Did God Kill Jesus? Quotes

“God’s power, it turns out, comes in God’s willingness to abdicate power. God saves the world through submission to the point of solidarity with human weakness. Jesus’ final teaching to his disciples was to wash their feet and then tell them to go and do likewise, to act as servants to the world. Too often, Christians have done just the opposite.”
― Tony Jones, Did God Kill Jesus?: Searching for Love in History's Most Famous Execution – Essential Biblical Theology on Atonement and Grace

“Paul famously wrote, “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”5 How often do we measure Christian ideas and beliefs by these criteria?”
― Tony Jones, Did God Kill Jesus?: Searching for Love in History's Most Famous Execution – Essential Biblical Theology on Atonement and Grace

“God is one with the powerless, one with the hopeless, one with the broken. And we know this because of Jesus. Jesus is the most fully realized revelation of God that we’ve got, and what we can see of God in the life of Jesus is the perfect example of self-limitation and humility.”
― Tony Jones, Did God Kill Jesus?: Searching for Love in History's Most Famous Execution – Essential Biblical Theology on Atonement and Grace

“the Bible is the second most important revelation of God to humanity. The most important revelation of God is Jesus himself.”
― Tony Jones, Did God Kill Jesus?: Searching for Love in History's Most Famous Execution – Essential Biblical Theology on Atonement and Grace

“Research shows that those who believe in a wrathful God are more likely to suffer from depression and anxiety disorders than those who believe in a loving, merciful God.”
― Tony Jones, Did God Kill Jesus?: Searching for Love in History's Most Famous Execution – Essential Biblical Theology on Atonement and Grace

“No matter the reason, the people didn’t turn on Jesus because they were Jews. They turned on Jesus because they were human.”
― Tony Jones, Did God Kill Jesus?: Searching for Love in History's Most Famous Execution – Essential Biblical Theology on Atonement and Grace

“To whom should we listen? The loudest voices? The most educated? The formerly marginalized? The formerly powerful? Those with the most retweets? Those who have traditionally spoken for God are now looked at askance by many people, and with good reason. Too often they’ve used their Christian platform for political and military gain. They’ve forgotten that the story of God, exemplified in Jesus, is an abdication of power. It’s a story of self-limitation and humility. It’s a story lived in solidarity with those at the margins. To whom should we listen? To Jesus on the cross.”
― Tony Jones, Did God Kill Jesus?: Searching for Love in History's Most Famous Execution – Essential Biblical Theology on Atonement and Grace

“on the cross, just moments before his death, Jesus cries out in anguish and dereliction, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” That is the pivot point of all cosmic history, for in that moment God became fully human. Only when God felt abandoned, alone in the universe, did God gain total empathy with the human condition.”
― Tony Jones, Did God Kill Jesus?: Searching for Love in History's Most Famous Execution – Essential Biblical Theology on Atonement and Grace

“Maybe you’ve heard someone say, “Sure, God is loving, but his love is balanced with his justice” or “Without justice, love is not possible.” These statements speak of God’s love as an attribute of God. But, for the Divinity model, God’s very nature is love. Love is not an aspect of God’s being; love is God’s very being.”
― Tony Jones, Did God Kill Jesus?: Searching for Love in History's Most Famous Execution – Essential Biblical Theology on Atonement and Grace

“Possibly the most famous quote in all of Orthodox theology comes from Athanasius (c. 293–373), who in his book, On the Incarnation, wrote of Christ, “For he was made man so that we might become God.”
― Tony Jones, Did God Kill Jesus?: Searching for Love in History's Most Famous Execution – Essential Biblical Theology on Atonement and Grace

“Jesus, uniquely at one with God, taught that the ultimate rule is love and that any other religious rule that did not extend God’s reign of love needed to be reconsidered. Jesus hinted that this rule of love was even to be extended to non-Jews, and this became a major theme of Paul’s ministry and writing a couple of decades later.”
― Tony Jones, Did God Kill Jesus?: Searching for Love in History's Most Famous Execution – Essential Biblical Theology on Atonement and Grace

“Bad theology begets ugly Christianity. Good theology begets beautiful Christianity.”
― Tony Jones, Did God Kill Jesus?: Searching for Love in History's Most Famous Execution – Essential Biblical Theology on Atonement and Grace

“If we can fight the tendency to let it become so familiar that we don’t notice it, we can be challenged every week to remember that God doesn’t want our bloody victories and that sacrifice doesn’t really overcome our rivalries. At least for Christians, that crucifix should be the emblem of the end of violence.”
― Tony Jones, Did God Kill Jesus?: Searching for Love in History's Most Famous Execution – Essential Biblical Theology on Atonement and Grace

“If we are supposed to learn about love from God, then the idea that God predestined us to sin, which results in our eternal damnation and requires God’s Son to die on the cross, teaches us very little about love.”
― Tony Jones, Did God Kill Jesus?: Searching for Love in History's Most Famous Execution – Essential Biblical Theology on Atonement and Grace

“Yes, it is hard to conceive of orthodox Christian faith without the idea of original sin. That’s a sign of just how successful Augustine’s ideas have been in the Western church. But that does not make the idea biblical or right. One can acknowledge the universality of the human proclivity toward sin without affirming either Calvin’s total depravity or Augustine’s original sin. One merely has to accept simple human fallibility. We’re neither immortal nor perfect. We’re fallible. We make mistakes. And we die.”
― Tony Jones, Did God Kill Jesus?: Searching for Love in History's Most Famous Execution – Essential Biblical Theology on Atonement and Grace

“To our question Who killed Jesus? the answer too often has been The Jews! The unconscionable anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism promulgated by this verse started in the early church and runs through the Crusades and Hitler to white supremacy in our own day.”
― Tony Jones, Did God Kill Jesus?: Searching for Love in History's Most Famous Execution – Essential Biblical Theology on Atonement and Grace

“So when Jesus defended his disciples for picking grain on the Sabbath, he was essentially telling his interrogators that they misunderstood God’s relationship with human beings. He was saying, in effect, Yes, there are rules, but don’t let the rules get in the way of loving God and others. And when Jesus healed a leper, he was giving an object lesson in the same: by the power of God’s Spirit, the people who have been excluded are now included.”
― Tony Jones, Did God Kill Jesus?: Searching for Love in History's Most Famous Execution – Essential Biblical Theology on Atonement and Grace

“The New Testament varies widely as well, with the Gospel writers understanding Jesus’ death as a Passover sacrifice and the author of Hebrews considering it a Yom Kippur sacrifice. Mixing those two is a bit like putting a Christmas tree up on Easter, which is basically what Paul does in his various letters.”
― Tony Jones, Did God Kill Jesus?: Searching for Love in History's Most Famous Execution – Essential Biblical Theology on Atonement and Grace

“ago, Augustine argued that if God knows something’s”
― Tony Jones, Did God Kill Jesus?: Searching for Love in History's Most Famous Execution – Essential Biblical Theology on Atonement and Grace