Francis Spufford Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

“For a believer, Christian faith is true to the human heart, not in the sense that any old thing we fancy believing in will become conveniently true - but because the complicated truth about our hearts, as we struggle to perceive it, tells us what we are and where we are, and consequently what we need.”

“I think I have made allowances for the kind of despair which would test my faith, but you cannot know in advance what disaster to those you love would be too much to bear faithfully, and like everyone's, my faith is weakly conditional in some ways. I hope, I pray not to lose it. My fingers are crossed. Also my heart.”

“What we need in Europe is to push back against the idea that religion is so farfetched that it's not worth talking about.”

“Christianity is a religion of continuity and discontinuity as well. It's about what stays the same and what changes in the twinkling of an eye. Both are necessary truths, but sometimes it's important to accentuate the discontinuity, the sudden leap, the way you go up a tree, Zacchaeus, and come down a saint.”

“I want to know why I read as a child with such a frantic appetite, why I sucked the words off the page with such an edge of desperation.”

“I was never argued out of faith; it was much more passive than that - and I wasn't argued back in, either.”

“It's always struck me as unfair that writing has so little sensation when it's going well.”

“Despite the best efforts of apologists like William Lane Craig, the 'evidence' for Christianity's truth is, in truth, not the kind that science will or should ever admit. We believers mean something different by the word: something that puts faith permanently in the category of irreproducible results.”

“I am a fairly orthodox Christian. Every Sunday, I say and do my best to mean the whole of the Creed, which is a series of propositions. But it is still a mistake to suppose that it is assent to the propositions that makes you a believer. It is the feelings that are primary.”

“The emotions that sustain religious belief are all, in fact, deeply ordinary and deeply recognisable to anybody who has ever made their way across the common ground of human experience as an adult.”