Quotes from Scot McKnight

A person is a person through other persons.

What must be emphasized in all of this is the difference between trusting Christ, the real person Jesus, with all that that naturally involves, versus trusting some arrangement for sin-remission set up through him — trusting only his role as guilt remover. These

I hope you agree with me that the hope for the world is the local church, and that the heart of God's plan is found in creating a whole new society in a local church. If

book of Revelation is written to shape a church surrounded by the swamping and creeping ways of Babylon.

This entire book—don't forget this please—is for each of those seven churches. Every vision, every interlude, every song is for each of them.

One thing that has to cease among Christians is the appeal to an audience to give with the promise of getting something.

Flannery O'Connor—it's right, but it ain't right enough.

I hope at some time you can read J. R. R. Tolkien's brilliant short story called "Leaf by Niggle," because I can think of no better description of the continuity of this life in the New Heavens and the New Earth.)

Fawning over Babylon's leaders divides the church. Nearly half of the American church votes one way as one half votes the other. If one's allegiance is to a party, if one thinks one's party is truly Christian, one has cut off one's sisters and brothers.

Bonhoeffer sketched what would in reality become his own virtue and fate: "But their peace will never be greater than when they encounter

Christopher Rowland, who has plumbed apocalyptic literature as well as anyone in the modern era, counters much of the common interpretation of Revelation when he says, "We should not ask of apocalypses, what do they mean? Rather, we should ask, how do the images and designs work? How do they affect us and change our lives?

At the heart of the Ten Commandments is an Israelite's honesty about one's neighbor (Exod 20:16). At the heart of the Bible's ethic is telling the truth. Honesty mattered then and it matters now.

They have failed to understand the timelessness of Babylon, that Babylon is always with us. One careful reading of the major chapters about Babylon is all one needs to form a Babylonian hermeneutic that provides discernment of Babylon in America and in its churches. Yet repeated failed readings of Revelation have today led to a failure to discern Babylon.

kingdom mission is church mission, church mission is kingdom mission, and there is no kingdom mission that is not church mission.

The reality is that each of our churches has created a Christian culture and Christian life for likes and sames and similiarities and identicals. Instead of powering God's grand social experiment, we've cut up God's plan into segregated groups, with the incredibly aggravating and God-dishonoring result that most of us are invisible to one another.

The release of souls from this embodied life into a celestial disembodied existence is not a biblical notion. The opposite is the case with Jesus and for the entire Bible.

hold it, then, as an axiom — or else I'd stop writing right now — that our calling is to follow Jesus in our context rather than to retrieve and re-create his context in our world. What

If you want to know how Jesus understands the Christian life, the place to begin is with what he means by kingdom of God.

Michael Green cuts through church cant: "God's church exists not for itself but for the benefit of those who are not yet members. . . . [and] the church which lives for itself will be sure to die by itself." The church is not a religious club and it does not have a secular mission. Instead, it is a worshipping and sending community.

God did not give the Bible in order that we could master him or it; God gave the Bible so we could live it, so we could be mastered by it. The moment we think we've mastered it, we have failed to be readers of the Bible. Of course, I think we should read the Bible and know it—but it is the specific element of reading for mastery versus reading to be mastered that grows out of this shortcut.

But humans want to usurp the place of God, making themselves the center of the Story.

To reveal what the kingdom of God is like, Jesus tells parables. And these parables usher his listeners and readers into a world he called kingdom.

What about the poor? How many poor people, unemployed people, financially struggling people are in your church? Are they even willing to let those facts be known? If not, why not?

The question we need to ask today is this, and this question strikes to the heart of how we read the Bible: Do we seek to retrieve that cultural world and those cultural expressions, or do we live the same gospel in a different way in a different day?