer

“Perhaps baptism really ought to have some health warnings attached to it: ‘If you take this step, if you go into these depths, it will be transfiguring, exhilarating, life-giving and very, very dangerous.’ To be baptized into Jesus is not to be in what the world thinks of as a safe place. Jesus’ first disciples discovered that in the Gospels, and his disciples have gone on discovering it ever since.”
― Rowan Williams, Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer

“you move towards thanksgiving, and you understand thanksgiving as something more than just private acknowledgement of God’s goodness; you have to learn to approach it as a ‘soaking-in’ of what God is. ‘We give thanks to thee for thy great glory’, as the Prayer Book has it. When all these things come together (says Cassian) we are on fire with the Holy Spirit. And when we look at Jesus we see someone whose entire life is on fire in that way, with the Spirit.”
― Rowan Williams, Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer

“Prayer, more and more, is not something we do, but what we are letting God do in us. And when that happens, it is not surprising that we get a bit wobbly and our emotions become a bit tempestuous, and we become baffled and depressed as well. So don’t panic! For when those disturbances are going on, it is very likely that God is beginning to settle down more deeply in you.”
― Rowan Williams, Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer

“People speak rather loosely of the Church being ‘prophetic’ and sometimes people talk as if the prophetic role of the Church is simply a matter of taking loud and very clear stands on all the issues of the day. But it is surely much more a matter of the Church expressing and asking important and readily forgotten questions in our society. It is to ask, ‘What’s that for?’ and ‘Why do we take that for granted?’ and ‘Where’s that leading us?’ We do it for one another in the Church but I think that we also do it for the whole of our human environment, which needs that sort of questioning for its health and survival.”
― Rowan Williams, Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer

“prayer is in significant part about resolving conflict and rivalry. If people prayed seriously they would be reconciled.”
― Rowan Williams, Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer

“For reflection or discussion 1 Choose and read a story from the Bible, and then ask yourself where you are in the story. Why do you see yourself in that way? And how does that affect what you hear God saying through the story? 2 Can you think of an example in the Bible where what we have is a record, not of a word of God to humans but of a human response to God? How would you describe that response? Do you think it is a response that would have pleased God, or not? 3 Why is it important for Christians to read the Bible in the light of the life and teaching of Jesus? Can you think of something that Jesus said or did that makes a difference to how we should interpret another part of the Bible?”
― Rowan Williams, Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer

“So baptism means being with Jesus ‘in the depths’: the depths of human need, including the depths of our own selves in their need – but also in the depths of God’s love; in the depths where the Spirit is re-creating and refreshing human life as God meant it to be.”
― Rowan Williams, Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer

“It is to accept that to be a Christian is to be affected – you might even say contaminated – by the mess of humanity. This is very paradoxical. Baptism is a ceremony in which we are washed, cleansed and re-created. It is also a ceremony in which we are pushed into the middle of a human situation that may hurt us, and that will not leave us untouched or unsullied. And the gathering of baptized people is therefore not a convocation of those who are privileged, elite and separate, but of those who have accepted what it means to be in the heart of a needy, contaminated, messy world. To put it another way, you don’t go down into the waters of the Jordan without stirring up a great deal of mud!”
― Rowan Williams, Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer