Biblical Perspectives on Evangelism Quotes

“The requirement for us, as for our children, is that the Christian gospel should be voiced and heard as: intellectually credible in an unreflective society; politically critical and constructive in a cynical community; morally dense and freighted in a self-indulgent society; artistically satisfying in a society overwhelmed by religious kitsch; and pastorally attentive in a society of easy but fake answers.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Biblical Perspectives on Evangelism: Living in a Three-Storied Universe

“I imagine that a reason for inarticulateness is that the scandal of faith has become increasingly unpalatable for adults who crave easy accommodation between faith and culture. In the context of such an easy accommodation, the Christian faith is trimmed of all its radicalness, until there is very little about which to be articulate, and that very little has most often been boiled down to privatized legalism.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Biblical Perspectives on Evangelism: Living in a Three-Storied Universe

“It is clear that consumerism depends upon amnesia, in which "products" are substituted for social reference points, and in time, such "consumer values" lead to a shameless kind of brutality.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Biblical Perspectives on Evangelism: Living in a Three-Storied Universe

“A tradition of cynical indifference, a tradition of instrumental reason, and a tradition of fixed absolutes have much in common.35 They all resist the work of conversation.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Biblical Perspectives on Evangelism: Living in a Three-Storied Universe

“What God most cares about is love of God and love of neighbor. That is, God wants our desire for communion not to be distorted or misdirected. God wants neighbors, their lives, their bodies, their property, respected and treated as ends and not means.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Biblical Perspectives on Evangelism: Living in a Three-Storied Universe

“Conversion to Christian faith is a conversion to oddity in the world, odd over against secular self-indulgence, odd over against legalistic communalism and market individualism.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Biblical Perspectives on Evangelism: Living in a Three-Storied Universe

“Choose amnesia and what you will inescapably get is the reductive despair of the empire, which absolutizes the status quo and precludes any imagination of an alternative.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Biblical Perspectives on Evangelism: Living in a Three-Storied Universe

“Third, evangelism is related to church growth, related but in no way synonymous. In speaking of evangelism, one must speak of church growth, but only at the end of the dramatic process, and not any sooner. Evangelism is never aimed at institutional enhancement or aggrandizement. It is aimed simply and solely at summoning people to new, liberated obedience to the true governor of all created reality.15 The church is a modest gathering locus for those serious about the new governance. There must be such a gathering, and such a meeting, and such a community, because the new governance is inherently against autonomy, isolation, and individualism. The church grows because more and more persons change allegiance, switch worlds,16 accept the new governance and agree to the unending and difficult task of appropriating the news in practical ways. "Church growth" misserves evangelism, however, when the church is allied with consumerism, for then the church talks people out of the very obedience to which the news summons us.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Biblical Perspectives on Evangelism: Living in a Three-Storied Universe

“The seductive, dominating power of these values is not an economic mistake, a political accident, or a military miscalculation. It is rather the work of the power of death which is having its relentless way among us. In tilting the gospel toward socio-economic, political matters, let it not be imagined that I am introducing a category that is "liberal" or partisan or new or modern. Indeed, all through the Bible the gospel has been exactly and precisely concerned with social relations related to power, goods, and access. Indeed, there is almost no aspect of the biblical presentation of the gospel that is otherwise. The issue, however, is not finally socio-economic or political. It is theological. It concerns the power for life and the power for death and the struggle between them for our life, our loyalty, and our imagination.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Biblical Perspectives on Evangelism: Living in a Three-Storied Universe

“It is my judgment that in the fraudulent and counter-productive quarrels in the church between "liberals" and "conservatives," the dramatic power of the text has largely been lost. In its place has come either the liberal misreading toward "expressive individualism" or the conservative propensity toward legalistic conformity which in the end is characteristically allied with free market politics and economics.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Biblical Perspectives on Evangelism: Living in a Three-Storied Universe