Top 90 Nadia Bolz-Weber Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Every time we draw a line between us and others, Jesus is always on the other side of it.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

2. “Identity. It’s always God’s first move. Before we do anything wrong and before we do anything right, God has named and claimed us as God’s own.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

3. “This is our God. Not a distant judge nor a sadist, but a God who weeps. A God who suffers, not only for us, but with us. Nowhere is the presence of God amidst suffering more salient than on the cross. Therefore what can I do but confess that this is not a God who causes suffering. This is a God who bears suffering. I need to believe that God does not initiate suffering; God transforms it.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

4. “I need a place to confess that I don’t have everything figured out. Christianity is not a program for avoiding mistakes; it is a faith of the guilty. There is no “right” or perfect way to be. We learn from our mistakes; we extend grace to others and ourselves. In the same way a lover who loves your body allows you to have grace for it, so is grace the antithesis of rejection.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

5. “I say no when I should say yes. I say yes when I should say no. I stumble into holy moments not realizing where I am until they are over. I love poorly, then accidently say the right thing at the right moment without even realizing it, then forget what matters, then show tenderness when it’s needed, and then turn around and think of myself way too often.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

6. “I’m not running after Jesus. Jesus is running my ass down.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

7. “God isn’t waiting for you to become thinner or heterosexual or married or celibate or more ladylike or less crazy or more spiritual or less of an alcoholic in order to love you. Also, I would argue that since your ideal self doesn’t actually exist, it would follow that the “you” everyone in your life loves is your actual self, too.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

8. “It’s about spiritual physics. Something has to die for something new to live.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

9. “So my argument in this book is this: we should not be more loyal to an idea, a doctrine, or an interpretation of a Bible verse than we are to people. If the teachings of the church are harming the bodies and spirits of people, we should rethink those teachings.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

10. “I can’t imagine that the God of the universe is limited to our ideas of God. I can’t imagine that God doesn’t reveal God’s self in countless ways outside of the symbol system of Christianity. In a way, I need a God who is bigger and more nimble and mysterious than what I could understand and contrive. Otherwise it can feel like I am worshipping nothing more than my own ability to understand the divine.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

11. “Because sometimes the most holy thing we can say is: No. Not on my watch.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

12. “It’s about how God continues to reach into the graves we dig for ourselves and pull us out, giving us new life, in ways both dramatic and small.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

13. “Nadia, the thing that sucks is that every time we draw a line between us and others, Jesus is always on the other side of it.” Damn.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

14. “My Christian faith tells me that good news is only good if it is for everyone, otherwise it’s just ideology.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

15. “Oh hey, God told me to tell you something: Get over yourself.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

16. “The disciples’ mistake was also my mistake: They forgot that they have a God who created the universe out of “nothing,” that can put flesh on dry bones “nothing,” that can put life in a dusty womb “nothing.” I mean, let’s face it, “nothing” is God’s favorite material to work with.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

17. “Sometimes help comes from unexpected places.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

18. “Maybe the Good Friday story is about how God would rather die than be in our sin-accounting business anymore.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

19. “What they don’t tell you when you get sober is that if you manage to stay that way, you will bury your friends. Not everyone gets to have a whole new shiny-but-messy life like I have, and I’ve never come up with a satisfying explanation for why that is.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

20. “Christians should help one another to silence the voice that accuses. To celebrate a repentance – a snapping out of it, a thinking of new thoughts – which leads to possibilities we never considered. To love one another as God loves us. To love ourselves as God loves us. To remind each other of the true voice of God. And there’s only one way to do this: by being unapologetically and humbly ourselves. By not pretending. By being genuine. Real. Our actual, non-ideal selves.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

21. “The adjective so often coupled with mercy is the word tender, but God’s mercy is not tender; this mercy is a blunt instrument. Mercy doesn’t wrap a warm, limp blanket around offenders. God’s mercy is the kind that kills the thing that wronged it and resurrects something new in its place.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

22. “Sometimes the fact that there is nothing about you that makes you the right person to do something is exactly what God is looking for.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

23. “I hate that this is God’s economy. That the salvation of my enemy is tied up in my own. Which is why I sometimes say that the Gospel is like, the worst good news I’ve ever heard in my life.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

24. “We weren’t a ship of fools so much as a rowboat of idiots.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

25. “Any identity other than child of God is spiritually meaningless.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

26. “And always, always, it is worth it to sing alleluia in defiance of the devil, who surely hates the sound of it.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

27. “This community will disappoint them. It’s a matter of when, not if. We will let them down or I’ll say something stupid and hurt their feelings. I then invite them on this side of their inevitable disappointment to decide if they’ll stick around after it happens. If they choose to leave when we don’t meet their expectations, they won’t get to see how the grace of God can come in and fill the holes left by our community’s failure, and that’s just too beautiful and too real to miss.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

28. “No one is climbing the spiritual ladder. We don’t continually improve until we are so spiritual we no longer need God. We die and are made new, but that’s different from spiritual self-improvement.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

29. “This desire to learn what the faith is from those who have lived it in the face of being told they are not welcome or worthy is far more than “inclusion.” Actually, inclusion isn’t the right word at all, because it sounds like in our niceness and virtue we are allowing “them” to join “us” – like we are judging another group of people to be worthy of inclusion in a tent that we don’t own.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

30. “Because in these healing texts, Jesus does not just cure people’s diseases and cast out their demons and then say, “Mission accomplished.” He’s always after something more than that because the healing is never fully accomplished until there is a restoration to community.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

31. “So if God’s first move is to give us our identity, then the devil’s first move is to throw that identity into question. Identity is like the tip of a spool of thread, which when pulled, can unwind the whole.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

32. “Our identity has nothing to do with how we are perceived by others. But it’s still tempting to believe. I mean, if Jesus was vulnerable to temptation, the rest of us certainly are, whether it be temptation to self-loathing or self-aggrandizement, depression or pride, self-destruction or self-indulgence. We are tempted to doubt our innate value precisely to the degree that we are insecure about our identity from, and our relationship to, God.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

33. “The Bible is not God. The Bible is simply the cradle that holds Christ. Anything in the Bible that does not hold up to the Gospel of Jesus Christ simply does not have the same authority.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

34. “I can only look at the seemingly limited space under the tent and think either it’s my job to change people so they fit or it’s my job to extend the roof so that they fit. Either way, it’s misguided because it’s not my tent. It’s God’s tent.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

35. “We want to go to God for answers, but sometimes what we get is God’s presence.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

36. “If the Gospel is where we find healing from the harm done to us by the messages of the church, then it must also be where we find freedom. Meaning that even if it is the last thing I want to do, I absolutely have to believe the Gospel is powerful enough, transgressive enough, beautiful enough to heal not only the ones who have been hurt but also those who have done the hurting.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

37. “I cared about Ben, but I was never in love with him. I was in love with what it said about me that I had a boyfriend like Ben, and that’s just different.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

38. “Our scars are part of our story, but they are not its conclusion. The past is ours and will always be a part of us, and yet it is not all there is. It’s a process, moving from wounds to scars to grief to showing those scars. It takes time, and maybe therapy, and maybe being vulnerable in community, and maybe working through the twelve steps, and maybe making a lot of mistakes, and maybe experiencing a tiny bit of joy.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

39. “Smiley TV preachers might tell you that following Jesus is about being good so that God will bless you with cash and prizes, but really it’s much more gruesome and meaningful. It’s about spiritual physics. Something has to die for something new to live.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

40. “Getting closer to God might mean getting told to love someone I don’t even like, or to give away even more of my money. It might mean letting some idea or dream that is dear to me get ripped away.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

41. “Usually when you are grieving and someone says something so senselessly optimistic to you, it’s about them. Either they want to feel like they can say something helpful, or they simply cannot allow themselves to entertain the finality and pain of death, so instead they turn it into a Precious Moments greeting card.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

42. “The beauty of our sky is really just a nice way for the earth to protect us from the terror of what’s so vast and unknowable beyond. The boundlessness of the universe is disturbing when you think about it. It’s too big and we’re too small.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

43. “But we’ve lost the plot if we use religion as the place where we escape from difficult realities instead of as the place where those difficult realities are given meaning.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

44. “Those most qualified to speak the gospel are those who truly know how unqualified they are to speak the gospel.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

45. “What Mary would do is show up and remind us that despite the violence and fear, it’s still always worth it to love God and to love people. And always, always, it is worth it to sing alleluia in defiance of the devil, who surely hates the sound of it.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

46. “The Kingdom of God is a tricky concept, and I was always taught it referred to our heavenly reward for being good, which, now that I actually read the Bible for myself, makes very little sense. Others say that the Kingdom of God is another way of talking about the church, and still others say that it’s the dream God has for the wholeness of the world, a dream being made true little by little among us right here, right now. My answer? All of the above.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

47. “Australia seems like a really faraway Canada, just with funnier animals.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

48. “The Gospels are the canon within the canon. The Bible, as Martin Luther said, is the cradle that holds Christ. The point of gravity is the story of Jesus, the Gospel. The closer a text of the Bible is to that story or to the heart of that story’s message, the more authority it has. The farther away it is, the less its authority.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

49. “But inevitably, when I can’t harm the people who harmed me, I just end up harming the people who love me. So maybe retaliation or holding on to anger about the harm done to me doesn’t actually combat evil. Maybe it feeds it. In the end, if we’re not careful, we can actually absorb the worst of our enemy and on some level even become them.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

50. “Matthew once said to me, after one of my more finely worded rants about stupid people who have the wrong opinions, “Nadia, the thing that sucks is that every time we draw a line between us and others, Jesus is always on the other side of it.” Damn.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber