Top 100 Campolo Quotes
#1. Tony Campolo and I both speak a lot, and we began to notice that there were some crowds of old folks that desperately needed some youthful energy, and there were other crowds of young folks that desperately needed some aged wisdom.
Shane Claiborne
#2. Whenever folks say radical Christianity is "a phase" of youth, I tell them they need to meet our 80-year-old nun or my friend Tony Campolo.
Shane Claiborne
#3. It has been said that people never do evil with more enthusiasm than when they do it in the name of God.
Tony Campolo
#4. In religious circles, depression is often deemed to be a spiritual condition that can be cured with prayer.
Tony Campolo
#5. Through the ages, God has used the church to keep alive and pass down the story of what Christ has done for us.
Tony Campolo
#6. Don't be satisfied with just pumping blood.
Tony Campolo
#7. 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
#8. A strong case can be made for religious leaders to speak out on political issues.
Tony Campolo
#9. If America is too arrogant, too prideful to repent, it's not the kind of country that God wants it to be.
Tony Campolo
#10. 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
#11. I think the time has come for the United States to do even-handed justice.
Tony Campolo
#13. 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
#14. Let us preach Christ, let us be faithful to proclaiming the Gospel, but let's leave judgment in the hands of God.
Tony Campolo
#15. 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
#16. I've always been skeptical of those television healers who are bald. If I had that gift, that'd be the first thing I'd fix.
Tony Campolo
#17. 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
#18. Your past is important, but it is not nearly as important to your present as the way you see your future.
Tony Campolo
#19. Artists are the best theologians. They feel things that are true before theologians can jargonize them into obscurity.
Tony Campolo
#20. 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
#21. I think the real place where most evangelicals have trouble with the Democratic Party is on the issue of abortion.
Tony Campolo
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. Clinton's successor in the White House, George W. Bush, was committed to expanding government spending for faith-based initiatives.
Tony Campolo
#25. 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.
Tony Campolo
#26. 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
#27. Like most Christians, I believe the Genesis account of creation is a description of six different stages of creation, each of which may have taken eons of time.
Tony Campolo
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. Rise up, you suckers, and go out and do the work of Jesus!
Tony Campolo
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. Protestants so often confuse being Republican with being Christian.
Tony Campolo
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. A career public speaker is not what I'm called to be. I'm called to be a critic.
Tony Campolo
#43. I do not mean that others represent Jesus for us. I mean that Jesus actually is present in each other person
Tony Campolo
#44. Grandchildren are God's reward for not killing your kids.
Tony Campolo
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. Most Evangelicals have the church to thank for the Sunday-school classes that taught us what the Bible says and paved the way for our eventual decisions to commit our lives to Christ.
Tony Campolo
#48. I read the Bible, I speak through issues, I see what I think is hypocrisy in the church and things that are wrong, and I speak to these things. But I could be wrong.
Tony Campolo
#49. 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
#50. My task as a citizen is to get the government to do more good and less inefficient and wasteful work.
Tony Campolo
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. Marriage should be viewed as an institution ordained by God and should be out of the control of the state.
Tony Campolo
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. Today, some of the most spiritual people I know claim to be without religion.
Tony Campolo
#61. Sigmund Freud was the apostle of disbelief. He was the one who made psychoanalysis a part of our culture, and in so doing he kicked out a flying buttress that had been essential for holding up our cathedral of faith.
Tony Campolo
#62. 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
#63. I think it goes back to the fact that the evangelical community often does not have a biblical vision of God.
Tony Campolo
#64. I'm a minister, and I serve as a minister in addition to being a university professor.
Tony Campolo
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. I contend that it's impossible to read the Sermon on the Mount and not come out against capital punishment.
Tony Campolo
#69. 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
#70. I teach at Eastern University, which is highly committed to doing work among the poor and the oppressed peoples of the world. We have a special commitment to the city.
Tony Campolo
#71. Our call is to be God's agents, to rescue not only the human race but the whole of creation.
Tony Campolo
#72. In the past, the Republican Party has depended on unified support at election time from Evangelical Christians. But times are changing!
Tony Campolo
#73. 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
#74. 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.
Tony Campolo
#75. 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
#76. There is a gift of the Holy Spirit that is given to both men and women in the New Testament. This is what makes the New Testament a New Testament rather than the Old Testament, in which women did not have such privileges.
Tony Campolo
#77. I propose that the government should get out of the business of marrying people and, instead, only give legal status to civil unions.
Tony Campolo
#78. Who's to say that there is any more support for Freud's psychoanalytic concept of the superego than there is for that old time religion that asserted that there is a God who ordains what is right and wrong, and that His righteousness endures for all generations?
Tony Campolo
#79. 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
#80. To prevent discussion of any other explanations of human origins is hardly what I would expect from open-minded educators.
Tony Campolo
#81. 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
#82. That's what they do in Europe. You go down to the city hall and you become legally connected. You have a civil union there. Then, if you're religious, you go down to the church, and the church blesses the union. That gets the problem solved.
Tony Campolo
#83. Evangelicals need to take a good look at what their issues are. Are they really being faithful to Jesus? Are they being faithful to the Bible?
Tony Campolo
#84. The Jesus of the Scripture transcends all nations and calls all nations into judgment.
Tony Campolo
#85. 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
#86. From the beginning, there have been some religious leaders who greeted the funding of faith-based social services by government with ambivalence.
Tony Campolo
#87. 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
#88. Young Evangelicals, especially, are breaking ranks with older Evangelicals (over 40) and are more and more leaning towards voting Democratic.
Tony Campolo
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. Rituals keep us from forgetting what must not be forgotten and keep us rooted in a past from which we must not be disconnected.
Tony Campolo
#92. Anyone who resists the notion of women preachers is functioning as a tool of the devil.
Tony Campolo
#93. The first reason for the preponderant influence of those Evangelicals who define themselves as advocates of Religious Right theological and political ideologies is that they have both the financial means and technological know-how to make widespread use of modern electronic forms of communication.
Tony Campolo
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. I am not suggesting that all those missionary organizations working in Haiti should pack up and go home, but I am urging them to understand that Haiti does not need clever Americans with newly contrived schemes for saving their country.
Tony Campolo
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
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