Healing the Divide Quotes

“Faith cannot be about absolute certainty in the letters of the Bible and wrath against those who don’t comply (Ephesians 2:15). It has to be about overwhelming trust in God’s love,6 which as the apostle Paul confirms, is beyond the letter of law and narrow legalistic interpretations.”
― Amos Smith, Healing the Divide: Recovering Christianity’s Mystic Roots

“As Bill Coffin put it, “We worship the Word made flesh, not the Word made words.”
― Amos Smith, Healing the Divide: Recovering Christianity’s Mystic Roots

“When we take our social role too seriously the first thing we lose is our sense of humor.”
― Amos Smith, Healing the Divide: Recovering Christianity’s Mystic Roots

“Jesus was contemplative and activist, mystic and prophet, Spirit and form, God and human, absolute and relative, Creator and creature, existing for eternity and existing in time.”
― Amos Smith, Healing the Divide: Recovering Christianity's Mystic Roots

“The body of Christ has no arms and feet, but ours. In other words, God needs us as much as we need God.”
― Amos Smith, Healing the Divide: Recovering Christianity's Mystic Roots

“The Alexandrian Mystics’ emphasis on silent prayer gave their teachings interior depth missing from Western theology today.”
― Amos Smith, Healing the Divide: Recovering Christianity's Mystic Roots

“Another way to think about Centering Prayer is training the mind to become free from distractions so it can “rest in God.”
― Amos Smith, Healing the Divide: Recovering Christianity's Mystic Roots

“Christianity’s job, in the words of George Fox, is to live in the “power, life, light, seed and wisdom, by which we may take away the occasion of wars.”
― Amos Smith, Healing the Divide: Recovering Christianity’s Mystic Roots

“Anger at injustice is a hallmark of the prophets. We have the responsibility to speak the truth. If we don’t witness to the crudeness and brutality of our society, which disregards the homeless, poor, hungry, and dispossessed, who will?”
― Amos Smith, Healing the Divide: Recovering Christianity’s Mystic Roots

“I worship a God who is as broad as the outer limits of the expanding universe and as tiny as a mustard seed.”
― Amos Smith, Healing the Divide: Recovering Christianity's Mystic Roots

“God says to us “Some things won’t get done unless you do them.”
― Amos Smith, Healing the Divide: Recovering Christianity's Mystic Roots

“We need precise words for Jesus. Otherwise, Christian theology is built on a foundation of sand.”
― Amos Smith, Healing the Divide: Recovering Christianity's Mystic Roots

“The spirit of the Gospels is the all inclusive love of Jesus, which jumps off the pages.”
― Amos Smith, Healing the Divide: Recovering Christianity's Mystic Roots

“Many came to Jesus expecting him to solve their problems. Instead he helped them to connect to their own faith and their own wisdom.”
― Amos Smith, Healing the Divide: Recovering Christianity's Mystic Roots

“Throughout the parables the paradoxical teachings continue: Give to receive. Die to live. Lose to win.”
― Amos Smith, Healing the Divide: Recovering Christianity's Mystic Roots

“Jesus always existed. At the same time Jesus was begotten (made human). This is the perplexing and elusive mystic core of Christian faith.”
― Amos Smith, Healing the Divide: Recovering Christianity's Mystic Roots

“Theology at its best doesn’t seek to solve, but to behold.”
― Amos Smith, Healing the Divide: Recovering Christianity's Mystic Roots

“God transcends and encompasses conservatism and liberalism, certainty and doubt, simplicity and complexity, Divinity and humanity, crucifixion and resurrection.”
― Amos Smith, Healing the Divide: Recovering Christianity’s Mystic Roots

“I’m not my brother’s keeper” is the lie infecting our streets and our neighborhoods (Genesis 4:9). This lie alienates us from God and one another.”
― Amos Smith, Healing the Divide: Recovering Christianity’s Mystic Roots

“I adore a God who is beyond words yet contained in the word Jesus.”
― Amos Smith, Healing the Divide: Recovering Christianity's Mystic Roots

“When it comes to his Divinity, Jesus is equal with God. When it comes to his humanity, Jesus is subordinate to God.”
― Amos Smith, Healing the Divide: Recovering Christianity's Mystic Roots

“God is mystery, surpassing the senses and all knowledge, and yet God is at the core of our being.”
― Amos Smith, Healing the Divide: Recovering Christianity's Mystic Roots

“When we revere our human form we respect other human beings, who are so similar to us, for their innate worth. This is the starting place for developing a social conscience.”
― Amos Smith, Healing the Divide: Recovering Christianity’s Mystic Roots

“Yet, beneath the layers of conditioning there’s the buoyant wonderment of the child, who has never forgotten. That’s why the Gospels say the dominion of heaven belongs to a child (Luke 18:16). The point isn’t to revert to childishness, but to unlearn all the deadening adult scripting that suburbia and the market economy foist upon us. There’s a mystical child in each of us, wide-eyed with rapture at the dance of life; the child who sees the fabric of light that strings everything together.”
― Amos Smith, Healing the Divide: Recovering Christianity’s Mystic Roots