A People's History of Christianity Quotes

“While contemporary Christians tend to equate morality with sexual ethics, our ancestors defined morality as welcoming the stranger. Unlike almost every other contested idea in early Christianity, including the nature of Christ and the doctrine of the Trinity, the unanimous witness of the ancient fathers and mothers was that hospitality was the primary Christian virtue.”
― Diana Butler Bass, A People's History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story

“But some contemporary believers, such as Lisa Domke, a pastor and mother in Seattle, ground their identity in Christ’s love but a love that goes beyond sentiment or feeling. “I say that I am someone seeking to live in the world with love and humility,” Lisa reports, “following God in the way of Jesus.” Love is the active practice of Christian virtue. As Sky, a Seattle Baptist, relates, “Children know that love is behavior, not romantic words.”
― Diana Butler Bass, A People's History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story

“By having a realistic sense of history,” Livingston responded. He insisted that seeing the past on its own terms—not through the romantic gaze of nostalgia—is intrinsic to human flourishing. Nostalgia, he declared, is the enemy of hope. It tricks people into believing that their best days are gone. A more realistic view of history, he insisted, envisions the past as a theater of experience, some good and some bad, and opens up the possibility of growth and change. Our best days are ahead, not behind. Hope for the future.”
― Diana Butler Bass, A People's History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story

“Universal hospitality. Welcoming all to God’s table. A river of justice. Or, as the prophet Isaiah envisioned long ago, “They will not hurt or destroy on my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (Isa. 11:9).”
― Diana Butler Bass, A People's History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story

“Enacting love was a critical aspect of experiencing love. Devotion and ethics intertwined.”
― Diana Butler Bass, A People's History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story

“Hospitality is the practice that keeps the church from becoming a club, a members-only society.”
― Diana Butler Bass, A People's History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story

“Whereas militant Christianity triumphs over all, generative Christianity transforms the world through humble service to all. It is not about victory; it is about following Christ in order to seed human community with grace.”
― Diana Butler Bass, A People's History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story

“Throughout the first five centuries people understood Christianity primarily as a way of life in the present, not as a doctrinal system, esoteric belief, or promise of eternal salvation. By followers enacting Jesus’s teachings, Christianity changed and improved the lives of its adherents and served as a practical spiritual pathway. This way—and earliest Christians were called “the People of the Way”—bettered existence for countless ancient believers.”
― Diana Butler Bass, A People's History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story

“Christians struggled with Jesus’s Great Command to love God (devotion) and love their neighbor (ethics).”
― Diana Butler Bass, A People's History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story

“Thus Christianity becomes a story of accumulated human experience of God that reveals a certain kind of wisdom in the world: To love God and love one’s neighbor constitutes the good life. Love is, as the apostle Paul wrote, the greatest of all things. Without love we are, as the good apostle said flatly, “nothing” (1 Cor. 13). Without love, Christianity is either a pretty bad joke or a twisted political agenda.”
― Diana Butler Bass, A People's History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story

“The team’s caravan traveled over difficult roads as American bombs fell. The car ahead of the one carrying Jonathan and Leah crashed. Jonathan and Leah remember the horror of seeing their friends thrown from the car. They jumped out to tend their injured colleagues, unsure of how to proceed. Just then some Iraqis stopped by the roadside. Seeing the wounded Americans lying in the ditch, they picked them up. Jonathan recalls, “They carried our bleeding friends to this town called Rutba. When we got there the doctor said, ‘Three days ago your country bombed our hospital. But we will take care of you.’ He sewed up their heads and saved their lives. When I asked the doctor what we owed him for his services, he said, ‘Nothing. Please just tell the world what has happened in Rutba.”
― Diana Butler Bass, A People's History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story

“Part of universal hospitality is in the practice of befriending other religious traditions and practices, while remaining deeply grounded. Brent Bill thinks Christians need to engage in “theological hospitality,” that we “should be open and welcoming…instead of starting with the theological differences that divide us.”
― Diana Butler Bass, A People's History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story

“The contemplative tradition has most deeply influenced my spiritual growth and my identity. My Christian action flows from my life of prayer.” Aaron McCarroll Gallegos agrees: “An authentic prayer life has become one of the most important Christian practices for me…. Without a vital inner spiritual life, I believe it is almost certain that one will lose their way.”
― Diana Butler Bass, A People's History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story

“The deepest and most important spiritual lessons I ever learned came from a circle of drunks, fighting desperately not to drink today, whom I initially viewed as low-life losers, and who ultimately came to be for me the oracles of God. The Twelve Steps in no way diminished my appreciation for the gospel of Jesus Christ—quite the contrary—I am more convinced than ever of the reality of the gospel story.”
― Diana Butler Bass, A People's History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story

“When someone asks me what kind of Christian I am,” says Brent Bill, a Quaker writer, “I say I’m a bad one.” He goes on to say, “I’ve got the belief part down pretty well, I think. It’s in the practice of my belief in everyday life where I often miss the mark.” Finally, he states, “I see myself as a pilgrim—traveling the faith path to the destination of being a good Christian—and into the eternal presence of God.”
― Diana Butler Bass, A People's History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story

“Unlike in our society, where we hide it, death surrounded medieval people. They had few hospitals, and so churches, poorhouses, and homes handled the dying and dead. Death was not a distant prospect at the end of a long, healthy life. It was integrated into ordinary experience. Medieval life was transitory, a journey through this world that often ended too soon and too abruptly. Death was often violent and unexpected. Extended death, through illness and in one’s own bed, was actually a blessing. Death was part of everyday life; medieval people considered their deaths regularly. Indeed, as one medieval historian puts it, “One of the chief obsessions of medieval Christians was the need to make a ‘good death.’”38”
― Diana Butler Bass, A People's History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story

“While contemporary Christians tend to equate morality with sexual ethics, our ancestors defined morality as welcoming the stranger.”
― Diana Butler Bass, A People's History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story

“Irenaeus of Lyon (ca. 115–202): “The glory of God is the human person fully alive.”
― Diana Butler Bass, A People's History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story

“church”
― Diana Butler Bass, A People's History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story

“Phyllis Tickle, Marcus Borg, Brian McLaren, Barbara Brown Taylor, Jim Wallis, and Lauren Winner for their encouragement, support, and friendship. Anne Howard, Joseph Stewart-Sicking, Linnae Himsl Peterson, Kathy Staudt, Jonathan Wilson, and Howard Anderson are good friends who offered insights along the way.”
― Diana Butler Bass, A People's History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story

“hope. And the possibility of history’s transformation lies through that door…. Spiritual visionaries have often been the first to walk through that door, because in order to walk through it, first you have to see it, and then you have to believe that something lies on the other side.2 A”
― Diana Butler Bass, A People's History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story

“A People’s History is not a nostalgia trip. In these pages I hope it is clear that no period of church history is superior to another. Rather, each time unfolds on its own historical merits, as Christians struggle to enact Jesus’s command to love God and neighbor in a unique human context.”
― Diana Butler Bass, A People's History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story

“Christianity succeeded because it “prompted and sustained attractive, liberating, and effective social relations and organizations.”3 Translated from sociologist-speak, that means Christians did risky, compelling, and good things that helped people.”
― Diana Butler Bass, A People's History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story

“Theologians pitted devotion and morality against belief, defining faith no longer as a way of life but rather as intellectual assent to certain creeds or confessions; their books were filled with “quarrelling, disputing, scolding, and reviling.”38”
― Diana Butler Bass, A People's History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story

“Who, Abelard demanded, would forgive such a God for killing his own son? Abelard proposed that Christ died for the sake of love, providing a model of self-sacrificial passion for humankind. Salvation entailed imitating Christ in his love for others, the love that God revealed in Jesus’s death for his friends. As Christ had done, we also do. As contemporary theologians Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Parker say of Abelard’s view, “The atonement created a deeper love for God than would have been possible without it,” creating the prospect that human hearts could be transformed “from fear to love.”36”
― Diana Butler Bass, A People's History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story

“When I get a little money I buy books,” he confessed to a friend. “If any is left, I buy food and clothes.”13”
― Diana Butler Bass, A People's History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story

“Indeed, early commentators scarcely attacked Christian doctrines, but they consistently portrayed Christian devotional practices as radical and socially divisive. Christianity had effectively “created a social group that promoted its own laws and its own patterns of behavior.”7 These behaviors, at odds with Roman custom, earned Christians the reputation of being revolutionaries and traitors to the good order of the state. Christian defenders, such as Justin Martyr (ca. 100–ca. 165), used the example of Christian practice to make the case that Jesus’s way “mended lives”: We who formerly…valued above all things the acquisition of wealth and possession, now bring what we have into a common stock, and communicate to everyone in need; we who hated and destroyed one another, and on account of their different manners would not live with men of a different tribe, now, since the coming of Christ, live familiarly with them, and pray for our enemies.8”
― Diana Butler Bass, A People's History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story