Quotes from Scot McKnight

In his book The Indelible Image, New Testament scholar Ben Witherington III reiterates a common piece of interpretive wisdom: "A text without a context is just a pretext for what we want it to mean.

One reason why so many Christians today don't know the Old Testament is because their "gospel" doesn't even need it!

The clearest way to put this is to say that Jesus thinks that following him means following the Torah. Those who follow him (and his teaching of the Torah) will be called "great" in the kingdom. Anyone who denies his teachings and teaches others not to follow him (and through him the Torah) will be called "least" in the kingdom.

Jesus is infallible and we are not.

The language describes the royal entourage who will ascend to welcome the King of Glory in the air (air does not mean heaven), in order to usher him back to earth in royal celebration. In other words, the language signals a common image: when the watchmen of a walled city heard the trumpet sound, signaling the proximity of their royal king, they would send out an entourage and create a royal procession as the victorious king returned.

J. Nelson Kraybill therefore contends that the "rapture" more accurately describes not being whisked away into heaven but our going out to meet Jesus to welcome him back to earth!

The top two lines on every prophet's job description look like this: Speak openly and clearly about what God is for. Speak openly and clearly about what God is against. The third and fourth lines look like this: I [God] am with you. Have courage. (But you may have to duck or die.)

In the Roman Empire a child's religion was determined not by some choice in the teenage years but by that child's family.

Fourth lesson in Bible reading: we are challenged to be better than nonfollowers. Followers are marked by a greater righteousness or by more righteousness. (Just what that more will look like can be found in the antitheses of 5:21–48.)

But Augustine knew the Bible's main mission: so that we can become people who love God and love others. If our reading of the Bible leads to this, the mission is accomplished. If it isn't …

As we have already explained, conversion is a journey that begins for the infant at baptism, during which a seed is planted—a seed that will grow.

If God entered Abraham into the covenant by circumcision and demanded Abraham enter his son through circumcision, then it is clear that God thinks the best way to form children into the covenant faith is by way of birthright entrance into the covenant.

Since—and this is why it changed how I read the Bible—God chose to communicate in language, since language is always shaped by context, and since God chose to speak to us over time through many writers, God also chose to speak to us in a variety of ways and expressions. Furthermore, I believe that because the gospel story is so deep and wide, God needed a variety of expressions to give us a fuller picture of the Story.

Prayer was and is both a spontaneous act and a recitative

We stand with Calvin when it comes to the moral compass: Jesus "means that however difficult, arduous, troublesome or painful God's rule may be, we must make no excuse for that, as the righteousness of God should be worth more to us, than all the other things which are chiefly dear and precious.

It tells us that God gave the Bible a mission: God speaks to us so we will be the kind of people he wants and will live the way he wants us to live.

Every scene of heaven in the Bible shows us a vision of the Church praying together and singing together and praising together.

If you compare the written prayers from the psalms, the Lord's Prayer, or those we find in the prayer books of the church, one thing will immediately strike any reader: The prayers from those sources are theologically rich and aesthetically appropriate. I cannot always say this of the spontaneous prayers of many Christians—and I am not impugning their motives or questioning their hearts.

God gave the Bible not so we can know it but so we can know and love God through it.

Though Son of God and though entitled to provisions, Jesus didn't let his physical desires dictate decisions.

The atonement is designed by God to restore cracked Eikons into glory-producing Eikons by participation in the perfect Eikon, Jesus Chirst, who redeems the cosmos. To be an Eikon, then, is to be charged with a theocentric and missional life. Prior to the fall, Adam and Eve did what they were supposed to do: they "eikoned." And cracked Eikons are being restored so that they can eikon now and so that they will eikon forever.

Gospels of Sin Management" presume a Christ with no serious work other than redeeming humankind … [and] they foster "vampire Christians," who only want a little blood for their sins but nothing more to do with Jesus until heaven. Dallas

The end of the Sermon makes it clear that Jesus expects his followers to take up his words and live them out regardless of the cost. I know of no alternative. Take them or leave them, is what I say to myself.

the God of the Bible is so immense, omnipotent, and omniscient that for God, knowing each of us in the depths of our beings is an afternoon walk in Sydney's botanical garden. The God of Jesus knows us by name, knows our minds and hearts and emotions, loves us (anyway), and summons us, as it were, into the divine presence to lay out our requests.