Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places Quotes

“We cannot be too careful about the words we use; we start out using them and they end up using us.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology

“Stories are verbal acts of hospitality.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology

“The Latin words humus, soil/earth, and homo, human being, have a common derivation, from which we also get our word 'humble.' This is the Genesis origin of who we are: dust - dust that the Lord God used to make us a human being. If we cultivate a lively sense of our origin and nurture a sense of continuity with it, who knows, we may also acquire humility.”
― Eugene Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places

“We live in a culture that has replaced soul with self. This reduction turns people into either problems or consumers. Insofar as we acquiesce in that replacement, we gradually but surely regress in our identity, for we end up thinking of ourselves and dealing with others in marketplace terms: everyone we meet is either a potential recruit to join our enterprise or a potential consumer for what we are selling; or we ourselves are the potential recruits and consumers. Neither we nor our friends have any dignity just as we are, only in terms of how we or they can be used.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology

“God’s great love and purposes for us are all worked out in messes in our kitchens and backyards, in storms and sins, blue skies, the daily work and dreams of our common lives. God works with us as we are and not as we should be or think we should be.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology

“When it comes to dealing with God, most of us spend considerable time trying our own hands at either being or making gods. Jesus blocks the way. Jesus is not a god of our own making and he is certainly not a god designed to win popularity contests.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology

“If we don't know where we are going, any road will get us there. But if we have a destination - in this case a life lived to the glory of God - there is a well-marked way, the Jesus-revealed Way. Spiritual theology is the attention that we give to the details of living life on this way. It is a protest against theology depersonalized into information about God; it is a protest against theology functionalized into a program of strategic planning for God.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology

“Soul" is a barrier against reduction, against human life reduced to biology and genitals, culture and utility, race and ethnicity. It signals an interiority that permeates all exteriority, an invisibility that everywhere inhabits visibility. "Soul" carries with it resonances of God-created, God-sustained, and God-blessed. It is our most comprehensive term for designating the core being of men and women.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology

“Any understanding of God that doesn’t take into account God’s silence is a half truth — in effect, a cruel distortion — and leaves us vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation by leaders who are quite willing to fill in the biblical blanks with what the Holy Spirit never tells us.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology

“No matter how right we are in what we believe about God, no matter how accurately we phrase our belief or how magnificently and persuasively we preach or write or declare it, if love does not shape the way we speak and act, we falsify the creed, we confess a lie.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Christ Plays In Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology

“Their creed kept them from imagining that our lives are improved by collecting gods and goddesses — or anything else, for that matter; there was no need for accumulating things, or for searching out every nook and cranny of the world for new insights, novel experiences, exotic tales. Their creed gave their community a center and a centering: one LORD, the LORD alone.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Christ Plays In Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology

“In reality, the ‘founding meal’ is only one link in a long chain of meals which Jesus shared with his followers and which they continued after Easter . . . the last supper has its historical roots in this chain of gatherings”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Christ Plays In Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology

“And here is the marvelous thing: we enter the center of the story without becoming the center of the story.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Christ Plays In Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology

“Pass the broccoli” and “Hear the Word of God” carry equal weight in conversations among the saved. The sacraments are served in kitchen and chancel alike.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Christ Plays In Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology

“This is so characteristic of biblical spirituality: the ordinary and the miraculous are on a single continuum.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Christ Plays In Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology

“It is important to recognize this at the outset, for salvation is not the spiritual diagnosis of souls, one here, one there; it is the story of a people, a community with a past, with ancestors, with common experience.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Christ Plays In Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology

“Pharaoh employs size and force and prestige to control and oppress. God employs an eighty-year-old desert shepherd and his brother, their only weapon a stick, and a ragtag company of despised slaves to bring about freedom and salvation for the whole world.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Christ Plays In Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology

“The work of salvation led by this dilatory, indecisive, foot-dragging loser? The work of salvation entrusted to this argumentative, excuse-making man who shows no sign of reverence before God, no readiness to obey God’s clear command? But maybe that is the point. Salvation is God’s work: Jesus saves. Incompetence may be the essential qualification, lest we impatiently and presumptuously take over the business and start managing a vast and intricate economy that we have no way of comprehending.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Christ Plays In Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology

“When we rip the moral life from the living context of the Christ life, pull it up by the roots from the nourishing, loamy soil of Scripture, we end up holding a withered, drooping, and finally dead flower, a cut flower.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Christ Plays In Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology

“Instead of being formed by the Spirit that hovered over the waters and raised Jesus from the dead, we are malformed into lives of moral workaholism or pious athleticism.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Christ Plays In Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology

“Jesus draws us into a pervasive awareness of Spirit, training us as “detectives of divinity”36 to interpret the signs and understand the sayings as evidence of the unseen yet unmistakable presence of God. We learn to recognize the glory.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Christ Plays In Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology

“Jesus is the dictionary in which we look up the meaning of words.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Christ Plays In Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology

“God’s great love and purposes for us are all worked out in messes in our kitchens and backyards, in storms and sins, blue skies, the daily work and dreams of our common lives. God works with us as we are and not as we should be or think we should be. God deals with us where we are and not where we would like to be.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Christ Plays In Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology

“Mountains are nice as long as they inspire lofty thoughts, but if one stands in the way of my convenience, a bulldozer can be called in to get rid of it.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Christ Plays In Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology

“Wonder is the only adequate launching pad for exploring a spirituality of creation, keeping us open-eyed, expectant, alive to life that is always more than we can account for, that always exceeds our calculations, that is always beyond anything we can make.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Christ Plays In Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology

“When we say “soul” we are calling attention to the God-origins, God-intentions, God-operations that make us what we are. It is the most personal and most comprehensive term for who we are — man, woman, and child.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Christ Plays In Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology

“It is the devil’s work to get us worked up thinking and acting for God and then subtly detach us from a relational obedience and adoration of God, substituting our selves, our godlike egos, in the place originally occupied by God.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Christ Plays In Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology

“transcendence vaguely intermingled with intimacy”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Christ Plays In Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology

“In our times “spirituality” has become a major business for entrepreneurs, a recreational sport for the bored, and for others, whether many or few (it is difficult to discern), a serious and disciplined commitment to live deeply and fully in relation to God.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Christ Plays In Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology

“The consensus had always held that the invisible is behind and gives energy to the visible;”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Christ Plays In Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology