Getting Involved with God Quotes

“The sufferer who keeps looking for God has, in the end, privileged knowledge. ... She passes through a door that only pain will open, and is thus qualified to speak of God in a way that others, whom we generally call more fortunate, cannot speak.”
― Ellen F. Davis, Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament

“For us the true measure of our wisdom will never be the grade point average we covet, a degree or rank, the right job, the book accepted by a prestigious press. No, we will be wise when we desire with heart, soul, mind, and strength only the things that God also desires for us--and nothing else compels us, or ever catches our wandering eye.”
― Ellen F. Davis, Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament

“Contrition means finding the courage to let your heart break over sin. Willfully letting your heart break and then offering the pieces to God is a radically counter cultural idea in our society.”
― Ellen F. Davis, Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament

“Worship is a vigorous act of reordering our desires in the light of God's burning desire for the wellness of all creation.”
― Ellen F. Davis, Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament

“...our role as comforters is not to solve the problem of pain; even less is it to stick up for God. Trying to vindicate God to a person in agonizing pain is like explaining to a crying infant that Mommy is really a well-intentioned person. ... While [Job's friends] remain mired in their convictions, Job is moving.”
― Ellen F. Davis, Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament

“As Christians, we are all engaged in the business of discerning and obeying God’s call, and this usually means that soon enough we find ourselves out beyond our own competence, frightened at what God demands and feeling cosmically abandoned, left in the lurch with a job for which our own resources are completely inadequate…Sooner or later, the panic touches each one of us who accepts God’s call and heads, eyes wide open, straight into some difficult and mysterious work—like pastoring a church, teaching a class, going back to school, learning a language, creating a work of art. The panic descends on everyone who accepts God’s call to do something that engages our heart and wracks our soul—like making a marriage proper through better and worse, raising a child and letting her go into adulthood, enduring a terrible illness, growing up, growing old. In fact, being called out far beyond our own competence is part of our regular experience with God.”
― Ellen F. Davis, Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament

“The Garden of Eden was the place where the first human creatures might have acquired wisdom: Eden was the place for total intimacy with God, and that is the sole condition fur becoming wise. Day by day they might have grown in wisdom and stature, taking those strolls with God in 'the breezy time of day (Genesis 3:8). But they could not wait to get smart, so they chose the quick and dirty method...”
― Ellen F. Davis, Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament

“The fourth-century Greek theologian St. John Chrysostom said that Job's greatest trial was that his wife was not taken.”
― Ellen F. Davis, Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament

“But 'true wisdom is such that no evil use can ever be made of it.' That is worth our pondering because we, more than any previous generation, are witnessing the evil effects of perverted knowledge, knowledge not essentially connected to goodness. ... No other generation has been so successful at using its technological knowledge in order to manipulate the world and satisfy its own appetites.”
― Ellen F. Davis, Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament

“The very idea of wisdom, as the Bible understands it, challenges the mind-set of our society and the view of knowledge that all of us have to some extent internalized.”
― Ellen F. Davis, Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament

“The Song [of Solomon] captures the ecstatic aspect of love that is the main subject of the whole Bible.”
― Ellen F. Davis, Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament

“That the Old Testament represents God chiefly as angry Judge and vicious Warrior is a false stereotype. While these images are not absent, they are more than balanced by striking portrayals of God as Lover or Husband, infatuated with Israel beyond all reason or deserving. God is not too proud to grieve terribly over Israel's unfaithfulness, nor to be giddy over her return home. ... [This covenant's] primary quality is love at the highest pitch of intensity.”
― Ellen F. Davis, Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament

“The great question that God's speech out of the whirlwind poses for Job and every other person of integrity is this: Can you love what you do not control?”
― Ellen F. Davis, Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament

“Yet accurate speech about anything, and especially about God, is in fact a rhythm of silence and speech, speaking and listening.”
― Ellen F. Davis, Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament

“And there we recognize that our frailty is not meant to cause us anxiety and sorrow. Rather, God means it to be a source of confidence, and even, as it was for Etty [the Dutch Jew previously mentioned that died in Auschwitz], a source of joy. For it is exactly that frailty--the strict limits to our powers, their inevitable failure, the certainty of death--that creates the need and the desire to see God's power at work...”
― Ellen F. Davis, Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament

“...Job rails against God, not as a skeptic, not as a stranger to God's justice, but precisely as a believer. It is the very depth of Job's commitment to God's ethical vision that makes his rage so fierce, and that will finally compel an answer from God.”
― Ellen F. Davis, Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament

“...consider how [the Proverbs] define success: the establishment of righteousness, justice and equity.”
― Ellen F. Davis, Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament

“God accommodates [Moses'] complaints and makes in-course corrections. God does not take a human being so fully into the divine confidence--you might say, God does not depend on a human being so fully--until Mary conceives by the Holy Spirit.”
― Ellen F. Davis, Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament

“If God has a best friend (and why not?), then surely it is Moses.”
― Ellen F. Davis, Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament