Logic cannot comprehend love; so much the worse for logic.
Fortunately, Paul is much more interesting than most of his interpreters, myself included.
It’s not great faith you need; it is faith in a great God.
Worship is love on its knees before the beloved; just as mission is love on its feet to serve the beloved.
If you’re a Christian you’re just a shadow of your future self.
There’s all the difference in the world between humbly saying “I want to find more light from Scripture than we have yet had” and saying “I’m going to prove the rest of the Church wrong and do something totally new!”
The kingdom that Jesus preached and lived was all about a glorious, uproarious, absurd generosity.
I accept the historical challenge, and with that, I accept the essentially Christian position that God always has more light to break out of his holy Word.
You become like what you worship. When you gaze in awe, admiration, and wonder at something or someone, you begin to take on something of the character of the object of your worship.
Traditions tell us where we have come from. Scripture itself is a better guide as to where we should now be going.
By all means write new songs. Each generation must do that. But to neglect the church’s original hymnbook is, to put it bluntly, crazy.
Easter was when Hope in person surprised the whole world by coming forward from the future into the present.
Death is the ultimate weapon of the tyrant; resurrection does not make a covenant with death, it overthrows it.
Right answers to difficult questions are better than wrong answers to difficult questions.
One of the reasons we do history, in fact, is because it acts as a brake, a control, on our otherwise unbridled enthusiasm for our own ideas.
Made for spirituality, we wallow in introspection. Made for joy, we settle for pleasure. Made for justice, we clamor for vengeance.
For me, actually, being a bishop in a bishopric where there’s an academic tradition gives me this fascinating, challenging, but open invitation to say, “We want you to be a scholar. We want you to go on doing this. But do it as a bishop!”
Within orthodoxy, there is always a danger of faith collapsing into fear.
The Bible is the book of my life. It’s the book I live with, the book I live by, the book I want to die by.
I am an advocate of one form of the New Perspective. But there are as many new perspectives as there are people writing about it.