Living the Dream? Quotes

“When we image borders, we fail at imaging God.”
― Tristan Sherwin, Living the Dream?: The Problem with Escapist, Exhibitionist, Empire-Building Christianity

“Jesus helps us to see when people break the second and third commandments.”
― Tristan Sherwin, Living the Dream?: The Problem with Escapist, Exhibitionist, Empire-Building Christianity

“In Jesus, God deals with our bastardisations. The incarnation was the Creator's means of giving us a multisensory, no-holds-barred, tangible experience of the divine nature. God condescended to the limits of our means of knowing reality and truth. We struggle to put our flesh into words, but God's word--God's self-expression--became flesh and dwelled with us, for us.
This is nothing short of an act of love, an act of revelation, and act of transferring the fullness of one's self into a vulnerable form so that it can be felt by another. God chooses to step into the range of our grasp, allowing our awareness of the divine to move from abstract imagination to relational discovery.
Such a step certainly doesn't remove the mystery of who or what God is. Questions remain. But it does allow us to enter into that mystery with the whole of our beings. We don't have to stop being human to embrace the mystery of God. By God's invitation, we can poke our doubting and enquiring digits into the opened side of the incomprehensible made manifest. As we do so, we can know what God is like; God is like Jesus, and, to use Pastor Brian Zahnd's oft-quoted summary, God has *always* been like Jesus.”
― Tristan Sherwin, Living the Dream?: The Problem with Escapist, Exhibitionist, Empire-Building Christianity

“God’s work in creation is a similar affair, and if there’s an encouraging aside to take from this story so far (a lesson that recurs throughout the Bible), it’s that God is drawn to the broken and neglected things, and does the miraculous with them.”
― Tristan Sherwin, Living the Dream?: The Problem with Escapist, Exhibitionist, Empire-Building Christianity

“This is crucial to note; God, according to Genesis, is not at war with all that is made. Neither does God use war to bring order to all that is made. Order comes through God’s liberating and loving proclamation.”
― Tristan Sherwin, Living the Dream?: The Problem with Escapist, Exhibitionist, Empire-Building Christianity

“In an ironic twist, then, what many of us today think of as a statement of Theistic faith, would have been originally heard as the Atheistic treaty of its day. Imagine the uproar that Friedrich Nietzsche’s God is Dead, or Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great have spawned in modern times, and you’re close to the paradigm-smashing impact of Genesis in its own culture.”
― Tristan Sherwin, Living the Dream?: The Problem with Escapist, Exhibitionist, Empire-Building Christianity