Authentic Christianity Quotes

“Restless hearts and anxious minds find peace in justification. Frenetic lives of self-justification have rest in the salvation of Jesus Christ. The incessant need to prove our own worthiness and our failure to ever do so are nailed to the cross, buried in the tomb, and put to death forever.”
― Gene Edward Veith Jr., Authentic Christianity: How Lutheran Theology Speaks to a Postmodern World

“Scripture is much more than distant and dusty words spoken by God long ago; Scripture is a direct confrontation and encounter with God in the present moment. God’s speaking is relocated into the present moment in the hearing of God’s Word.”
― Gene Edward Veith Jr., Authentic Christianity: How Lutheran Theology Speaks to a Postmodern World

“Recovering authentic Christian spirituality does not require producing a new message. Nor does it mean joining the cacophony of our culture. Instead, recovering authentic Christianity requires increasing the clarity and power of the signal so it can be heard over the background noise.”
― Gene Edward Veith Jr., Authentic Christianity: How Lutheran Theology Speaks to a Postmodern World

“God is not impressed with grandiose accomplishments from someone who ignores his God-given calling to his wife and children.”
― Gene Edward Veith Jr., Authentic Christianity: How Lutheran Theology Speaks to a Postmodern World

“Instead of serving in our vocations, we want to be served. Instead of loving our neighbors, we often harm them or use them for our benefit. Parents are to love and serve their children, not abuse them or abort them. Husbands are to love and serve their wives, not belittle or mistreat them. Businesses should serve their customers, not cheat them. Government officials should love and serve those under their authority, not tyrannize and exploit them. In a church, members should love and serve one another, not stir up conflict by insisting on their own way.”
― Gene Edward Veith Jr., Authentic Christianity: How Lutheran Theology Speaks to a Postmodern World

“Vocation is far more than work-life integration, bridging the chasm between personal and professional; it is the integration of heaven and earth, God’s work and our work, family and faith, daily life and divine power, culture and the Christian life. Vocation reveals the spirituality of everyday life.”
― Gene Edward Veith Jr., Authentic Christianity: How Lutheran Theology Speaks to a Postmodern World

“And, to be certain, God did not merely descend into creation to wallow in dust. He came to redeem a sin-shackled creation and bring eternal life in the midst of death. God put on human flesh in order to restore human flesh. He descended into the depths of a fallen world in order to lift it up out of the muck and mire of sin.”
― Gene Edward Veith Jr., Authentic Christianity: How Lutheran Theology Speaks to a Postmodern World

“The biblical revelation of God is more complex than the partial truths human beings are able to grasp by themselves. God is utterly transcendent, more so than the Deists and abstract philosophers realize. At the same time, He also does dwell within the hearts of His children. But there is another truth that is often forgotten today, one that Lutherans especially emphasize: God became a human being, in the flesh. And He continues to manifest Himself through physical means—the water of Holy Baptism and the bread and wine of Holy Communion—and by filling the world and the most mundane spheres of ordinary life.”
― Gene Edward Veith Jr., Authentic Christianity: How Lutheran Theology Speaks to a Postmodern World

“The secular realm, in all of its secularity, belongs to God, who rules it with His providential care, His created order, and His Law. The spiritual realm is also God’s, and He governs it with His Word, His redemption, and His Gospel. Christians are to live out their faith in the world, applying God’s moral law by improving the lives of their neighbors and faithfully carrying out their vocations. Meanwhile, they grow in their faith by Word and Sacrament and are prepared for a life that never ends in the kingdom of heaven.”
― Gene Edward Veith Jr., Authentic Christianity: How Lutheran Theology Speaks to a Postmodern World

“But Luther’s Reformation of five hundred years ago was different from those Protestant revolutions that would soon follow. His goal was to reform the Church, not demolish it and build something better on its ruins. He did not want to start a new church, but to reform the only Church that existed. He sought to correct abuses that thoughtful Christians throughout the Middle Ages also criticized. (Notice how Dante and Chaucer also attacked the sale of indulgences.) He sought to recenter the Church on its essential message: namely, that God became flesh in Jesus Christ, who died to take away the sins of the world and who rose again from the dead for our salvation.”
― Gene Edward Veith Jr., Authentic Christianity: How Lutheran Theology Speaks to a Postmodern World

“Instead of tinkering with style, for better or worse, churches need to deal, in a serious way, with the content of their teaching. Specifically, they need to find effective ways to rescue people from their life-and-death spiritual problems, particularly those that are characteristic of our age.”
― Gene Edward Veith Jr., Authentic Christianity: How Lutheran Theology Speaks to a Postmodern World

“Then Darwin offered an account of the origin of species that did without God altogether.”
― Gene Edward Veith Jr., Authentic Christianity: How Lutheran Theology Speaks to a Postmodern World

“And so it can be today: Lutherans—with their understanding of creation, incarnation, God’s presence in the Sacraments, His governance of the world, and His involvement in human vocations—can bring back not only belief in God but also belief in reality.”
― Gene Edward Veith Jr., Authentic Christianity: How Lutheran Theology Speaks to a Postmodern World

“Anticipating the collapse of secular reason, Hamann thus brings us to a decidedly postmodern crossroads, at which point one can take the road of faith, which, as an inspired tradition attests, leads to ever greater enlightenment; or one can take the road of postmodern unbelief, which leads to nihilism. Simply put, the alternative is one between Hamann and postmodernity. 15”
― Gene Edward Veith Jr., Authentic Christianity: How Lutheran Theology Speaks to a Postmodern World