Often, we ignore the fact that our spiritual condition and psychological state of mind are highly affected by what is happening to us physically.
— Tony Campolo
If four years of university can increase your effectiveness of what you can do for others in the name of Christ, it is the best investment that you can make. But if the education is simply to get a job to make a lot of money, you have to raise the question of why you're doing it.
Most of my fundamentalist brothers and sisters - and I am an evangelical, so I can say most of my fundamentalist brothers and sisters - are quite willing to pack women off and send them as missionaries to dangerous places where they might get killed.
Insofar as the church fails to do the will of God, I am called upon to help it discover and to do the will of God; and I am called upon to help the government to do the same.
My task as a citizen is to get the government to do more good and less inefficient and wasteful work.
A career public speaker is not what I'm called to be. I'm called to be a critic.
In baptism, new Christians become part of a body of fellow believers who are called to spiritually encourage one another and hold one another responsible for consistent Christian living.
In America, evangelical churches have often been bastions of conservatism, providing support for the status quo.
We ought to get out of the judging business. We should leave it up to God to determine who belongs in one arena or another when it comes to eternity. What we are obligated to do is to tell people about Jesus, and that's what I do.
I don't doubt that God can bring good out of tragedies, but the Bible is clear that God is not the author of evil!
There is no doubt that religion had already waned under the onslaught of the Enlightenment, but it was Freud who provided the radically new understanding of human nature that made any religious explanation of the whats and whys of our personhood seem naive.
It is hard to say what the future holds, but this is probable - it won't be just like the past.
It's a new day for the Democrats when it comes to matters of faith, and the younger Evangelicals are aware of this and many of them are moving into the Democratic camp.
In the past, the Republican Party has depended on unified support at election time from Evangelical Christians. But times are changing!
After-school tutoring programs, care for the elderly, shelters for the homeless, disaster relief work, and a variety of other services would all benefit from government funding.
Haitians do not need development programs imposed on them by expatriates. Instead, they need help in developing as self-assured persons.
The first reason for the preponderant influence of those Evangelicals who define themselves as advocates of Religious Right theological and political ideologies is that they have both the financial means and technological know-how to make widespread use of modern electronic forms of communication.
I'm not denying that depression can be spiritually induced. Guilt from having wronged and hurt others can bring it on. A sense of having failed to live out the will of God can give rise to depression. Certainly the fear of death and what might follow can sap the joy out of life.
What we need to affirm is that Jesus is neither a Democrat nor a Republican. Whenever we marry Jesus to a political party, we are committing the sin of idolatry. We are making Jesus into the image of our political party.
There is a gift of the Holy Spirit that is given to both men and women in the New Testament. This is what makes the New Testament a New Testament rather than the Old Testament, in which women did not have such privileges.
While I can see how the government has, at times, wasted taxpayers' money, and I can admit that too often its programs are ineffective, I also can see the good that government does.
An evangelical is somebody who, first of all, has a very high view of Scripture, believes it's an infallible message from God.
Jesus is the only Savior, but not everybody who is saved by Him is aware that He is the one who is doing the saving.
Most Evangelicals have the church to thank for the Sunday-school classes that taught us what the Bible says and paved the way for our eventual decisions to commit our lives to Christ.
In our post-Freudian world, it is no longer a goal to become people of character who live out a God-ordained ideal of selfhood.
Evangelicals need to take a good look at what their issues are. Are they really being faithful to Jesus? Are they being faithful to the Bible?
Who's to say that there is any more support for Freud's psychoanalytic concept of the superego than there is for that old time religion that asserted that there is a God who ordains what is right and wrong, and that His righteousness endures for all generations?
Sigmund Freud was the apostle of disbelief. He was the one who made psychoanalysis a part of our culture, and in so doing he kicked out a flying buttress that had been essential for holding up our cathedral of faith.
Evangelical Christians, who once were a ridiculed irrelevant sectarian movement, have, over just three decades, become a powerful voting bloc that can no longer be ignored.
The traditional spokespersons for the Evangelicals, such as Chuck Colson and James Dobson, have become alarmed about this drift away from the 'Family Values' issues that they believe should be the overwhelming concerns of Evangelicals. They have expressed their displeasure in letters of protest circulated through the religious media.
Clinton's successor in the White House, George W. Bush, was committed to expanding government spending for faith-based initiatives.
From the beginning, there have been some religious leaders who greeted the funding of faith-based social services by government with ambivalence.
Flipping the dial through available radio stations there will blare out to any listener an array of broadcasts, 24/7, propagating Religious Right politics, along with what they deem to be 'old-time gospel preaching.' This is especially true of what comes over the airwaves in Bible Belt southern states.
There are reasons why Religious Right Evangelicals will continue to dominate religious discourse, not only in their own sector of the Christian community, but also in what transpires in mainline denominations.
A Christian school should be a place where young men and young women go through a period of spiritual formation and development so that they come out incredibly more proficient at living out their calling than they would have been had they not gone to school.
Protestants so often confuse being Republican with being Christian.
Women have the same privileges and opportunities as men, given the New Testament. Relegating women to second-class citizenship was abolished when Jesus died on the cross.
When there is conflict between what God requires and the demands of the government, each of us has an important decision to make concerning taxes.
I read the Bible, I speak through issues, I see what I think is hypocrisy in the church and things that are wrong, and I speak to these things. But I could be wrong.
The Jesus of the Scripture transcends all nations and calls all nations into judgment.
Through the ages, God has used the church to keep alive and pass down the story of what Christ has done for us.
Let us preach Christ, let us be faithful to proclaiming the Gospel, but let's leave judgment in the hands of God.
I don't think that John Kerry is the Messiah or the Democratic Party is the answer, but I don't like the evangelical community blessing the Republican Party as some kind of God-ordained instrument for solving the world's problems.
Freud taught us that it wasn't God that imposed judgment on us and made us feel guilty when we stepped out of line. Instead, it was the superego - that idealized concept of what a good person is supposed to be and do - given to us by our parents, that condemned us for what had been hitherto regarded as ungodly behavior.
A strong case can be made for religious leaders to speak out on political issues.
Religion, for better or for worse, has been politicized in blatant ways that have seldom been equaled in American elections.
Young Evangelicals, especially, are breaking ranks with older Evangelicals (over 40) and are more and more leaning towards voting Democratic.
Getting the government to put money into social programs run by religious institutions is a practice that started during the Clinton years, when Bill Clinton advocated the AmeriCorps program.
I am not suggesting that all those missionary organizations working in Haiti should pack up and go home, but I am urging them to understand that Haiti does not need clever Americans with newly contrived schemes for saving their country.
Lies and distortions can be spread, via the Internet, in an inexpensive way, and the effects are astounding.
