After Evangelicalism Quotes

“The sense that card-carrying American evangelicalism now requires acquiescence to attitudes and practices that negate core teachings of Jesus is fueling today’s massive exodus.”
― David P. Gushee, After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity

“American evangelicalism now requires acquiescence to attitudes and practices that fundamentally (aha!) negate core teachings of Jesus”
― David P. Gushee, After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity

“If evangelical gatekeepers can swallow keeping children in cages, mocking the Sermon on the Mount, and following leaders in thrall to Trumpist bigotry, why would anyone respect their discernment, value their praise, or fear their critique?”
― David P. Gushee, After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity

“It is a loop between church, Spirit, and Bible, and it is enough.”
― David P. Gushee, After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity

“In general, evangelical fear of liberal learning has contributed to what Mark Noll properly described as “the scandal of the evangelical mind”—which is, in Noll’s immortal phrase, “that there is not much of an evangelical mind.”
― David P. Gushee, After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity

“evangelicalism—at its core, at its immovable power center—never was more than fundamentalism with lipstick on.”
― David P. Gushee, After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity

“It may not be quite enough to find a nice inclusive Episcopal church led by Progressive White Cleric to replace the lily-white rocking megachurch led by Conservative White Guy in Jeans on Stage.”
― David P. Gushee, After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity

“I am saying that Christians have many resources for listening to God’s voice and discerning God’s will. But given human limits—even as humans with Jesus in front of us, the Bible open before us, and the Spirit within us—I am rejecting any inerrant path to infallible doctrine.”
― David P. Gushee, After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity

“Distrust of higher education has been an enduring feature of fundamentalism and evangelicalism.”
― David P. Gushee, After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity

“Jesus according to Jesus”
― David P. Gushee, After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity

“But evangelicals are taught to pretend that there is no contradiction, because the Bible must not be questioned.”
― David P. Gushee, After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity

“It seems ironic to acknowledge that a Catholic Mass almost certainly contains more Scripture than the average evangelical service.”
― David P. Gushee, After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity

“It would have been so nice if evangelicals could have known of the Jewish traditions of dialogue, debate, argument, questioning. Instead we got inerrancy. Inerrancy made it wrong to question the literal face-value reading of any biblical text—ranging from the Sodom and Gomorrah story to Joshua’s holy war texts.”
― David P. Gushee, After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity

“Taken at its face value, the Bible does not condemn slavery. When abolitionists argued that the deeper message of the Bible was clearly against slavery—as Mark Noll points out—they were viewed as suspiciously unfaithful to the Bible.”
― David P. Gushee, After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity

“let’s say, fairly limited in their skills. Joel Osteen. Kenneth Copeland. Paula White. I mean, really.”
― David P. Gushee, After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity

“meanings” of the Bible so many people point to in their attempts to oppress other people.”
― David P. Gushee, After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity

“biblical inerrancy.”
― David P. Gushee, After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity

“Muslim scholar Ibn ‘Arabi (1165–1240) wrote, “Every branch reverts to its root.”
― David P. Gushee, After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity

“with good manners”
― David P. Gushee, After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity

“The pattern is clear: dissent, lose, and leave (or be forced out).”
― David P. Gushee, After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity

“It may not be quite enough to find a nice inclusive Episcopal church led by Progressive White Cleric to replace the lily-white rocking megachurch led by Conservative White Guy in Jeans on Stage. Are we committed to moving toward a fully antiracist way of life?49 Are we ready to give up what has probably been a full-immersion bath in Christian whiteness? In our break with white evangelicalism, how radical are we prepared to be? Are we willing to lay down everything, even white Christianity, at the foot of the cross?”
― David P. Gushee, After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity

“It basically means orienting our lives by a version of Christian faith that is compassionately realistic about the human condition, reflects the best of human knowledge, and enables all kinds of human beings to truly flourish. It’s humane and for human well-being. I have come to believe that something that might be called Christian humanism offers a good way forward for post-evangelicals. I am confident it reflects Jesus’ own way of treating people.”
― David P. Gushee, After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity

“it has had consequences that go beyond feeling guilty to feeling ruined.”
― David P. Gushee, After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity

“Human rationality drives our powerful desire to come to a clear and accurate understanding of reality and to behave in accordance with what we discover. Grasping reality matters deeply to human functioning, even to human sanity. When what we are offered in the Bible or what is reinforced by Tradition seems to contradict what we observe to be real, evangelicals have often been taught to submit to Scripture and Tradition and ignore the facts in front of us. But this kind of religiosity not only takes us into intellectual dead ends, it can also hurt people—as when our texts seem to require us to put a grossly negative moral construction on the fact of nonheterosexual sexuality.”
― David P. Gushee, After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity

“Overall, I view the design of the Catholic Mass as something like a polished gem, refined over time to a state of great beauty—if you know what you are looking at,”
― David P. Gushee, After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity

“The reality is that not every place claiming to be a church is part of the church universal, that many churches fail their calling. This fact forces us toward something like the old distinction between the churches that we see (the church visible) and the church that Jesus recognizes as his people (the church invisible). We may not be able to find Christ’s people where we thought to look. But I am convinced that we can find them.”
― David P. Gushee, After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity

“This is to affirm that since the resurrection and ascension of Jesus, he is present bodily in the world through his people.”
― David P. Gushee, After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity

“The Nicene Creed”
― David P. Gushee, After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity

“the identification of evangelical faith with conservative/Republican/Trumpist politics”
― David P. Gushee, After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity

“Some say: all of the above.”
― David P. Gushee, After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity