H. Richard Niebuhr Quotes

The great Christian revolutions came not by the discovery of something that was not known before. They happen when someone takes radically something that was always there.

Christendom has often achieved apparent success by ignoring the precepts of its founder.

A God without wrath brought human beings without sin into a kingdom without judgment through ministrations of a Christ without a cross.

Religion makes good people better and bad people worse.

Men are generally right in what they affirm and wrong in what they deny. What we deny is generally something that lies outside our experience, and about which we can therefore say nothing.

The way to the organic, active peace of brotherhood leads through the hearts of peacemakers who will knit together, with patience and self-sacrifice, the shorn and tangled fibers of human aspirations, faith, and hopes, who will transcend the fears and dangers of an adventure of trust. The road to unity is the road of repentance.

Pilgrims are persons in motion passing through territories not their own, seeking something we might call completion, or perhaps the word clarity will do as well, a goal to which only the spirit's compass points the way.

Everyone has some kind of philosophy, some general worldview, which to men of other views will seem mythological.

Apart from the resurrection of Jesus, the eschatological orientation of the church appears as the spoke of a wheel without a hub.

It is imperative that the past of the pilgrims' progress be intentionally carried forward into the present as we work into our future. Without it we cannot know who we are, why we are here, or where we can go. Without a common past to live out of we become aimless and wandering individuals instead of a pilgrim people.

Pilgrims are poets who create by taking journeys.