Top 90 Nadia Bolz-Weber Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “Good Friday is not about us trying to “get right with God.” It is about us entering the difference between God and humanity and just touching it for a moment. Touching the shimmering sadness of humanity’s insistence that we can be our own gods, that we can be pure and all-powerful.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

54. “As a teenager, I loved how I looked in the outfit of using drugs and exercising poor judgement. I had tried it on, spun around in the mirror, and decided I would choose this look, this image, this identity. But eventually and without realising it, the ability to choose had gone. I had become what at first I had only pretended to be.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

55. “Every time I go look for God amidst sorrow, I always find Jesus at the cross, in death and resurrection. This is our God.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

56. “This was the bonus to liberal Christianity: I could use my reason and believe at the same time.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

57. “From my father I heard only these words: “But you were born for such a day as this.” He closed the book and my mother joined him in embracing me. They prayed over me and they gave me a blessing. And some blessings, like the one my conservative Christian parents gave to their soon-to-be-Lutheran pastor daughter who had put them through hell, are the kind of blessings that stay with you for the rest of your life. The kind you can’t speak of without crying all over again.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

58. “What God claims to love, do not deem unworthy of that love. What God has called good, do not call anything other than good. What God has animated with God’s own breath and endowed with a soul and God’s own image, do not treat with anything less than dignity.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

59. “To God, everyone is different but no one is special. You’re not special for being straight. Or gay. Or male. Or cis. Or trans. Or asexual. Or married. Or sexually prodigious. Or a virgin. We all have the same God who placed the same image and likeness within us and entrusted us imperfect human beings with such mind blowing things as sexuality and creativity and the ability as individuals to love and be loved as we are.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

60. “What makes us saints of God is not our ability to be saintly but rather God’s ability to work through sinners.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

61. “If the quality of my Christianity lies in my ability to be more inclusive than the next pastor, things get tricky because I will always, always encounter people – intersex people, Republicans, criminals, Ann Coulter, etc. – whom I don’t want in the tent with me. Always. I only really want to be inclusive of some kinds of people and not of others.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

62. “We had started out caring about each other, but in the end none of us knew how to care for each other. But this experience taught me that a community based on the idea that everyone hates rules is, in the end, just as disappointing and oppressive as a community based on the ability to follow rules.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

63. “Jesus was a real revolutionary and that Christianity had unfortunately given the guy a bad name.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

64. “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

65. “A sexual ethic that includes concern means seeing someone as a whole person and not just a willing body.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

66. “There’s not enough wrong with it to leave and there’s just enough wrong with it to stay,” Matthew later told me. “Fight to change it.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

67. “I realized that sometimes the best thing we can do for each other is talk honestly about being wrong.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

68. “Holiness is the thing I never saw coming that makes me catch my breath because I know the sacred has interrupted my isolation.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

69. “Many of us were taught that if you do not fit inside the circle of the church’s behavioral codes, God is not pleased with you, so we whittled ourselves down to a shape that could fit those teachings, or we denied those parts of ourselves entirely.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

70. “On some level, although we can’t handle the pain of acknowledging it, Good Friday happens every day.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

71. “Because in the end, we aren’t punished for our sins as much as we are punished by our sins.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

72. “But I cannot pretend, as much as sometimes I would like to, that I have not throughout my life experienced the redeeming, destabilizing love of a surprising God.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

73. “But the only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we’re uncool.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

74. “If becoming a person of faith were more like, say, receiving a personality transplant, life would be easier.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

75. “I realized that I had been called to proclaim the Gospel from the place where I am and proclaim where I am from the Gospel.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

76. “I’ve never fully understood how Christianity became quite so tame and respectable, given its origins among drunkards, prostitutes, and tax collectors.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

77. “Many of us would pray not to die in a car crash before we were baptized, like other people pray to not get sick before their employee benefits kick in.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

78. “The religiosity of the prohibition movement was stoked by a genuine desire to lead holy lives pleasing to God. But purity is easier to regulate than holiness.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

79. “We bring the holy things of the church onto the holy streets of the city because on some level, the violence and despair of Good Friday is still a human reality. Unfortunately, we’ve never lacked an opportunity to pay such a visit.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

80. “And I get it. I can be cynical myself. Every time I see some smiley TV preacher talk about God’s plan for me or hear Sarah Palin say something irretrievably mean and stupid about poor people, or every time I pass an embarrassing billboard featuring Jesus and a fetus, I totally get why reasonable people would keep their distance.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

81. “Once a seminary student asked to shadow me for two days to see what my life as a pastor was like. At the end, he said, “Oh my gosh, you’re basically a person for a living.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

82. “Her relationship to God wasn’t doctrinal. It was functional.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

83. “In my pastoral work I’ve started to suspect that the more someone was exposed to religious messages about controlling their desires, avoiding sexual thoughts, and not lusting in their hearts, the less likely they are to be integrated physically, emotionally, sexually, and spiritually.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

84. “It would seem that when we are sinned against, when someone else does us harm, we are in some way linked to that sin, connected to that mistreatment like a chain. And our anger, fear, or resentment doesn’t free us at all. It just keeps us chained.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

85. “So I was scared. I was scared about the fact that in order for me to be the kind of pastor I would want to be, I would need to look at some of my own personal stuff, which I was perfectly happy ignoring.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

86. “Truth. It can make me hate the person speaking it. Until the point at which I want to kiss them for setting me free.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

87. “On All Saints’ Sunday, I am faced with sticky ambiguities around saints who were bad and sinners who were good.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

88. “The better you were at not doing these things, the better a Christian you were. It did not seem to me, even back then, that God’s grace or the radical love of Jesus was what united people in the Church of Christ; it was their ability to be good. Or at least their ability to appear to be good. And not everyone can pull that off.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

89. “You hear a lot of nonsense in hospitals and funeral homes. God had a plan, we just don’t know what it is. Maybe God took your daughter because He needs another angel in heaven. But when I’ve experienced loss and felt so much pain that it feels like nothing else ever existed, the last thing I need is a well-meaning but vapid person saying that when God closes a door he opens a window.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

90. “I’m so sorry,” I replied. “But sometimes Jesus just hunts your ass down and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

91. “Trent had just spent an hour describing what he learned as a kid from his church: how the only way to please God, the same being who created him with a sexuality to begin with, was to not engage with his erotic nature whatsoever. As if the God of the Universe had programmed into creation a passive-aggressive test of our willpower.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber