Quotes from William H. Willimon

if we are going to meet God, we will meet God in the flesh.

To be a perpetual victim is always to have your life named, claimed, and determined by the victimizer. It is to give the perpetrator of injustice power over who you are and what you mean.

The Bible's concern is not if we shall believe but what we shall believe.

Most of us long for balance in our lives, equilibrium and serene contentment. But that was the way of the Buddha, not Jesus. Jesus blessed those who thirsted after God like a thirsty animal.

Love your neighbor as yourself" cannot mean love your neighbor as if your neighbor were you. Only

Obliteration bombing of civilian populations had come to be seen as a military necessity. A terrible evil had been defended as a way to a greater good. After the bomb, all sorts of moral compromises were easier—nearly two million abortions a year seemed a mere matter of freedom of choice, and the plight of the poor in the world's richest nation was a matter of economic necessity.

the lynching, he knew his people felt that he ought to stick with saving souls and stay out of local controversies.

We may come singing 'Just As I Am,' but we will not stay by being our same old selves. The needs of the world are too great, the suffering and pain too extensive, the lures of the world too seductive for us to begin to change the world unless we are changed, unless conversion of life and morals becomes our pattern.

Whenever the Church has imagined that it had a claim upon God which others did not have, it is already fallen away from grace.

The challenge of Jesus is the political dilemma of how to be faithful to a strange community, which is shaped by a story of how God is with us. In this chapter we will challenge the assumption, so prevalent at least since Constantine, that the church is judged politically by how well or ill the church's presence in the world works to the advantage of the world.

Most ethics since Kant has sought to be democratic. Kant's "categorical imperative" underwrote the assumption that all people could be moral without training since they had available to them all they needed insofar as they were rational. Kant's project, therefore, was to free the moral agent from the arbitrary and contingent characters of our histories and communities.

A sovereign, creative, truthful God is not threatened by our human attempts to describe and better to understand the nature and purposes of God.

The charge of blasphemy, if it is ever made, is treated as a quaint anachronism; but the charge of treason, of placing another loyalty above that to the nation state, is treated as the unforgivable crime.

A Princeton student being interviewed by a reporter was questioned about the prospect of American troops going to Afghanistan when the Soviet Union invaded there. "There's nothing worth dying for," was her response. Which means of course that one day she shall have the unpleasant task of dying for nothing.

Just let the Pope tell us that our Western middle-class need for uninhibited sexual self-expression is less important to him and the church than the poor of Latin America, and some of our brightest academic ethicists shall attempt to relegate him to the domain of those who are out of it, behind the times.

The loss of Christendom gives us a joyous opportunity to reclaim the freedom to proclaim the gospel in a way in which we cannot when the main social task of the church is to serve as one among many helpful props for the state.

The bombing of helpless and unprotected civilians is a strategy which has aroused the horror of all mankind. I recall with pride that the United States consistently has taken the lead in urging that this inhuman practice be prohibited.

Mainline American Protestantism, as is often the case, plodded wearily along as if nothing had changed. Like an aging dowager, living in a decaying mansion on the edge of town, bankrupt and penniless, house decaying around her but acting as if her family still controlled the city, our theologians and church leaders continued to think and act as if we were in charge, as if the old arrangements were still valid.