Christian Leaders

"When I live holy, He's pleased with me, and when I don't live holy He's not pleased with me, but whether He's pleased with me or not has nothing to do with my salvation... You think your attempt at living holy entitles you to stay in the family of God. That's a dangerous heresy. You are in the family of God (if you are in the family of God at all) by the grace of God, through faith... My salvation is not dependent on my goodness at all."

"Is [a hyena] in the [dog kind]? I think most people would consider it a dog kind of animal, so who gets to make this decision is the question. Who's calling the shots? I'd want to know that before we proceed any further... Get a bunch of three-year-olds, show them hyenas on TV and don't say anything. "What is that? Oh, it's a dog, a wild dog." That's what they'll say, that's what most people think of it: as a wild dog."

"I don't speak Latin. It's a dead language. It killed the Romans, and now it's killing us."

"I don't know why this [flat earth theory is] becoming an issue now. I... suspect strongly this is a hoax put forth by the atheists to see how far the Christians will take it."

"All these flat earth guys!... Here's the Hovind theory on the flat earth... I suspect, I do not know this, I just have a sneaking suspicion that some atheists someplace have got in a club together to say "Hey, let's start pushing this idea that the earth is flat, and let's see if the Christians fall for it." They've done that several times before over the last hundred years, spread some stupid idea and sometimes a lot of Christians do fall for it... And then they'll use that to sit around and laugh and say "Wow, look at how stupid these Bible-believers are!" I think this whole flat earth thing is another one of those."

"If I were king or president... of a section of, say, America, I would want to pattern everything based on God's word, because God's law is perfect."

"If indeed adulterers were executed, very quickly society would be much more calm, and I'm not saying we should do it, but I'm just saying we should look at the biblical pattern."

"I think there is something in the genetic code that deals with the disposition towards gentleness or meanness, and I think in God's perfect law, if we would continually eliminate, execute people that do these certain crimes, we would gradually get a much better society that... not so many people have this "mean gene" in them."

"According to the Bible, murder should be punished by death. Killing your father or mother (Exodus 21:15), that's punishable by death. Kidnapping (Exodus 21:16) is punishable by death. Cursing your father or mother, verse 17, punishable by death. Causing someone to have an abortion, in verse 22 and 23 of that chapter, is punishable by death. If you kick a pregnant woman and the baby dies, you have to be killed. Vehicular homicide... if your ox kills somebody else, then you are responsible, especially if you were warned and didn't keep it in. I think the Bible would offer the pattern that... we should make our laws by, so to me, that would easily translate into something related to [vehicular homicide]... If you with your car kill somebody, you are responsible, so that would be similar to the ox goring somebody after you have been warned. So I would look at verse 28-29 as something where we could model some laws on vehicular homicide."

"Noah set up a system of government where if somebody kills somebody, y'all get together and kill him. That's perfectly fine, it's just, it's right."

"The biblical system of punishment is just perfect. It's perfect and we are doing nothing similar to the biblical system."

"Penicillin has two chromosomes."

"When they burn forests, all the CO2 is released, and trees next door grow faster. So it doesn't create an environmental crisis like they want you to believe."

"We cannot be too gentle, too kind. Shun even to appear harsh in your treatment of each other. Joy, radiant joy, streams from the face of one who gives and kindles joy in the heart of one who receives. All condemnation is from the devil. Never condemn each other, not even those whom you catch committing an evil deed. We condemn others only because we shun knowing ourselves. When we gaze at our own failings, we see such a morass of filth that nothing in another can equal it. That is why we turn away, and make much of the faults of others. Keep away from the spilling of speech. Instead of condemning others, strive to reach inner peace. Keep silent, refrain from judgement. This will raise you above the deadly arrows of slander, insult, outrage, and will shield your glowing hearts against the evil that creeps around."

"Acquire a peaceful spirit and then thousands of others around you will be saved."

"the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak (which is like Luther's translation of Mathew 26,41: der Geist ist willig, aber das Fleisch ist schwach; Wyclif for example translated it with: for the spirit is ready, but the flesh is sick.)"

"fight the good fight"

"live and move and have our being"

"gave up the ghost"

"it came to pass"

"filthy lucre"

"the salt of the earth"

"my brother's keeper"

"the powers that be"

"let there be light"

"the word of God which liveth and lasteth forever"

"judge not that you not be judged"

"ask and it shall be given you"

"eat, drink and be merry"

"seek and you shall find"

"fashion not yourselves to the world"

"a moment in time"

"twinkling of an eye"

"knock and it shall be opened unto you"

"lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil"

"By sanctifying cruelty, early Christianity set a precedent for more than a millennium of systematic torture in Christian Europe. If you understand the expressions to burn at the stake, to hold his feet to the fire, to break a butterfly on the wheel, to be racked with pain, to be drawn and quartered, to disembowel, to flay, to press, the thumbscrew, the garrote, a slow burn, and the iron maiden (a hollow hinged statue lined with nails, later taken as the name of a heavy-metal rock band), you are familiar with a fraction of the ways that heretics were brutalized during the Middle Ages and early modern period. During the Spanish Inquisition, church officials concluded that the conversions of thousands of former Jews didn’t take. To compel the conversos to confess their hidden apostasy, the inquisitors tied their arms behind their backs, hoisted them by their wrists, and dropped them in a series of violent jerks, rupturing their tendons and pulling their arms out of their sockets. Many others were burned alive, a fate that also befell Michael Servetus for questioning the trinity, Giordano Bruno for believing (among other things) that the earth went around the sun, and William Tyndale for translating the Bible into English. Galileo, perhaps the most famous victim of the Inquisition, got off easy: he was only shown the instruments of torture (in particular, the rack) and was given the opportunity to recant for “having held and believed that the sun is the center of the world and immovable, and that the earth is not the center and moves.”"

"[H]is writing is the bedrock of English language and literature... Tyndale's best memorial is that whenever anyone writes or speaks well in English, she or he echoes the simple but majestic rhythms that Tyndale introduced. He showed that plain English was a mighty tongue. His voice is the forgotten ghost in the language... Tyndale had the revolutionary idea that the English of ordinary folk could be the finest literary language in the world. He was a passionate populist and democrat, as well as a rich scholar... [H]is words are blood and bone of the English language."

"For this book is for me and all kings to read."

"Most important was Tyndale's Bible translation...which gave currency to Erasmian and Lutheran revisions of such crucial established concepts as ecclesia (church or congregation?) and presbyter (priest or elder?), and which was accompanied by powerfully reformist prefaces and prologues. Tunstall's attempt to stamp out this dangerous New Testament had greatly amused the reformers who financed further operations out of the money the bishop paid over in buying up the offending edition. In 1528 Tyndale also entered the lists as a theorist of politics when in his Obedience of a Christian Man he elaborated Luther's teaching on the subject's duty of submission to his secular ruler in ways highly satisfactory to Henry who read the book with pleasure; next year, however, Tyndale cast himself into outer darkness again by violently attacking the Divorce in a work, The Practice of Prelates, mainly concerned to blast Wolsey and the English hierarchy in general."

"Tyndale was more than a mildly theological thinker. He is at last being understood as, theologically as well as linguistically, well ahead of his time. For him, as several decades later for Calvin... and in the 20th century Karl Barth) the overriding message of the New Testament is the sovereignty of God. Everything is contained in that. It must never, as he wrote, be lost from sight... Tyndale, we are now being shown, was original and new — except that he was also old, demonstrating the understanding of God as revealed in the whole New Testament. For Tyndale, God is, above all, sovereign, active in the individual and in history. He is the one as he put it, in whom alone is found salvation and flourishing."

"These opening chapters of Genesis are the first translations — not just the first printed, but the first translations — from Hebrew into English. This needs to be emphasized. Not only was the Hebrew language only known in England in 1529 and 1530 by, at the most, a tiny handful of scholars in Oxford and Cambridge, and quite possibly by none; that there was a language called Hebrew at all, or that it had any connection whatsoever with the Bible, would have been news to most of the ordinary population."

"William Tyndale gave us our English Bible. The sages assembled by King James to prepare the Authorised Version of 1611...took over Tyndale's work. Nine-tenths of the Authorised Version's New Testament is Tyndale's. The same is true of the first half of the Old Testament... William Tyndale was a most remarkable scholar and linguist, whose eight languages included skill in Greek and Hebrew far above the ordinary for an Englishman of the time... His unsurpassed ability was to work as a translator with the sounds and rhythms as well as the senses of English, to create unforgettable words, phrases, paragraphs and chapters, and to do so in a way that, again unusually for the time, is still, even today, direct and living: newspaper headlines still quote Tyndale, though unknowingly, and he has reached more people than even Shakespeare."

"Tyndall (who assuredlie sheweth himself in myn opynyon rather to be replete with venymous envye rancour and malice then with any good lerning vertue knowlage or discression)."

"[N]ow everyone learned what those specialists had always known: that for those parts of the Bible which Tyndale translated, the whole of the New Testament and much of the Old Testament, more than eighty per cent of the words in what we call the Authorised Version of 1611 are his. Such altogether memorable passages as the account of the Nativity in Matthew ('shepherds abiding in the fields keeping watch over their flocks by night'), and the story of the Prodigal Son in Luke ('father, I have sinned against Heaven, and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son') are wholly his. It was Tyndale who gave us 'the burden and heat of the day', 'filthy lucre', 'God forbid', 'the salt of the earth', 'the powers that be', 'eat, drink and be merry'. The list is endless. What is extraordinary is that Tyndale's English is actually a more English English, more demotic in its language and tone, than the version of 1611 of three generations later, where a committee has smoothed over many rough edges and produced something more stately, more ecclesiastical, safer."

"Tyndale, coming out of the remote Forest of Dean, hard by the Welsh border, somehow or other (and it remains a mystery to me how he did it, but it was an achievement comparable to Martin Luther's, in his German Bible) fashioned, in the pages of his New Testament, the English which we still speak and write; an English employing a vocabulary which if not at first universally understood and assimilated soon was; an English partly derived from the word order and sentence structure of the Greek and especially of the Hebrew biblical texts in which Tyndale, a remarkable and precocious classical philologist, was thoroughly proficient. Tyndale had an intuitive and strong sense of the affinity of English with these ancient tongues, an affinity which he believed was not to be found in the Latin language and in the Latin Bible."

"Tyndale founded English Puritanism as the theological, religious, and moral system that univocally regarded scripture as God's law for everyman, binding everyman and God together in a contract that enjoined and rewarded strict morality."

"Except for Geoffrey Chaucer I would think someone who comes closest to being authentically of Shakespeare's greatness, that is William Tyndale...who is the principal translator of [the King James Bible] ... I am not quite sure that I would agree that even Shakespeare could write more powerfully than William Tyndale in Tyndale's Bible, in his version of the story of Joseph. Unfortunately it vanishes in King James even though they use so much of Tyndale. There is a wonderful sentence, "And the Lord was with Joseph and he was a lucky fellow", which is superb and worthy of Shakespeare."

"Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God."

"Fight the good fight."

"Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and yet had no love I were even as the sounding brass or as a tinkling cymbal."