I majored in Social Studies in college, and taught that subject for several years.  Perhaps I’ll get to do it again one day.

So this is a subject that greatly interests me.

In reading some quotes from Thomas Jefferson, someone I love to read about, his thoughts on Christianity were very interesting to me, even inspiring.

As I studied up on Jefferson, I actually found a website dedicated to proving that Jefferson was this Deist who wanted a strict separation of church and state.  This was of course a liberal website trying to support their own modern secular idea of the separation of church and state.

They are wrong, but at the same time, I think these quotes are interesting because Jefferson was not the modern evangelical, either.  So modern Christian conservatives will have a hard time completely claiming his ideas either.  They might be better if they did.

“I had not supposed there was a family in this state [Virginia] not possessing a Bible, and wishing without having the means to procure one.  When, in earlier life, I was intimate with every class, I think I was never in a house where that was the case.  However, circumstances may have changed, and the [Bible] Society, I presume, have evidence of the fact.  I therefore enclose you cheerfully an order … for fifty dollars, for the purposes of the Society.” (1814)

“There was never a more pure and sublime system of morality delivered to man than is to be found in the four Evangelists.” (1814)

“My views of [the Christian religion] … are the result of a life of inquiry and reflection, and very different from that anti-Christian system imputed to me by those who know nothing of my opinions.  To the corruptions of Christianity I am, indeed, opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus Himself.  I am a Christian in the only sense in which He wished anyone to be – sincerely attached to His doctrines, in preference to all others …

I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus – very different from the Platonists, who call me infidel and themselves Christians and preachers of the gospel, while they draw all their characteristic dogmas from what its Author never said nor saw.  They have compounded from the heathen mysteries a system beyond the comprehension of man, of which the great Reformer of the vicious ethics and deism of the Jews, were He to return on earth, would not recognize one feature.” (1816)

“The Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines of Christ levelled to every understanding and too plain to need explanation, saw in the mysticism of Plato materials with which they might build up an artificial system which might, from its indistinctness, admit everlasting controversy, give employment for their order, and introduce it to profit, power, and preeminence.  The doctrines which flowed from the lips of Jesus Himself are within the comprehension of a child; but thousands of volumes have not yet explained the Platonisms engrafted upon them; and for this obvious reason, that nonsense can never be explained.” To John Adams 1814

“… when, in short, we shall have unlearned everything which has been taught since His day, and got back to the pure and simple doctrines He inculcated, we shall then be truly and worthily His disciples; and my opinion is that if nothing had ever been added to what flowed purely from His lips, the whole world would at this day have been Christian …” 1821

“The doctrines of Jesus are simple and tend all to the happiness of man:

1.  That there is one only God, and He all perfect.

2.  That there is a future state of rewards and punishments.

3. That to love God with all thy heart, and thy neighbor as thyself, is the sum of religion …

But compare with these the demoralizing dogmas of Calvin … The impious dogmatists, as Athanasius and Calvin, … are the false shepherds foretold as to enter not by the door into the sheepfold, but to climb up some other way.  They are mere usurpers of the Christian name, teaching a counter-religion made up of the deliria of crazy imaginations, as foreign from Christianity as is that of Mahomet.” 1822

So we see within Jefferson’s thought some interesting ideas.  First, he defined being a disciple of Christ, a Christian, as being a person that was dedicated to the teachings of Jesus (and by extension the first Apostles, from a much longer quote I chose not to include, since this was their goal), teachings which Jefferson himself found greater than all others.  Wasn’t this the “Great Comission”?  “Go and make disciples, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.”

Second, he was obviously against the bringing in of worldly philosophy to something that is fairly simple and easy to understand.  He saw the constant lofty thinking as a distraction from simply following the teachings of Jesus and a justification for a professional priest/laity division that was by nature corrupt and self-serving.

Which leads to third, that he saw the great religious and traditional structure of the Christianity of his day as a detriment to true religion, following Jesus.

Did Jefferson go to church?  Yep.  This is why I love Jefferson.  He was an ardent idealist but worked within the necessary reality of his day.

Peace.

Saw this in a video and liked it.  Thought I would share.  It’s from St. Augustine.

“Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering.”

You were fearfully and wonderfully made.

Peace.

Jesus Among Other Gods by Zacharias

It often happens that when the moral law protects the , a ceremonial law is invoked to accomplish immoral ends.

Pilate may well be the quintessential example of what politics has come to mean. He knew what was right but succumbed to the seduction of his position.

… nobody is born a Christian. All Christians are such by virtue of conversion. To ask a Christian not to reach out to anyone else from another faith is to ask that Christian to deny his own faith.

From The Pursuit of God by Tozer

The whole Bible supports this idea. God is speaking. Not God spoke, but God is speaking. He is, by His nature, continuously articulate. He fills the world with His speaking voice.

God’s word in the Bible can have power only because it corresponds to God’s word in the universe. It is the present Voice which makes the writen Word all-powerful. Otherwise it would lie locked in slumber within the covers of a book.

God did not write a book and send it by messenger to be read at a distance by unaided minds. He spoke a Book and lives in His spoken words, constantly speaking His words and causing the power of them to persist across the years.

The tragedy is that our eternal welfare depends upon our hearing and we have trained our ears not to hear.

Just now we happen to be living in a secular age. Our thought habits are those of the scientist, not those of the worshiper. We are more likely to explain than to adore. “It thundered,” we exclaim, and go our earthly way. But still the Voice sounds and searches.

The Bible will never be a living Book to us until we are convinced that God is articulate in His universe.

I believe that much of our religious unbelief is due to a wrong conception of and a wrong feeling for the Scriptures of Truth. A silent God suddenly began to speak in a book and when the book was finished lapsed back into silence again forever. Now we read the book as the record fo what God said when He was for a brief time in a speaking mood. With notions like that in our heads, how can we believe?

And one last one:

Can you tell me who Jesus Christ was?
Well, then I will tell you. Alexander, Ceasar, Charlemagne and I myself have founded great empires; but upon what did these creations of our genius depend? Upon force. Jesus alone founded his empire upon love, and to this very day millions will die for Him … I think I understand something of human nature; and I tell you, all these were men, and I am a man: none else is like Him; Jesus Christ was mare than man … I have inspired multitudes with such an enthusiastic devotion that they would have died for me … but to do this it was necessary that I should be visibly present with the electric influence of my looks, my words, of my voice. When I saw men and spoke to them, I lighted up the flame of self-devotion in their hearts … Christ alone has succeeded in so raising the mind of the man toward the unseen, that it becomes insensible to the barriers of time and space. Across a chasm of eighteen hundred years, Jesus Christ makes a demand which is beyond all others difficult to satisfy; He asks for that which a philosopher may often seek in vain at the hands of his friends, or a father of his children, or a bride of her spouse, or a man of his brother. He asks for the human heart; He will have it entirely to Himself. He demands it unconditionally; and forthwith His demand is granted. Wonderful! In defiance of time and space, the soul of man, with all its powers and faculties, becomes an annexation to the empire of Christ. All who sincerely believe in Him, experience that remarkable, supernatural love toward Him. This phenomenon is unaccountable; it is altogether beyond the scope of man’s creative powers. Time, the great destroyer, is powerless to extinguish this sacred flame; time can neither exhaust its strength nor put a limit to its range. This is it, which strikes me most; I have often thought of it. This it is which proves to me quite convincingly the Divinity of Christ.

That was Napoleon.

Peace.

Jesus Among Other Gods by Zacharias

… most skeptics begin their challenge to God’s existence with the problem of evil or at least reserve their greatest emotion for that discussion. But in doing so, they dig a deeper pit than the one they are trying to get out of, because raising the problem of evil without God runs the risk of failing to justify the question.

We are not merely observers to the reality of evil. We are involved in it beyond mere academic discussion.

Love can only be what it was meant to be when it is wedded first to the sacred.

Goodness in the face of evil is magnificent, because it is more than goodness; it is the touch of God.

I recall talking to a very successful and very wealthy businessman who throughout the conversation repeatedly raised this question, “But what about all the evil in this world?” Finally, the friend sitting next to me said to him, “I hear you constantly expressing a desire to see a solution to the problem of evil around you. Are you as troubled by the problem of evil within you?” In the pin-drop silence that followed, the man’s face showed his duplicity.

The Pursuit of God by Tozer

Important as it is that we recognize God working in us, I would yet warn against a too-great preoccupation with the thought. It is a sure road to sterile passivity. God will not hold us responsible to understand the mysteries of election, predestination and the divine sovereignty. The best and safest way to deal with these truths is to raise our eyes to God and in deepest reverence say, “Oh, Lord, thou knowest.” Those things belong to the deep and mysterious profound of God’s omniscience. Prying into them may make theologians, but it will never make saints.

Now we have reached a low place of sand and burnt wire grass and, worst of all, we have made the Word of Truth conform to our experience and accepted this low plane as the very pasture of the blessed. It will require a determined heart and more than a little courage to wrench ourselves loose from the grip of our times and return to biblical ways.

Peace.

It is possible to hold a treasure in your hand but be ignorant of it and go for the wrapping instead.

Jesus took pains to show them that their preoccupation with bread as the primary purpose and expression of enjoyment had seriously displaced both what bread was meant to do and what life was meant to be.

In short, if we are to truly understand who we are, we must understand what bread can and cannot do.

We are not in need merely of a superior ethic. We are in need of a transformed heart and will that seek to do the will of God.

… the task of the Church is not to make God relevant to the people as much as it is to make people relevant to God.

And from The Pursuit of God by Tozer:

The “other world” which is the object of this world’s disdain and the the subject of the drunkard’s mocking song, is our carefully chosen goal and the object of our holiest longing.

Peace.

So here are several quotes, some from each.

Pursuit of God by A.W. Tozer:

We Christians are in real danger of losing God amid the wonders of His Word. We have almost forgotten that God is a person and, as such, can be cultivated as any person can.

How tragic that we in this dark day have had our seeking done for us by our teachers.

The blessed ones who possess the kingdom are they who have repudiated every external thing and have rooted from their hearts all sense of possessing. These are the “poor in spirit.”

There can be no doubt that this possessive clinging to things is one of the most harmful habits in the life. Because it is natural, it is rarely recognized for the evil that it is. But its outworkings are tragic.

Ransomed men need no longer pause in fear to enter the Holy of Holies. God wills that we should push on into His presence and live our whole lives there.

The world is perishing for the lack of the knowledge of God and the Church is famished for want of His presnence. The instant cure of most of our religious ills would be to enter the Presence in spiritual experience, to become suddenly aware that we are in God and God in us.

… the highest love of God is not intellectual, it is spiritual. God is Spirit and only the spirit of a man can know Him really.

God is so vastly wonderful, so utterly and completely delightful that He can, without any thing other than Himself, meet and overflow the deepest demands of our total nature, mysterious and deep as that nature is.

Promoting self under the guise of promoting Christ is currently so common as to excite little notice.

Jesus Among Other Gods by Ravi Zacharias

Truth by definition excludes.

Anyone who claims that all religions are the same betrays not only an ignorance of all religions but a caricatured view of even the best-known ones. Every religion at its core is exclusive.

Young dreams may be wild ones, but they are never corrected by ridiculing them.

Of all the enterprises in which the human heart engages, none lends itself more to abuse and manipulation than the activities of religion.

Sometimes religion can be the greatest roadblock to true spirituality.

Peace.

p.327 [This is close to the end of the battle, as the Soviets were circling in around the German 6th Army and closing in] Southwest of Kotelnikovo, Sgt. Alexi Petrov spurred his gun crew on toward Rostov. The squat artilleryman had lost count of the times he had crossed and recrossed the twisting loops of the lower Don, but he ignored his exhaustion as he pursued an enemy who had held his family in bondage for more than a year.
In the midst of the offensive, however, Petrov met a new foe. Approaching the outskirts of a village, the inhabitants – men and women – ran out and attacked his unit with pitchforks and hammers. The Red Army troops withdrew from the onslaught and stumbled back with the news that their assailants were native Kazakhs, a minority violently opposed to Communist rule from Moscow.
The Kazakhs screamed insults and shoulted: “We don’t want any Russians here!” while bewildered Soviet soldiers milled about on the plain. Someone phoned division headquarters for advice. Within minutes a terse order came back: “Destroy them all.”
In the general ardment that followed, Petrov fired high e shells into the village, which blew into thousands of pieces of mud, clay, and timber. Machine guns picked off any who tried to escape, and the Kazakhs were killed to the last child.
Gazing at the crackling flames, Petrov suddenly wondered why these people had such a hatred for the state. What was it about Communism that made them turn against their brothers? He was plagued by a terrible guilt for killing his own brethren.

p.314 At an officers’ mess inside the Kessel [the area in Stalingrad where the Germans were surrounded, cut off from supplies and near starvation], blond Lt. Hans Oettl was surrounded by men wishing him a happy birthday. Seated in front of his own blue china, from which he had eaten for years, he watched a cook ladle out a huge steaming portion of goulash filled with thick chunks of meat. Astounded and delighted, Oettl began to eat.
The door suddenly burst open and a military policeman stormed in, demanding to know whether anyone had seen his watchdog. In the sudden silence, Hans Oettl looked at his companions, now staring uncomfortably at the floor, then his gaze returned slowly to the goulash and mountain of meat in front of him.
While the policeman thundered threats against anyone who might have killed his pet, the lieutenant deliberately raised his fork and chewed a portion of the policeman’s German Shepherd.

p.312 On New Year’s Eve, discipline in the revitalized 62nd Army (Soviet) relaxed and, along the shore, high ranking Soviet officers held a series of parties to honor actors, musicians, and ballerinas visiting Stalingrad to entertain the troops. One of the troop members, violinist Mikhail Goldstein, stayed away and went instead to the trenches to perform another of his one-man concerts for the soldiers.
In all the war Goldstein had never seen a battlefield quite like Stalingrad: a city so utterly broken by bombs and artillery, cluttered with skeletons of hundreds of horses, picked clean by the starving enemy. And always there were the grim police of the Russian NKVD, standing between the front line and the Volga [the river through Stalingrad], checking soldiers’ papers and suspected deserters .
The horrible battlefield shocked Goldstein and he played as he never played before, hour after hour for men who obviously enjoyed his music. And while all German works had been banned by the Soviet government, Goldstein doubted that anny commissar would protest on New Year’s Eve. The melodies he created drifted through the loudspeakers to the German trenches and the shooting suddenly ceased. In the eerie quiet, the music flowed from Goldstein’s dipping bow.
When he finished, a hushed silence hung over the Russian soldiers. From another loudspeaker, in German territory, a voice broke the spell. In halting Russian it pleaded: “Play some more Bach. We won’t shoot.”
Goldstein picked up his violin and started a lively Bach Gavotte.

Peace.

Victories are not won in public, but in private. Jesus, while being a very public figure, was actually a very private person. He did not pray in public nearly as much as he prayed in private.

Peace.

True love causes pain.
Jesus, in order to give us the proof of his love, died on the cross.
A mother, in order to give birth to her baby, has to suffer.
If you really love one another, you will not be able to avoid making sacrifices.

The poor do not need our condescending attitude or our pity. They only need our love and our tenderness.

Someone once told me that not even for a million dollars would they touch a leper. I responded: “Neither would I. If it were the case of money, I would not even do it for two million. On the other hand, I do it gladly for the love of God.”

I pay no attention to numbers; what matters is the people. I rely on one. There is only one: Jesus.

What we say does not matter, only what God says to souls through us.

Do not be afraid of loving to the point of sacrifice, until it hurts. Jesus’ love for us led him to his death.

Peace.

Jesus comes to meet us. To welcome him, let us go to meet him.
He comes to us in the hungry, the , the lonely, the alcoholic, the addict, the , the street beggars.
He may come to you or me in a father who is alone, in a mother, in a brother, or in a sister.
If we reject them, if we do not go out to meet them, we reject Jesus himself.

The important thing is not to do a lot or to do everything. The important thing is to be ready for anything, at all times; to be convinced that when serving the poor, we really serve God.

Before judging the poor, we have to examine with sincerity our own conscience.

If abortion becomes legalized in rich countries, those countries truly are the poorest of the world.

The less we have, the more we give. Seems absurd, but it’s the logic of love.

Peace.