Quotes from Fleming Rutledge

The entire thrust of this season at the end of the church year is designed to bring us face-to-face with reality—reality about sin and death, reality about the human race, reality about God. Something ultimate has entered our world, something or Someone that calls us to attention, calls us out of our daily preoccupations and our routine points of view. That is what this season with its special biblical readings is designed to reveal

Evil is more than the sum of individual misdeeds. Evil has a life of its own. It is not enough to stand aside from it. If it is not actively resisted, it sweeps all before it. Part of a Christian's calling is to resist evil, and in doing so, to endure to the end.

Nothing in the Bible makes any religious sense unless we are people of faith who believe that God's own self speaks to us in this living Word.

The drift away from the Bible has weakened the church.

The scandalous "word of the cross" is God's own Word. The link between scandal and God is in itself irreligious; this is another aspect of the uniqueness of the Christian message.

The scandalous "word of the cross" is not a human word. It is the Spirit-empowered presence of God in the preaching of the crucified One.

The Holy Spirit, so central to New Testament writings as diverse as those of Paul, John, and the author of Acts, inhabits the message and empowers the speaker, so that the proclamation of God's act in Christ is the new occasion of creation, issuing from the Trinitarian power of the originating Word itself.

should be clear by now that this making-right, or rectification, is not a process. It is already true, in Christ; but it is true eschatologically, from the perspective of the End. The now–not yet dynamic is operative here, as always.

Therefore, so long as we live in this fallen world, we are simul iustus et peccator (saint and sinner simultaneously), until the destruction of the old Adam is completed as God makes all things new (Rev. 21:5; Isa. 42:9; 43:19; Gal. 6:15).

By becoming one of the poor who was deprived of his rights, by dying as one of those robbed of justice, God's Son submitted to the utmost extremity of humiliation, entering into total solidarity with those who are without help.

The case being tried involves a question of ultimate truth — the question of who God is and where he stands; and for just that reason, it is God who will inevitably do the judging.

It is God's new creative act, his great reclamation project that is even greater than the creation itself, because whereas we are "wonderfully created," we are "yet more wonderfully restored."30

The church is not called to be a "change agent"—God is the agent of change. The Lord of the kosmos has already wrought the Great Exchange in his cross and resurrection, and the life of the people of God is sustained by that mighty enterprise.26 The calling of the church is to place itself where God is already at work.

resolve is not incompatible with Christian humility.

the wrath of God is always exercised in the service of God's good purposes. It is the unconditional love of God manifested against anything that would frustrate or destroy the designs of his love. A

God did not change his mind about us on account of the cross or on any other account. He did not need to have his mind changed. He was never opposed to us. It is not his opposition to us but our opposition to him that had to be overcome, and the only way it could be overcome was from God's side, by God's initiative, from inside human flesh — the human flesh of the Son.44 The divine hostility, or wrath of God, has always been an aspect of his love.

Christ's recapitulation of the human story does not simply invite us into the divine life. There is an objective reality about it; it has happened over our dead bodies, so to speak.

The world's religions have certain traits in common, but until the gospel of Jesus Christ burst upon the Mediterranean world, no one in the history of human imagination had conceived of such a thing as the worship of a crucified man.

Indeed, "theory" is a poor word to choose when seeking to understand the testimony of the Bible. 14 The Old and New Testaments do not present theories at any time. 15 Instead, we find stories, images, metaphors, symbols, sagas, sermons, songs, letters, poems. It would be hard to find writing that is less theoretical.

Few outside academia would know that the incongruities so frequently cited today as proof of the Bible's unreliability were noted many centuries ago by such as Origen and Calvin.

The disappointment, brokenness, suffering, and pain that characterize life in this present world is held in dynamic tension with the promise of future glory that is yet to come. In that Advent tension, the church lives its life.

In the present time, God's "wording" (logizomai) of his new creation proceeds largely in a hidden way. The invincible transforming power of God's coming future is acting simultaneously in and through the deeply flawed realities of the present human situation.

The believers of the future will be brought into the near presence of Jesus, not just in the sense that the stories of his life will be retold, but because the apostolic preaching, by the action of the Spirit, makes Jesus present.

The Son of God did not come to make good people better but to give life to the dead.