Jarrel Oliveira

“I was brought up in a Christian environment where, because God had to be given pre-eminence, nothing else was allowed to be important. I have broken through to the position that because God exists, everything has significance.”360”
― Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“Have you ever thought of how miraculous reading is? Easily taken for granted”
― Brian P. Irwin, After Dispensationalism: Reading the Bible for the End of the World

“Literalism thirsts for the removal of doubt in religion, enabling believers to justify all kinds of political oppression in the name of God and country. During slavery blacks were encouraged to be obedient slaves because it was the will of God. After all, Paul did say "slaves obey your masters"; and because of the "curse of Ham," blacks have been considered inferior to whites. Even today the same kind of literalism is being used by white scholars to encourage blacks to be nonviolent, as if nonviolence were the only possible expression of Christian love. It is surprising that it never dawns on these white religionists that oppressors are in no moral position to dictate what a Christian response is. Jesus' exhortations to "turn the other cheek" and "go the second mile" do not mean that blacks should let whites walk all over them. We cannot use Jesus' behavior in the first century as a literal guide for our actions in the twentieth century. To do so is to fall into the same trap that fundamentalists fall into. It destroys Christian freedom, the freedom to make decisions patterned on, but not dictated by, the example of Jesus.”
― James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation