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“If tribulation is a necessary element in the redemption we must anticipate that it will never cease till God sees the world to be either redeemed or no further redeemable. A Christian cannot, therefore, believe any of those who promise that if only some reform in our economic, political, or hygienic system were made, a heaven on earth would follow. This might seem to have a discouraging effect on the social worker, but it is not found in practice to discourage him. On the contrary, a strong sense of our common miseries, simply as men, is at least as good a spur to the removal of all the miseries we can, as any of those wild hopes which tempt men to seek their realisation by breaking the moral law and prove such dust and ashes when they are realised. If applied to individual life, the doctrine that an imagined heaven on earth as necessary for vigorous attempts to remove present evil, would at once reveal its absurdity. Hungry men seek food and sick men healing none the less because they know that after the meal or the cure the ordinary ups and downs of life still await them.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

“Every true work is not done to the poor. Every true work is done to Me.”
― Watchman Nee, The Normal Christian Life

“the problem of life was as simple as it was classic. Politics offered no difficulties, for there the moral law was a sure guide. Social perfection was also sure, because human nature worked for Good, and three instruments were all she asked â€� Suffrage, Common Schools, and Press. On these points doubt was forbidden. Education was divine, and man needed only a correct knowledge of facts to reach perfection:

"Were half the power that fills the world with terror, Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts, Given to redeem the human mind from error, There were no need of arsenals nor forts.”
― Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

“Judas became the spokesman of all those who through the centuries would protest the ornamentation of the Christian cult and would feel that, when the best of gold and jewels were given to the God Who made them, there was some slight made to the poor - not because they were interested in the poor, but because they were envious of that wealth.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Life of Christ

“Christian hope frees us to act hopefully in the world. It enables us to act humbly and patiently, tackling visible injustices in the world around us without needing to be assured that our skill and our effort will somehow rid the world of injustice altogether. Christian hope, after all, does not need to see what it hopes for (Heb. 11:1); and neither does it require us to comprehend the end of history. Rather, it simply requires us to trust that even the most outwardly insignificant of faithful actions - the cup of cold water given to the child, the widow's mite offered at the temple, the act of hospitality shown to the stranger, none of which has any overall strategic socio-political significance so far as we can now see - will nevertheless be made to contribute in some significant way to the construction of God's kingdom by the action of God's creative and sovereign grace.”
― Craig M. Gay, The Way of the (Modern) World: Or, Why It's Tempting to Live As If God Doesn't Exist

“The Church risks irrelevance when it makes central God's preference for the poor and not His universal favor toward the poor in spirit.”
― gilbert mylender

“My business is anything that comes between men and the Spirit of God.”
― Richard Llewellyn, How Green Was My Valley

“Absolute excellence is rarely to be found in any legislation.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

“There is no doubt that the biblical concept of the Kingdom calls for a ministry to the suffering, the imprisoned, the oppressed, the hungry and whomever is dehumanized by an unjust society. In abstract, almost all of us can affirm this with enthusiasm. When it is the vocation, however, of one of our number to make this Gospel imperative, a matter demanding and requiring us to change our comfortable ways, then many of us fall away. The prophet has never been popular among his other contemporaries. He has been stoned, beheaded, crucified and shot. If not killed, we have been all too ready to vilify him or her in the name of God, little realizing that it may well be God who sent the prophet to challenge our complacency.”
― Urban Tigner Holmes, What Is Anglicanism?

“When religion becomes so involved in a future good "over yonder" that it forgets the present evils over here it is as dry as dust religion and needs to be condemned.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“The Pharisees had an ethic of avoidance, and Jesus had an ethic of involvement.”
― Mark Buchanan, Your God Is Too Safe: Rediscovering the Wonder of a God You Can't Control

“I have no interest in eliminating the tension between justice and forgiveness by taking justice off the table. Given the subtleties of sin and the persistence of evil, we would soon be living in moral anarchy and political chaos if there were no provision for justice.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Tell It Slant: A Conversation on the Language of Jesus in His Stories and Prayers

“In a few years all our restless and angry hearts will be quiet in death, but those who come after us will live in the world which our sins have blighted or which our love of right has redeemed.”
― Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis

“Thus when people object, as they do, to me and others pointing out that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer—by commenting that wealth is not finite, that statist and globalist solutions and handouts will merely strip the poor of their human dignity and vocation to work, and that all this will encourage the poor toward a sinful envy of the rich, a slothful escapism, and a counterproductive reliance on Caesar rather than God—I want to take such commentators to refugee camps, to villages where children die every day, to towns where most adults have already died of AIDS, and show them people who haven't got the energy to be envious, who aren't slothful because they are using all the energy they've got to wait in line for water and to care for each other, who know perfectly well that they don't need handouts so much as justice. I know, and such people often know in their bones, that wealth isn't a zero-sum game, but reading the collected works of F. A. Hayek in a comfortable chair in North America simply doesn't address the moral questions of the twenty-first century.”
― N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church

“New converts displayed a most un-Roman concern for the sick man.”
― John Pollock, The Apostle: The Life of Paul

“Can we really fix ourselves? Can we really see what needs to be seen and do what needs to be done? Tolstoy suggests we can, even though the road will be long and arduous. He is Orthodox enough to see that humans are sinners in need of mercy, but not Orthodox enough to get to the root of the problem. The prophet does not plunge deeply enough into the human heart. Tolstoy was Christian enough to see that evil exists but not Orthodox enough to get to the root of the problem.”
― John Mark Reynolds, The Great Books Reader: Excerpts and Essays on the Most Influential Books in Western Civilization

“The least of the muscular Christians has hold of the old chivalrous and Christian belief, that a man's body is given him to be trained and brought into subjection, and then used for the protection of the weak, the advancement of all righteous causes, and the subduing of the earth which God has given to the children of men. He does not hold that mere strength or activity are in themselves worthy of any respect or worship, or that one man is a bit better than another because he can knock him down, or carry a bigger sack of potatoes than he.”
― Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown at Oxford

“Some parents live more like reclusive monks than like first-century Christians who were famous for their love for and service within their cities, cities that in many cases were more overtly wicked than cities found in modern-day America.”
― Elyse M. Fitzpatrick, Give Them Grace: Dazzling Your Kids with the Love of Jesus

“There is no separation between the gospel and culture, between how we live in society and how we live in our private lives, between the lordship of Jesus inside the four walls of a church building and outside that building.”
― Michael Brown

“Marxian thought, King argued, should challenge Christians to express their own "passion and concern for social justice".”
― Troy Jackson, Becoming King: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Making of a National Leader

“So much of the time it is not complacency that threatens but its opposite, impetuosity. We see something that is wrong, whether in the world or in the church, and we fly into action, righting the wrong, confronting sin and wickedness, battling the enemy, and then we go out vigorously recruiting "Christian soldiers".”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Tell It Slant: A Conversation on the Language of Jesus in His Stories and Prayers

“There is no such thing as a “social gospel.â€� It is a misnomer. There is only one Gospel. “If any man preach any other gospel unto you . . .
let him be accursedâ€� [Galatians 1:9 KJV].”
― Billy Graham, Billy graham in quotes

“God might choose his own time, but Reagan had a taste for coming to the rescue.”
― Rick Perlstein, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan

“He is blunt in his moral assessment, brandishing a word that he says has gone missing in the broader poverty debate: “exploitation.”
― Jennifer Schuessler

“Poverty is not just a sad accident. Yes, it’s partly about lack of jobs, “but it’s also a result of the fact that some people make a lot of money off low-income families and directly contribute to their poverty.â€� Matthew Desmond”
― Jennifer Schuessler

“One writer may speak of something more lasting than Horace Greeley when he writes of that editor that his secular philanthropy drifted into autocratic ambition.”
― Harold Holzer, Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion

“Any gospel which does not embrace both 'evangelism' and 'social action' is a counterfeit, offering either an escapist's dream, which leaves power structures of the world untouched, or a mere social reform which leaves the soaring spiritual dimension of reality out of consideration, and thereby dooms itself to compromise and failure.”
― N.T. Wright, Spiritual and Religious

“I didn’t confront the Dominionists directly, instead choosing to minister to the sick and hungry New Orleanians who arrived in DeQuincy in Katrina’s wake. But inside, I fumed at the Dominionist faction at Grace. Katrina was not about God’s judgment; it was about a storm that started as a low-pressure zone that slowly, dangerously grew into a tropical wave of low pressure. Katrina had a natural cause, not a supernatural cause. What flooded New Orleans and sent its citizenry into exile was not, as the Dominionists at Grace argued, God running spiritually corrupt, lost souls out of town but rather a catastrophically flawed levee system constructed by human hands. Besides, I believed that what we did to help those affected by the storm—not why the storm or its destruction happened—was what mattered. My Katrina-era messages were just blandly positive—I preached that the storm was a moment to prove to God just how loving we could be to one another—but the Dominionists at Grace were furious nonetheless. “Are you really saying,â€� they chided me after Sunday services, “that it doesn’t matter how people in New Orleans live? That they can be saved if they’re alcoholics?â€� I was unflinching in my answer. “Yes, â€� I replied sternly, “that’s exactly what I’m saying.â€� The Dominionists simply shook their heads in disgust at my apostasy.”
― Jerry DeWitt, Hope after Faith: An Ex-Pastor's Journey from Belief to Atheism