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Real faith has room for doubt—understanding that the effort to believe is the very thing that makes doubt possible. Real faith is not afraid of doubt, but the faux faith of certitude is afraid of its own shadow. I have no idea how to arrive at real faith without a journey involving doubt.
Christianity looks like love absorbing sin and death, trusting God for resurrection.
God is love—co-suffering, all-forgiving, sin-absorbing, never-ending love. God is not like Caiaphas sacrificing a scapegoat. God is not like Pilate enacting justice by violence. God is like Jesus, absorbing and forgiving sin.
The world of cold-blooded competition is the world that kills Christ.
Superstitious reverence for all things military constantly verges on the idolatrous and prevents the church from being a prophetic people. Memorial Day is not on the church calendar, and military color guards marching down church aisles with rifles on their shoulders should not be part of our liturgy.
If our chief goal is to avoid suffering, we will probably never find paradise. Paradise is not found in the mall, it’s found on the Easter side of Good Friday.
Fundamentalism was born as the wrongheaded reaction to the crisis of modernity.
Christianity is a confession, not an explanation. We will attempt to explain what we legitimately can, but we will always confess more than we can explain. I fully confess God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, even though I cannot fully explain the Trinity.
In my youthful arrogance (the word I really want to use is stupidity) I effectively defined and limited Christianity to my kind of Christianity —a charismatic-flavored evangelicalism. As far as I was concerned, most Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans, and mainline Protestants needed to “get saved”—which is to say, they needed to become my style of Christian.
David Bentley Hart.
“Accepting Jesus into your heart” began to replace belonging to the body of Christ. All of this was in keeping with the modern emphasis on “me.” The fourth word—“Community”—provided an important course correction in the basic way I viewed Christianity. “Me” would be replaced with “We.”
The Apostles don’t call us to “accept Jesus into our heart”—they call us to belong to the body of Christ.
We learned to be pro-life and pro-war—and never saw the stunning incongruity!
“Pro-life” (as a guiding principle and not an empty slogan) is an excellent way to go about identifying the politics of Jesus.
The church in the West is no longer public or prayerful. We are now private. The only way we know how to be public is to be political.
Ambiguity irritates the reactive soul.
But if you see a person or group primarily as a rival posing a threat to your self-interest, you cannot love them. You will only fear them, and reacting in fear you will lash out at them.
What is called “revival” today is mostly spectacle and religious entertainment playing upon the emotions of guilt, desire, and anger.
Too much of the most visible presence of Christianity is loud, vociferous, and angry. It bears a closer resemblance to shock-jocks than Saint Francis.
There are those who are fascinated by a kind of “riot Christianity” where the point is to make a lot of noise.
Those looking for instant results instead of a long obedience will find the Christian life disappointing.
Check out this quote.
When grace is pierced, it bleeds pardon. When grace is crucified, it doesn’t condemn.
Check out this quote.
We coddle the mighty whose ire we fear and condemn the sin of the weak who pose no threat.
Check out this quote.
Jesus never intended to change the world through battlefields or voting booths. Jesus has always intended to transform the world one life at a time at a shared table.
So today our sermons don’t end with, “Go write your senator and lobby Washington.” Our sermons end with, “Come to the table and share in the life of Christ.” Christ is present with us. He is present in the Eucharist. He is bread on the table. This is enough. I am not disappointed.
When the unclean touched Jesus, Jesus was not made unclean, rather the unclean were made whole.
Instead of being restricted to a particular geography and limited to a priestly elite, the Christian holy of holies can be located anywhere and everywhere. The Lord’s Table bears witness to the new covenant truth that the holy land is the whole earth and the chosen people are the human race.
The risen Christ did not appear at the temple but at meal tables.
We thought God was a deity in a temple. It turns out God is a father at a table.
Making church more about the sermon than the sacrament is a move toward secularism.
If someone says that sounds like tree-hugger theology, I say a theologian can do worse than to hug a tree.
Framing Christianity within a dualistic “us versus them” paradigm can be a successful way of achieving numerical growth.
There’s always common ground if we are willing to find it. If we stay on the road following the Jesus way, what we discover is that we are walking farther and farther down the road of love. We learn to be open and generous. We learn to love everyone we meet. To accept them. To include them. To recognize that they too are children of God. This is the beauty of learning openness on the open road of life.
The paradox is that the narrow way leads to broad acceptance. The narrow way is not narrow-mindedness. The narrow way is exactly what Jesus said it is—treating others with the generosity of love. The golden rule is the narrow gate.
