Tony Campolo Quotes

#1. Most of us are tiptoeing through life so we can reach death safely. We should be praying, "If I should wake before I die ... " Life can get away from you.

Tony Campolo

#2. 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?

Tony Campolo

#3. There are reasons why Religious Right Evangelicals will continue to dominate religious discourse, not only in their own sector of the Christian community, but also in what transpires in mainline denominations.

Tony Campolo

#4. Because of the increase in life longevity, America can now assume that at any given time three, and perhaps four, former presidents will still be alive, even when the current president is occupying the White House.

Tony Campolo

#5. I, for one, am quite willing to join the 'forgive, forget and move on' crowd, but it does make me wonder if Evangelicals are going to sound believable when they say that they tend to vote Republican because of their religious commitments to the family.

Tony Campolo

#6. 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.

Tony Campolo

#7. I'm a minister, and I serve as a minister in addition to being a university professor.

Tony Campolo

#8. The two hot issues are the gay issue and the abortion issue. These are the two defining issues in the evangelical community these days. I'm sure that these hot buttons will be pushed, time and time again.

Tony Campolo

#9. Today, some of the most spiritual people I know claim to be without religion.

Tony Campolo

#10. Although I believe that scripture is divinely inspired and infallible, I have a hard time going along with the belief that the whole creation process occurred in six twenty-four hour days.

Tony Campolo

#11. I contend that Bush would be a lot more moderate if there weren't some fundamentalists breathing down his neck every time he wants to establish the state of Israel, every time he wants to do justice for the Palestinian people.

Tony Campolo

#12. Marriage should be viewed as an institution ordained by God and should be out of the control of the state.

Tony Campolo

#13. Insofar as the church fails to do the will of God, I am called upon to help it discover and to do the will of God; and I am called upon to help the government to do the same.

Tony Campolo

#14. So I really would like to see both parties respond to the poor with greater commitment. But I've got to tell you, the Democrats, I feel, are doing a better job in that respect than Republicans are.

Tony Campolo

#15. I'm not denying that depression can be spiritually induced. Guilt from having wronged and hurt others can bring it on. A sense of having failed to live out the will of God can give rise to depression. Certainly the fear of death and what might follow can sap the joy out of life.

Tony Campolo

#16. 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.

Tony Campolo

#17. I don't know of many evangelicals who want to deny gay couples their legal rights. However, most of us don't want to call it marriage, because we think that word has religious connotations, and we're not ready to see it used in ways that offend us.

Tony Campolo

#18. Perhaps because our culture and politics have gone so off course, with values so contrary to those of Jesus, more and more people intuitively recognize that His vision of God's kingdom-a new world of compassion, justice, integrity and peace- is the Good News they've been searching and waiting for.

Tony Campolo

#19. What I am trying to say is that Jesus who incarnated God 2,000 years ago is mystically present and waiting to be discovered in EVERY person you and I encounter

Tony Campolo

#20. It has taken countless hours of prayer, study, conversation and emotional turmoil to bring me to the place where I am finally ready to call for the full acceptance of Christian gay couples into the Church.

Tony Campolo

#21. 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.

Tony Campolo

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

Tony Campolo

#23. Evangelical Christians, who once were a ridiculed irrelevant sectarian movement, have, over just three decades, become a powerful voting bloc that can no longer be ignored.

Tony Campolo

#24. Anyone who resists the notion of women preachers is functioning as a tool of the devil.

Tony Campolo

#25. Even if there were no heaven and there were no hell, would you still follow Jesus? Would you follow him for the life, joy and fulfilment he gives you right now?

Tony Campolo

#26. 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.

Tony Campolo

#27. From the beginning, there have been some religious leaders who greeted the funding of faith-based social services by government with ambivalence.

Tony Campolo

#28. So after the Lewinsky scandal, everything changed, and we moved from using the Bible to address the moral issues of our time, which were social, to moral issues of our time that were very personal. I have continued that relationship up until the present.

Tony Campolo

#29. The Jesus of the Scripture transcends all nations and calls all nations into judgment.

Tony Campolo

#30. What if Barack Obama established a Presidential Advisory Committee that would meet once every couple of months, bringing together the former presidents for a conference in order to seek their collective wisdom? There is a wealth of experience in former presidents that generally goes untapped.

Tony Campolo

#31. To prevent discussion of any other explanations of human origins is hardly what I would expect from open-minded educators.

Tony Campolo

#32. A Christian school should be a place where young men and young women go through a period of spiritual formation and development so that they come out incredibly more proficient at living out their calling than they would have been had they not gone to school.

Tony Campolo

#33. 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.

Tony Campolo

#34. In religious circles, depression is often deemed to be a spiritual condition that can be cured with prayer.

Tony Campolo

#35. I don't think that John Kerry is the Messiah or the Democratic Party is the answer, but I don't like the evangelical community blessing the Republican Party as some kind of God-ordained instrument for solving the world's problems.

Tony Campolo

#36. Clinton's successor in the White House, George W. Bush, was committed to expanding government spending for faith-based initiatives.

Tony Campolo

#37. In baptism, new Christians become part of a body of fellow believers who are called to spiritually encourage one another and hold one another responsible for consistent Christian living.

Tony Campolo

#38. Most Evangelicals claim to be politically non-partisan, and say they only identify with the Republican Party because the Republicans are committed to 'family values.'

Tony Campolo

#39. I think the real place where most evangelicals have trouble with the Democratic Party is on the issue of abortion.

Tony Campolo

#40. The reason why I buy into the Democratic Party more than the Republican Party is because there are over 2,000 verses of Scripture that deal with responding to the needs of the poor.

Tony Campolo

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

Tony Campolo

#42. But I think it's up to a local congregation to determine whether or not a marriage should be blessed of God. And it shouldn't be up to the government.

Tony Campolo

#43. While I can see how the government has, at times, wasted taxpayers' money, and I can admit that too often its programs are ineffective, I also can see the good that government does.

Tony Campolo

#44. When you listen to Christian radio stations - and there are thousands of them now in the United States - and when you listen to Christian television networks - and there are thousands of Christian television shows across the country - they are all politically right.

Tony Campolo

#45. I think the time has come for the United States to do even-handed justice.

Tony Campolo

#46. President Bush once said that marriage is a sacred institution and should be reserved for the union of one man and one woman. If this is the case - and most Americans would agree with him on this - then I have to ask: Why is the government at all involved in marrying people?

Tony Campolo

#47. If America is too arrogant, too prideful to repent, it's not the kind of country that God wants it to be.

Tony Campolo

#48. A strong case can be made for religious leaders to speak out on political issues.

Tony Campolo

#49. I contend the state ought to do its thing and provide legal rights for all couples who want to be joined together for life. The church should bless unions that it sees fit to bless, and they should be called marriages.

Tony Campolo

#50. Don't be satisfied with just pumping blood.

Tony Campolo

#51. It has been said that people never do evil with more enthusiasm than when they do it in the name of God.

Tony Campolo

#52. It's a new day for the Democrats when it comes to matters of faith, and the younger Evangelicals are aware of this and many of them are moving into the Democratic camp.

Tony Campolo

#53. In our post-Freudian world, it is no longer a goal to become people of character who live out a God-ordained ideal of selfhood.

Tony Campolo

#54. My task as a citizen is to get the government to do more good and less inefficient and wasteful work.

Tony Campolo

#55. An evangelical is somebody who, first of all, has a very high view of Scripture, believes it's an infallible message from God.

Tony Campolo

#56. When there is conflict between what God requires and the demands of the government, each of us has an important decision to make concerning taxes.

Tony Campolo

#57. My theology is such that the God who loves Israel and will not forsake Israel - which is why I want to see Israel have a secure nation with secure borders - also loves the Palestinians.

Tony Campolo

#58. Grandchildren are God's reward for not killing your kids.

Tony Campolo

#59. I do not mean that others represent Jesus for us. I mean that Jesus actually is present in each other person

Tony Campolo

#60. A career public speaker is not what I'm called to be. I'm called to be a critic.

Tony Campolo

#61. 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?

Tony Campolo

#62. Whenever there is a catastrophe, some religious people inevitably ask, 'Why didn't God do something? Where was God when all those people died?'

Tony Campolo

#63. If a guy is intimidated by a woman in leadership, he has real problems with his own concepts of masculinity. That's a harsh statement, but I believe it to be true.

Tony Campolo

#64. Protestants so often confuse being Republican with being Christian.

Tony Campolo

#65. And we've got to ask ourselves some very serious questions as to whether or not certain religious leaders, in terms of raising money - I hate to bring this up - are pushing hot buttons.

Tony Campolo

#66. When leading evangelicals say terrible things about Islam, evil things about Islam, terrible things about Muhammad, they ought to be ashamed of themselves.

Tony Campolo

#67. 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.

Tony Campolo

#68. Rise up, you suckers, and go out and do the work of Jesus!

Tony Campolo

#69. 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.

Tony Campolo

#70. Certain things happened in the early church. Women who had never had any freedom suddenly have the ability to stand up and speak and be treated as equals within the life of the church.

Tony Campolo

#71. I don't know what to make of the Muslim mystics, especially those who have come to be known as the Sufis. What do they experience in their mystic experiences? Could they have encountered the same God we do in our Christian mysticism?

Tony Campolo

#72. One of the problems with evangelicalism is that it has allowed itself to be married to the Republican party ... Jesus is not a Republican. Nor is he a Democrat.

Tony Campolo

#73. Women have the same privileges and opportunities as men, given the New Testament. Relegating women to second-class citizenship was abolished when Jesus died on the cross.

Tony Campolo

#74. Most of my fundamentalist brothers and sisters - and I am an evangelical, so I can say most of my fundamentalist brothers and sisters - are quite willing to pack women off and send them as missionaries to dangerous places where they might get killed.

Tony Campolo

#75. I am looking for suggestions on what we can do about extremists within our own society. They cannot be ignored.

Tony Campolo

#76. We ought to get out of the judging business. We should leave it up to God to determine who belongs in one arena or another when it comes to eternity. What we are obligated to do is to tell people about Jesus, and that's what I do.

Tony Campolo

#77. I don't doubt that God can bring good out of tragedies, but the Bible is clear that God is not the author of evil!

Tony Campolo

#78. 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.

Tony Campolo

#79. I am relatively sure, from conversations that I had with former president Bill Clinton, that George Bush seldom called upon him for advice.

Tony Campolo

#80. I applaud the growing commitment of Evangelicals to the needs of the poor and oppressed in urban America.

Tony Campolo

#81. Prior to ROE V. WADE, abortions were common even though they were illegal. I don't think making them illegal again is going to solve the problem.

Tony Campolo

#82. Christianity isn't the only group that has fundamentalists.

Tony Campolo

#83. In America, evangelical churches have often been bastions of conservatism, providing support for the status quo.

Tony Campolo

#84. But isn't it time for Christians to admit that we should reject bargains if they are gained by the exploitation of the poorest of the poor in developing countries?

Tony Campolo

#85. When you talk about evangelicals, don't forget that a significant proportion of the evangelical community is African American. And most African Americans - well over 90 percent, thoroughly evangelical, thoroughly biblical - will probably vote Democratic.

Tony Campolo

#86. 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.

Tony Campolo

#87. Perhaps we would do well to listen to the likes of Rabbi Harold Kushner, who contends that God is not really as powerful as we have claimed.

Tony Campolo

#88. But I contend that if we're providing total medical coverage for every man, woman, and child in Iraq, shouldn't we at least be doing the same thing for every man, woman, and child in the United States?

Tony Campolo

#89. Lies and distortions can be spread, via the Internet, in an inexpensive way, and the effects are astounding.

Tony Campolo

#90. That a new humanity will be brought forth from this Christ consciousness in each person.

Tony Campolo

#91. The kingdom of God is a glorious and gigantic party!

Tony Campolo

#92. Religion, for better or for worse, has been politicized in blatant ways that have seldom been equaled in American elections.

Tony Campolo

#93. If four years of university can increase your effectiveness of what you can do for others in the name of Christ, it is the best investment that you can make. But if the education is simply to get a job to make a lot of money, you have to raise the question of why you're doing it.

Tony Campolo

#94. I contend that, in spite of all that might be said about Watergate, Richard Nixon was good for the poor people of America.

Tony Campolo

#95. Nowhere in the Hebrew Scriptures does it say that God is omnipotent.

Tony Campolo

#96. Haitians do not need development programs imposed on them by expatriates. Instead, they need help in developing as self-assured persons.

Tony Campolo

#97. We must not be so concerned with the unborn that we fail to pay attention to the born.

Tony Campolo

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

Tony Campolo

#99. I think there are other issues that the Democrats could use to rally evangelicals. There are a lot of us, for instance, who believe that the Bible calls us to be environmentally responsible.

Tony Campolo

#100. While a case can be made for intelligent design, I can't figure out why some Christians are so thrilled about that possibility. First of all, it doesn't prove there's a God. If anything, intelligent design lends support to some form of pantheism that defines God as immanent within nature.

Tony Campolo