Top 35 Gregory A. Boyd Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Adolf Hitler is simply the dark-side of Mother Teresa.”

— Gregory A. Boyd

2. “Our central job is not to solve the world’s problems. Our job is to draw our entire life from Christ and manifest that life to others. Nothing could be simpler – and nothing could be more challenging.”

— Gregory A. Boyd

3. “Jesus came to establish the kingdom of God as a radical alternative to all versions of the kingdom of the world, whether they declare themselves to be “under God” or not.”

— Gregory A. Boyd

4. “When followers of Jesus aren’t careful to clearly distinguish the Kingdom from their own nation, we easily end up Christianizing aspects of our national culture we ought to be revolting against.”

— Gregory A. Boyd

5. “With reckless abandon, therefore, we are to manifest God’s unconditional love by ascribing unsurpassable worth to all people at all times in all conditions.”

— Gregory A. Boyd

6. “I believe a significant segment of American evangelicalism is guilty of nationalistic and political idolatry.”

— Gregory A. Boyd

7. “Because the myth that America is a Christian nation has led many to associate America with Christ, many now hear the good news of Jesus only as American news, capitalistic news, imperialistic news, exploitive news, antigay news, or Republican news. And whether justified or not, many people want nothing to do with any of it.”

— Gregory A. Boyd

8. “We are to derive worth from God alone and to love without judgment and without conditions on the basis of the unsurpassable fullness of life we get from God. Our only job is to love, not judge.”

— Gregory A. Boyd

9. “I don’t want to base my life on a symbol, he said resolutely. I want reality, and the Christian faith has always been rooted in reality. What’s not rooted in reality is the faith of liberal scholars. They’re the ones who are following a pipe dream, but Christianity is not a pipe dream.”

— Gregory A. Boyd

10. “Our fundamental sin is that we place ourselves in the position of God and divide the world between what we judge to be good and what we judge to be evil. And this judgment is the primary thing that keeps us from doing the central thing God created us to do, namely, love like He loves.”

— Gregory A. Boyd

11. “It takes a greater God to steer a world populated with free agents than it does to steer a world of preprogrammed automatons.”

— Gregory A. Boyd

12. “America wasn’t founded as a theocracy. America was founded by people trying to escape theocracies. Never in history have we had a Christian theocracy where it wasn’t bloody and barbaric. That’s why our Constitution wisely put in a separation of church and state.”

— Gregory A. Boyd

13. “The central mark of a maturing Christian, and of a maturing congregation, is that they increasingly love others as Christ loves them.”

— Gregory A. Boyd

14. “Jesus never allowed himself to be defined by the political conflicts of his day, and neither should we.”

— Gregory A. Boyd

15. “If we further consider this divine panoramic view within which all evil is supposedly a “secret good” is held by a God who, according to Scripture, has a passionate hatred toward all evil, the “solution” becomes more problematic still. For it is certainly not clear how God could hate what he himself wills and sees as a contributing ingredient in the good of the whole. If all things play themselves out according to a divine plan, how can God genuinely hate anything?”

— Gregory A. Boyd

16. “It is important that we never separate our love for God from our love for others. For loving our neighbors as ourselves is one central way we love God.”

— Gregory A. Boyd

17. “Can I bring the Lord back into my mind-flow every few seconds so that God shall always be in my mind? I choose to make the rest of my life an experiment in answering this question. Frank Laubach1.”

— Gregory A. Boyd

18. “What the fear of hell could not do, my discovery of the love of God could do: it began to permanently break the stronghold.”

— Gregory A. Boyd

19. “Our call is to trust that the foolishness of self-sacrificial love will overcome evil in the end. Our call is to manifest the beauty of a Savior who loves indiscriminately while revolting against all hatred and violence. This is the humble mustard seed revolution that will in the end transform the world.”

— Gregory A. Boyd

20. “I wondered if there was a way to teach people how to use their imaginations in prayer and worship. So I began reading books on cognitive therapy and neuroscience and started studying the devotional traditions of the church.”

— Gregory A. Boyd

21. “When we live as though we were lords of our own life, capable of meeting our own needs, we are living in the flesh. When we treat people, possessions, or achievements as though they were the source of our worth and significance rather than God, we are living in the flesh. In fact, insofar as we live as though God were not present, moment-by-moment, and as though this wasn’t the most important aspect of any present moment, we are living in the flesh.”

— Gregory A. Boyd

22. “If we have the potential to oppress or slay millions, it’s because we also have the potential to liberate and love millions.”

— Gregory A. Boyd

23. “The result is that it has become humanly impossible for many around the globe to hear the good news as good. Instead, because of its kingdom-of-the-world associations, they hear the gospel as bad news, as American news, exploitive capitalistic news, greedy news, violent news, and morally decadent news. They can’t see the beauty of the cross because everything the American flag represents to them is in the way.”

— Gregory A. Boyd

24. “Jesus completely abolishes all ordinary ideas and expectations people have of a Supreme Being.”

— Gregory A. Boyd

25. “For many in America and around the world, the American flag has smothered the glory of the cross, and the ugliness of our American version of Caesar has squelched the radiant love of Christ.”

— Gregory A. Boyd

26. “God doesn’t depend primarily on the words of his disciples, nor on their clever apologetic arguments, nor on their ability to concoct ingenious marketing techniques. God relies on his disciples participating in the love that he is and thus replicating it toward each other within the body and toward all others outside the body.”

— Gregory A. Boyd

27. “In a creation populated with free agents, God doesn’t always get what he wants. Augustine and the church tradition that followed him were simply mistaken when they insisted that “the will of the omnipotent is always undefeated.” Because God desires a creation in which love is a reality, he allows his will to be defeated to some extent.”

— Gregory A. Boyd

28. “It’s my conviction that we are made to perpetually share in a life in which we are perfectly and unconditionally loved, in which we experientially know we could not matter more to God than we already do, and in which we feel absolutely secure in this love and worth, for we know that nothing – including the loss of our biological life – could cause us to lose this life.”

— Gregory A. Boyd

29. “What kind of holiness does the Western Church manifest today? To answer this, we need only ask: Are the prostitutes and tax collectors of our day attracted to us or repelled by us?”

— Gregory A. Boyd

30. “Our Kingdom call is to revolt against the Powers by dismantling the hierarchy of privilege, rejecting all racial stereotypes and judgments, forging meaningful relationships across ethnic lines, and submitting ourselves to one another as we listen, learn, and follow one another.”

— Gregory A. Boyd

31. “The love demonstrated on Calvary is the center of the gospel, for it reveals the beauty of God himself.”

— Gregory A. Boyd

32. “We may well prefer a democratically controlled oligarchy to some other kind. We may well have a choice between Marxist and Islamic and other statements of the vision of the good society. But what our contemporaries find themselves practically incapable of challenging is that the social problem can be solved by determining which aristocrats are morally justified, by virtue of their better ideology, to use the power of society from the top so as to lead the whole system in their direction.8.”

— Gregory A. Boyd

33. “To live thoughtfully with Christlike love we must allow ourselves to be disturbed by the grotesque realities surrounding us and sympathetically enter into the nightmarish suffering of others.”

— Gregory A. Boyd

34. “The words and acts of the founding fathers, especially the first few presidents, shaped the form and tone of the civil religion as it has been maintained ever since. Though much is selectively derived from Christianity, this religion is clearly not itself Christianity. ROBERT BELLAH1.”

— Gregory A. Boyd

35. “We tend to become the decisions we make. The more we choose something, the more we become that something. We are all in the process of solidifying our identities by the decisions we make. With each decision we make, we pick up momentum in the direction of that decision.”

— Gregory A. Boyd

36. “In a community that gets life based on appearances, problems tend to be diagnosed in terms of how things appear.”

— Gregory A. Boyd