Wherever St. Paul went, there was a riot. Wherever I go, they serve tea.
Learning to live as a Christian is learning to live as a renewed human being, anticipating the eventual new creation in and with a world which is still longing and groaning for that final redemption.
Jesus’s resurrection is the beginning of God’s new project.
It is faith alone that justifies, but faith that justifies can never be alone, though one is justified by faith alone, the faith which justifies is never in fact alone.
Someone who is determinedly trying to show God how good he or she is is likely to become an insufferable prig.
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.