Tony Campolo Quotes

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 are 2,000 verses of Scripture that tell us we must be committed to protecting the poor and the oppressed... There is no concern of Scripture that is addressed so often and so powerfully as reaching out to the poor.

Jesus never says to the poor: ‘come find the church’, but he says to those of us in the church: ‘go into the world and find the poor, hungry, homeless, imprisoned.

I don't know how your theology works, but if Jesus has a choice between stained glass windows and feeding starving kids in Haiti, I have a feeling he'd choose the starving kids in Haiti.

One of the most startling discoveries of my life was the realization that the Jesus that I love, the Jesus who died for me on Calvary, that Jesus, is waiting, mystically and wonderfully, in every person I meet. I find Jesus everywhere.

Often, we ignore the fact that our spiritual condition and psychological state of mind are highly affected by what is happening to us physically. Sometimes depression is simply the result of exhaustion.

When you were born, you cried and everybody else was happy. The only question that matters is this - when you die, will you be happy when everybody else is crying?

Let us preach Christ, let us be faithful to proclaiming the Gospel, but let's leave judgment in the hands of God.

The gospel is not about... pie-in-the-sky when they die. ... It is imperative that the up and coming generation recognize that the biblical Jesus was committed to the realization of a new social order in this world.... Becoming a Christian, therefore, is a call to social action.

Nothing is more dangerous than to live out the will of God in today's contemporary world. It changes your whole monetary lifestyle...Let me put it quite simply: If Jesus had $40,000 and knew about the kids who are suffering and dying in Haiti, what kind of car would he buy?

Because I am not yet living up to what Jesus expects me to be in those red letters in the Bible, I always define myself as somebody who is saved by God's grace and is on his way to becoming a Christian. (...) Being saved is trusting in what Christ did for us, but being Christian is dependent on the way we respond to what he did for us.

Those issues are biblical issues: to care for the sick, to feed the hungry, to stand up for the oppressed. I contend that if the evangelical community became more biblical, everything would change.

A person is as young as their dreams and as old as their cynicism.

Your past is important but it is not nearly as important to your present as the way you see your future.

Conservatives are people who worship at the graves of dead radicals. Stop to think about that. The people who started this country, George Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, these were not conservatives; these were the radicals of the time. In fact, conservatives always look back on people who they despised and make them into heroes. If you were to listen to the religious right today, they would make you believe that Martin Luther King was one of their flock. In reality, they hated him and did everything they could to destroy him.

The Bible makes clear a basic truth that we self-centered humans find difficult to accept, namely, that the natural universe was not created primarily for us. There is no doubt that God wants us to enjoy it and even use its resources to optimize a good life for ourselves. But the ultimate purpose of creation is worship. Nature and all living things were created to glorify God.

If we were to set out to establish a religion in polar opposition to the Beatitudes Jesus taught, it would look strikingly similar to the pop Christianity that has taken over the airwaves of North America.

Jesus refers to the poor over and over again. There are 2,000 verses of Scripture that call upon us to respond to the needs of the poor. And yet, I find that when Christians talked about values in this last election that was not on the agenda, that was not a concern. If you were to get the voter guide of the Christian Coalition, that does not rate. They talk more about tax cuts for people who are wealthy than they do about helping poor people who are in desperate straits.

I am saying that there is no salvation apart from Jesus; that’s my evangelical mindset. However, I am not convinced that Jesus only lives in Christians

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.

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.

The Gospel is about grace and we all know that grace is about us receiving from God blessings that we don't deserve.

Artists are the best theologians. They feel things that are true before theologians can jargonize them into obscurity.

It is hard to say what the future holds, but this is probable - it won't be just like the past.

Sadly, we do a much better job of making people feel guilty than we do of delivering them from the guilt we create. We need to confess this and change our ways.