Aaron Schultz > Aaron's Quotes

“The Bible isn’t a cookbook—deviate from the recipe and the soufflé falls flat. It’s not an owner’s manual—with detailed and complicated step-by-step instructions for using your brand-new all-in-one photocopier/FAX machine/scanner/microwave/DVR/home security system. It’s not a legal contract—make sure you read the fine print and follow every word or get ready to be cast into the dungeon. It’s not a manual of assembly—leave out a few bolts and the entire jungle gym collapses on your three-year-old. When we open the Bible and read it, we are eavesdropping on an ancient spiritual journey. That journey was recorded over a thousand-year span of time, by different writers, with different personalities, at different times, under different circumstances, and for different reasons. In the Bible, we read of encounters with God by ancient peoples, in their times and places, asking their questions, and expressed in language and ideas familiar to them. Those encounters with God were, I believe, genuine, authentic, and real. But they were also ancient—and that explains why the Bible behaves the way it does. This kind of Bible—the Bible we have—just doesn’t work well as a point-by-point exhaustive and timelessly binding list of instructions about God and the life of faith.”
― Peter Enns, The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It

“A story like the exodus story is what happens when, as I said previously, God lets his children tell the story—in ways they understand and that is packed with meaning for them.”
― Peter Enns, The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It

“I’ve watched congregations devote years and years to heated arguments about whether a female missionary should be allowed to share about her ministry on a Sunday morning, whether students older than ten should have female Sunday school teachers, whether girls should be encouraged to attend seminary, whether women should be permitted to collect the offering or write the church newsletter or make an announcement . . . all while thirty thousand children die every day from preventable disease. If that’s not an adventure in missing the point, I don’t know what is.”
― Rachel Held Evans, A Year of Biblical Womanhood

“Asking questions is part of what it means to have faith. The opposite of faith is not doubt, it’s certainty. So, the fact that you’re questioning what you’ve been told isn’t evidence of your lack of faith, it’s evidence that you take your faith seriously enough to examine it and to follow the truth wherever it leads you.”
― Keith Giles, Before You Lose Your Mind: Deconstructing Bad Theology in the Church

“It’s true, however, that some people like things simple. But inquisitive others seek to traverse the wonders of the mind and soul, as well as all creation, for glimmers of the Divine.”
― Keith Giles, Before You Lose Your Mind: Deconstructing Bad Theology in the Church

“Some church folks hope that by distancing themselves from us heretics, they do not have to be reminded of their own lack of empathy, judgment, intolerance for diversity, cognitive dissonance, bigotry, infatuation with savior-like political leaders, hypocrisy, oppressive policies, power trips, aversion to new ideas, and overall un-Christlike ways.”
― Keith Giles, Before You Lose Your Mind: Deconstructing Bad Theology in the Church

“The contradiction of a belief, ideal or system of values, causes cognitive dissonance that can be resolved by changing the challenged belief yet, instead of effecting change, the resultant mental stress restores psychological consonance to the person, by misperception, rejection or refutation of the contradiction, seeking moral support from people who share the contradicted beliefs or acting to persuade other people that the contradiction is unreal” Hence a mob if you are familiar with social media. You know how this goes … you post some new belief or idea that you are contemplating. Rather than discussion or addressing the belief itself, often those responding just simply turn to attacking your character, your background, or just overall ganging up on you to tell you that you are wrong. Rarely will someone engage in actual discussion of the idea itself. You know what I am talking about. We have all had someone tag in their friends or maybe we have done it ourselves. Hmmmm …”
― Keith Giles, Before You Lose Your Mind: Deconstructing Bad Theology in the Church

“Using Christianity to colonize usually backfires eventually because colonized peoples end up discovering that the God they were forced to worship is really on their side. They discover that the God of the Bible is a God who frees enslaved people and condemns those who exploit them. The colonized discover that the Christian story is a story of a God saving people like them from the type of people that forced Christianity on them.”
― Damon Garcia, The God Who Riots: Taking Back the Radical Jesus

“People who’ve had any genuine spiritual experience always know that they don’t know. They are utterly humbled before mystery. They are in awe before the abyss of it all, in wonder at eternity and depth, and a Love, which is incomprehensible to the mind.”
― Richard Rohr

“We found that human cultures pass through phases, each culture in its own time. As the culture ages and begins to lose its objectives, conflict arises within it between those who wish to cast it off and set up a new culture-pattern, and those who wish to retain the old with as little change as possible.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Best of Philip K. Dick

“There is no greater distortion to the true gospel of Christ than to hold up a leader who bullies, lies, threatens, and promotes violence, and assert that God appointed him. A church that exalts any leader—political, religious, or otherwise—who regularly stirs up division and violence, unleashes anger and hatred, lies incessantly, threatens reporters, and belittles women, is not a church. It’s a cult.”
― Amy Hawk, The Judas Effect: How Evangelicals Betrayed Jesus for Power

“According to Jesus, the gospel can be contaminated by at least two common attitudes, which can spread throughout the church and ruin the whole batch of dough. Some of the Pharisees were judgmental and hypocritical. Their religious instruction was heavy on control and rules and legalism and hoop jumping, and had a convenient way of overlooking the log in its own eye while barring entrance to God’s kingdom for others. For example, a gospel contaminated by such a yeast might condemn a gay, married, and monogamous person for sexual immorality, while simultaneously saluting a twice-divorced, thrice-married, unrepentant serial adulterer and sexual assailant who sleeps with porn stars while his wife is home tending to their infant son. This is the type of hypocrisy Jesus can’t stand.”
― Amy Hawk, The Judas Effect: How Evangelicals Betrayed Jesus for Power

“Biblically speaking, if my fervor for the first nine months of life isn’t matched by equal fervor for protecting and advocating the years after, I’m not truly pro-life. I’m just pro-pregnancy.”
― Amy Hawk, The Judas Effect: How Evangelicals Betrayed Jesus for Power