Quotes from Gregory A. Boyd

as the New Testament and the church tradition teach, the life of God is nothing other than the perfect love that eternally unites the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and this Triune God spoke creation into being with the ultimate goal of inviting humans to share in this life. This is what God created us to long for!

It is important that we never separate our love for God from our love for others. For loving our neighbors as ourselves is one central way we love God.

Since the primary motive of the evil is disguise, one of the places evil people are most likely to be found is within the church. What better way to conceal one's evil from oneself, as well as from others, than to be a deacon or some other highly visible form of Christian within our culture?"[9

What kind of holiness does the Western Church manifest today? To answer this, we need only ask: Are the prostitutes and tax collectors of our day attracted to us or repelled by us?

differences between "magic" and biblical faith is that magic is about engaging in behaviors that ultimately benefit the practitioner, while biblical faith is about cultivating a covenantal relationship with God that is built on mutual trust.

To a large degree we have preached our own version of the knowledge of good and evil as though it were the message of salvation. We need to confess that we have sinned in the gravest fashion by frequently loving our version of truth and ethics more than people, and even God himself. For one cannot genuinely love God while refusing to love one's neighbor (1 John 4:20).

The result is that it has become humanly impossible for many around the globe to hear the good news as good. Instead, because of its kingdom-of-the-world associations, they hear the gospel as bad news, as American news, exploitive capitalistic news, greedy news, violent news, and morally decadent news. They can't see the beauty of the cross because everything the American flag represents to them is in the way.

Jesus came into this world and died on the cross to blow apart all the deceptive mental pictures of God that we've been enslaved to since the original fall and that lie at the root of all idolatry and sin

God doesn't depend primarily on the words of his disciples, nor on their clever apologetic arguments, nor on their ability to concoct ingenious marketing techniques. God relies on his disciples participating in the love that he is and thus replicating it toward each other within the body and toward all others outside the body.

The question that wins the world, and the question that must define the individual and collective life of kingdom-of-God citizens is, how do we take up the cross for the world? How do we best communicate to others their unsurpassable worth before God? How do we serve and wash the feet of the oppressed and despised?

The central mark of a maturing Christian, and of a maturing congregation, is that they increasingly love others as Christ loves them.

Our Kingdom call is to revolt against the Powers by dismantling the hierarchy of privilege, rejecting all racial stereotypes and judgments, forging meaningful relationships across ethnic lines, and submitting ourselves to one another as we listen, learn, and follow one another.

any suggestion that God has returned to his Old Testament theocratic mode of operation—as in raising up America as a uniquely favored nation—is not only unwarranted, it is a direct assault on the distinct holiness of Jesus Christ and the kingdom he died to establish.

Can I bring the Lord back into my mind-flow every few seconds so that God shall always be in my mind? I choose to make the rest of my life an experiment in answering this question. Frank Laubach1

What the fear of hell could not do, my discovery of the love of God could do: it began to permanently break the stronghold

We are to derive worth from God alone and to love without judgment and without conditions on the basis of the unsurpassable fullness of life we get from God. Our only job is to love, not judge.

Our call is to trust that the foolishness of self-sacrificial love will overcome evil in the end. Our call is to manifest the beauty of a Savior who loves indiscriminately while revolting against all hatred and violence. This is the humble mustard seed revolution that will in the end transform the world.

If we further consider this divine panoramic view within which all evil is supposedly a secret good is held by a God who, according to Scripture, has a passionate hatred toward all evil, the solution becomes more problematic still. For it is certainly not clear how God could hate what he himself wills and sees as a contributing ingredient in the good of the whole. If all things play themselves out according to a divine plan, how can God genuinely hate anything?

Our central job is not to solve the world's problems. Our job is to draw our entire life from Christ and manifest that life to others. Nothing could be simpler—and nothing could be more challenging.

In a creation populated with free agents, God doesn't always get what he wants. Augustine and the church tradition that followed him were simply mistaken when they insisted that the will of the omnipotent is always undefeated. Because God desires a creation in which love is a reality, he allows his will to be defeated to some extent.

If God does not know with certainty all that will come to pass, as Open Theism argues, believers cannot have the assurance that God has a purpose for every event of their life. Tragedies may occur that God did not specifically ordain or allow, for he did not even know for certain that they would come about. Against such a notion, Scripture encourages believers to look for the hand of God in the midst of their hardships (Exod. 4:11; Heb. 12:3–13). 2.

God acts toward his people, as much as possible, but since he is a God of persuasion rather than coercion, God also allows his people to act on him and to thereby condition the form his self-revelation takes, as much as this is necessary to remain in solidarity with, and to continue to work through, his fallen and culturally conditioned people.

Our choices matter. Much hangs in the balance. Our freedom is God's risk and our dignity.

the creational monotheism of the Bible and of the church seems to logically require something like a prehistoric fall, regardless of how we interpret the Chaoskampf material of the Old Testament. Assuming that there is one eternal Creator God who is all-good and all-powerful, it is illogical to posit a foundational structural evil within the cosmos (which