Home > Work > Doubts and Loves: What is Left of Christianity
1 " The real battle for Christians today is not Armageddon, it is the battle for a sensible approach to that ancient library of books we call the Bible. The Bible was written by human beings, with all the longings, prejudices and illusions that characterise us as a species. It is not an apocalyptic almanac, a mystical code book, an inerrant textbook for living. It is a compendium of a particular people's struggle with meaning; so it should encourage us to do the same in our day. "
― Richard Holloway , Doubts and Loves: What is Left of Christianity
2 " We will go on producing myths, ways of explaining ourselves to ourselves but, like everything else about us, they are in constant transition and we must not fundamentalise any of them. "
3 " Christian theological history is filled with stories of groups who have developed theories of the election of themselves to salvation and the damnation of others; theories that demonstrate that their particular group has been exclusively endowed with divine truth, so that they possess a unique mission to the world and have a unique authority within it. "
4 " This quarrel over the messianic status of Jesus within first-century Judaism had profound effects on Christianity and prompted it towards a fateful turning point that switched the emphasis from following the way of Jesus to believing things about Jesus. Gradually a Christian came to be thought of not as one who lives and acts in a certain way, but as one who holds certain convictions or theories. The trouble with religious convictions or beliefs is that, since we can rarely prove or disprove them, we get anxious about them and start quarrelling with people whose convictions or theories differ from our own. "
5 " Truth is rarely simple and seldom obvious, which is why mature institutions recognise the importance of conflict and disagreement. Christianity was born in conflict, and it has been characterised by conflict ever since. The Church's obsession with heresy is witness to this fact. "
6 " One of the most important elements in the evolution of human institutions is the emergence of the difficult customer within the system itself, the radical who starts to question its very being, the reformer who calls for changes in the way it runs. "
7 " Hannah Arendt scorned this preoccupation with death and proposed a new symbolism that emphasized not the inevitability of our dying, but the actuality of our living. She wanted us to think of ourselves, not as mortals, but as natals, as those who are alive; and she wanted us to act for love not hatred of the world....In her exposition of Arendt, [Jantzen] points out that Christianity's preoccupation with death and salvation worked against a sense of connection to the web of life,'and taught people to be homeless in the world'. "
8 " In his lecture on Jesus, Brown meditated on the unlikely paradox that any institution could represent this man because institutions, by their very nature, have to follow particular laws if they are to survive and prosper; and the main law of institutional survival is that the many take precedence over the few. If institutions are to endure they have to place a higher value on their own endurance than on loyalty to individuals, no matter how attractive or charismatic they may be. "
9 " The best approach to religious codes that have become rigid and absolute is to acknowledge their arbitrariness and use them, if we use them at all, as a private discipline for ordering our own chaos. When they are proclaimed as the bearer of absolute and unchanging truth, defended in the traditional way, they enslave the human spirit rather than protect it from its own excesses. Jesus' vision burned through the external systems to the anxious human heart that lay beneath them and called for its transformation into a perfection of love. "
