“In the contemporary world, secularism, neo-paganism, along with eastern spiritualities, abound in the market-place of ideas, confusing many so that they neither hear nor heed the voice of the Lord…In the case of our beliefs in Jesus Christ as the Messiah and Son of God, we can let the deceivers steal them from us. They can plant contrary ideas in our minds that confuse us or replace our spiritual understanding with other notions. Or we can lose our faith in the doctrine of the Church by neglect. We can set these teachings aside in our minds so that they fade in importance. Or other ideas and interests may grab our attention so that the matter of who Christ is loses its influence on us.” (Dynamis 5/21/2014, Fr. Basil)
“Christianity…is not just a set of beliefs one happens to hold as part of one’s religion, but it is a unified way of looking at the world in the light of those beliefs held as true. It takes their basic motifs, such as creation, fall, redemption, and restoration, not just as ideas we happen to believe in but as realities that are foundational to all other beliefs about the world that we might hold…in the secular worldview, if something is personal, then the only place it can be real is inside of you—not outside of you in the “real” impersonal world that everybody else has to live in when they are not inside of themselves. That is why this generation is only able to think of ideas as true “for me” or “for you”—not as just plain true, period.” (Donald Williams)
“In the inverted world of modernity, ideas are considered spiritually “real,” while actions and rituals are somehow suspect…“We have a habit of abstracting things (particularly in our modern era). We constantly read texts about things and immediately want to leap to the ideas that they raise. Somehow, we never seem to understand that the ideas are actually embodied in the things…Classical Christianity is the true materialism, revealing a dignity of the created order that never enters the sentiments of the modern mind. Our modern sin and failure is not found in loving material things too much – rather, we love them too little and in the wrong manner. We love our ideas about things and how we feel about things. Nothing is therefore loved for itself, but only for the sentiments that arise from its misuse.” (Father Stephen Freeman)
“Literal things are far more mystical than mere ideas…What unites us is not an idea or a set of ideas or our consensus about those ideas. It’s a Person, a real Person, a divine Person.” (Peter Kreeft)
“The ideas that we entertain in our minds have a profound influence on our faith. The thoughts that might lead us astray from the doctrine of Christ may not overtly contradict the teachings of the faith. But they may be like a guest who moves into our home and takes over. They may crowd out and eventually displace the truths concerning Christ. To guard against losing our faith to other perspectives, ideas, and interests, we should make sure that the Lord and His ways are continually on our minds.” (Fr. Basil)
“God is not a static object. He is personal and therefore acts in freedom. We can know or perceive Him because He makes Himself known. By and large, people in our culture are looking for a God who can be experienced by the critical faculty. In short, we want a God whom we can consume. Do I like Him? Do I want Him? Will I give Him my life? Do I choose Him? This is largely accomplished by substituting the idea of God for God Himself.” (Father Stephen Freeman)
“If a person wants to get an idea about the pyramids of Egypt, he must either trust those who have been in immediate proximity to the pyramids, or he must get next to them himself. There is no third option. In the same way a person can get an impression of God: He must either trust those who have stood and stand in immediate proximity to God, or he must take pains to come into such proximity himself.” (St. Nicholas of Serbia)
“God Himself became a Man to give us a concrete, definite, tangible idea of what to think of when we think of God.” (Henry H. Halley)
“ this new life [life in Christ] is spread not only by purely mental acts like belief, but by bodily acts like baptism and Holy Communion. It is not merely the spreading of an idea; it is more like evolution—a biological or superbiological fact.” (C. S. Lewis)
"The idea of God came by revelation, and the evidence, massed together, analyzed and sifted with scholarly acumen, is altogether convincing. Thus we may say that at the beginning God, with the other gifts he gave to man, gave him religion. That is to say, He gave him not only a predisposition for reverence and piety, but also a certain amount of religious knowledge, such as that which He gave to the Hebrew people at the time of Moses and the Prophets." (Wilhelm Schmidt)