Quotes from Scot McKnight

The book of Revelation is for modern-day disciples who have eyes to see the power of the empire in our world and in our churches and in our lives and yours.

They set the kindling afire to consume the body of a man who had but one goal—to make the Bible readable for everyone.

What is not out of the question is that what the world sees as a grotesque image, the cross, has become for Christians a place of grace

Deceit finds its way into every religion, including Christianity. In fact, deceit was at work from the very beginning. Two sorts of deceit are found in our verses: some leaders deceive the people of God (7:15–20), while some deceive themselves (7:21–23).

Calling God "Father" (Abba) is not unique to Jesus,15 and neither is it a revelation of a religious profundity that Judaism had not yet comprehended (what can be more intimate than Hosea 1–2 or 11:1–4?). Instead of its being unique, "Father" is characteristic of Jesus but would not have been at all offensive in Judaism.

These common approaches fail the words of Jesus because in the Sermon Jesus calls his followers to do what he teaches. Those who don't do what he says, in fact, are condemned as foolish.

Let your life speak.

Thus, see Old Testament texts like Pss 68:5; 103:13–14; Isa 63:15–16; Jer 31:9, 20, the famous avinu malkeinu ("Our Father, our King") lines in classic Jewish prayers, like Ahabah Rabah and The Litany for the New Year, and texts like 4Q372 fragment 1:16.

As Tom Wright describes it, Mary's Song is the "gospel before the gospel" and it "goes with a swing and a clap and a stamp." Mary's Song is an expression of gratitude for God morphing her bad reputation into a messianic vocation. But her past is even more than this unfortunate label.

The martyrs who sing the new ode of Moses sing a song not of their own liberation from Egypt or their own salvation but of the impact of their witness on the world around them. Their witness led a mass of people to praise the God on the throne and his Lamb. John's ode is like Moses's ode, but it's also altogether new at the same time.

as life is a story, so also is spiritual formation a story—a journey from earth to heaven.

even Jesus was resurrected with his wounds." I like that: we, too, are raised to a vocation with the wounds of our past intact, visible, and a witness to what God can do.

The ways of reading Revelation that spend time speculating about the questions When will all this happen? and Who is the antichrist? fail the church in discipleship. Instead of a discipleship that teaches us to discern Babylon among us and shows us how to live in Babylon as dissidents instead of conformists, these speculative questions teach Christians how to wait for the escape from Babylon.

John's core chapters (6–19) tell us, and this concludes our observations, that the three times seven judgments are disciplines designed by God to woo people from the way of the Dragon to the way of the Lamb.

1) If disciples really trust God, they will live as if treasures in heaven really matter; (2) those whose perspective is distorted by materialism are blinded to God's truth; and (3) one either loves God or money, and those who think they can love both are idolaters.

Babylon was and is a timeless trope for empires and nations and powers that systematize injustices, oppress the people of God, and suppress the truths of liberation. Babylon is no more a city of the future than it is a city of the here and now.

Am I absorbed with an Ethic from Beyond? Is my life too absorbed with the here and now?

That is, until we find the story that leads us to the gospel claim that Jesus is the Messiah, we don't have the Bible's story right.

The heart of Babylon will always be arrogant self-sufficiency that has no need for God, no care for the people of God, and no commitment to the ways of God.

when we peer into our own hearts, we will have sufficient cause — even laughably ridiculous cause — to see our own sin and be humbled before God. That will lead us to an other-awareness that our fellow disciples and humans are like us, sinners in need of mercy, grace, forgiveness, and patience. This reversal of the proclivity to be gods creates on our part a tenderness in our perception of the sins of others.

Romans 12–16 is lived theology, and Romans 1–11 is written to prop up that lived theology. Romans 12–16 is not the application of Paul's theology, nor is Romans a classic example of the indicative leading to the imperative. What Paul had in focus was the lack of praxis, the lack of lived theology, the lack of peace in Rome, and he wrote Romans both to urge a new kind of lived theology (12–16) and to offer a rationale (1–11) for that praxis.

The entire sweep of the Bible teaches that Christians in non-Christian environments are not to be worried so much about changing their environments as they are to remain faithful in whatever kind of environment they find themselves.

Hebrew for "poor, humble." The "pious poor" of Judaism. After the Exile in Babylon (587 BC), a social class of Jews who returned were known as much for their commitment to the Torah* and the temple as for their economic poverty. Their situation led them to trust in God and to pray for him to establish his justice in the Land. Accordingly, this group was one in which hopes for the Messiah flourished

The "pure" in heart know the temptation of externalism and the social honor that comes with being pure in hands, or in observance, or in reputation (15:1–20; 23:25–28).41 But the pure in heart see God as a person to be loved, so their first priority is God, and this love leads to loving others well.