Quotes About Belief

Jesus and his first followers, as Second Temple Jews, believed as well in an eschatology of new creation. This did not involve the abolition of the present world and its replacement with a totally different on. Nor did it imply the steady evolution-from-within of the Stoics, let alone the escapist 'eschatology' of the heading-for-heaven Platonists. They believed in the redemptive transformation of the present world into a new one.

We cannot use a supposedly objective historical epistemology as the ultimate ground for the truth of Easter. To do so would be like someone who lit a candle to see whether the sun had risen.

But what Saul believed about Jesus meant that the underlying center of spiritual gravity had shifted.

Resurrection, by contrast, has always gone with a strong view of God's justice and of God as the good creator. Those twin beliefs give rise not to a meek acquiescence to injustice in the world but to a robust determination to oppose it.

Those who choose to live without God will one day find that they have forfeited their likeness to him.

Stories are a basic constituent of human life; they are, in fact, one key element within the total construction of a worldview. I

As with the ascension, there are several things we need to say right away about this extraordinary claim. (By now we ought to be getting used to extraordinary claims, not because we are dealing with fantasy or "supernatural" speculation, but because Jesus himself opens the window on a world that, though real and solid, is very different from the world as most people see it.) And the first thing is: don't believe everything you read about the Rapture.

Put like that, of course, it seems absurd; and yet the absurdity lies in the attempt to picture God as just like us only a bit bigger and more all-seeing.

We mustn't imagine that our feeling of being close to God is a true index of the reality.

So, then, since the person you are and the world God has made will be gloriously reaffirmed in God's eventual future, you must be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the Lord's work, because you know that in the Lord your labour is not in vain." Belief in the bodily resurrection includes the belief that what is done in the present in the body, by the power of the Spirit, will be reaffirmed in the eventual future, in ways at which we can presently only guess.

And if anyone tries to say that the good news is not about all these things—about freeing slaves, about helping the poor, about reconciling warring factions, ethnic groupings, and whole nations, about looking after the blessed world we live on and in—but instead is only about coming to faith in the present and going to heaven in the future, then we must reply that something has gone very, very wrong in their thinking.

many people today assume that Christianity is one or more of these things—a religion, a moral system, a philosophy. In other words, they assume that Christianity is about advice. But it wasn't and isn't. Christianity is, simply, good news. It is the news that something has happened as a result of which the world is a different place.

Those who belong to him are to believe and to live by the belief that they died and rose again with him, so that they are no longer under any slavish obligation to obey the old master.

Christian faith isn't a general religious awareness. Nor is it the ability to believe several unlikely propositions. It is certainly not a kind of gullibility which would put us out of touch with any genuine reality. It is the faith which hears the story of Jesus, including the announcement that he is the world's true Lord, and responds from the heart with a surge of grateful love that says: "Yes. Jesus is Lord.

Though many Christians in the Western world have imagined that the aim or goal of being a Christian is simply "to go to heaven when you die," the New Testament holds out something much richer and more interesting.

Faith involves believing that certain things are true, of course. But (here's another caricature we have to put firmly to bed) this isn't about odd, detached dogmas. It's about certain things in the light of which everything else at last comes into focus.

Part of Christian belief is to find out what's true about Jesus and let that challenge our culture.

don't believe everything you read about the Rapture. In fact, don't believe most of what you read about the Rapture.

Notoriously, the accounts of Easter do not fit snugly together.1 How many women went to the tomb, and how many angels or men did they meet there? Did the disciples meet Jesus in Jerusalem or Galilee or both? And so on. But, as with Cambridge in 1946, so with Jerusalem in a.d. 30 (or whenever it was): surface discrepancies do not mean that nothing happened.

here are other proposals regularly advanced as rival explanations to the early Christian one: 1. Jesus didn't really die; someone gave him a drug that made him look like dead, and he revived in the tomb. Answer: Roman soldiers knew how to kill people, and no disciple would have been fooled by a half-drugged, beat-up Jesus into thinking he'd defeated death and inaugurated the kingdom.

Jesus only appeared to people who believed in him. Answer: the accounts make it clear that Thomas and Paul do not belong to this category; and actually none of Jesus's followers believed, after his death, that he really was the Messiah, let alone that he was in any sense divine.

the church has unhesitatingly privileged the creed and let the canon fend for itself—

Because of God's call and promise, Abraham is the beginning of the truly human people. He is the one who, in a faith which Paul sees as the true antecedent of Christian faith, allows his thinking and believing to be determined, not by the way the world is, and not by the way his own body is, but by the promises and actions of God.

This means we can already rule out the revisionist positions on Jesus's resurrection that have been offered by so many writers in recent years. Many suggest that the early disciples were so overwhelmed with grief at Jesus's death that they picked up the idea of resurrection from their surrounding culture and clung to it, persuading themselves that Jesus had been raised from the dead, though of course they knew he hadn't been.