Quotes About Meaning

Metaphorical language is intrinsically nonliteral. It simultaneously affirms and negates: x is y, and x is not y. The statement "My love is a red, red rose" affirms that my beloved is a rose even as it negates it. My beloved is not a rose, unless I am literally in love with a flower. Rather, there is something about my beloved that is like a rose.

it has more than one nuance or resonance of meaning. In terms of its Greek roots, "metaphor" means "to carry with," and what metaphor carries or bears is resonances or associations of meaning.

The recognition that the Bible contains both history and metaphor has an immediate implication: the ancient communities that produced the Bible often metaphorized their history. Indeed, this is the way they invested their stories with meaning. But we, especially in the modern period, have often historicized their metaphors.

Postcritical naivete is the ability to hear the biblical stories once again as true stories, even as one knows that they may not be factually true and that their truth does not depend upon their factuality.

Christmas is not about tinsel and mistletoe or even ornaments and presents, but about what means will we use toward the end of a peace from heaven upon our earth. Or is "peace on earth" but a Christmas ornament taken each year from attic or basement and returned there as soon as possible?

Paying attention to our relationship with God matters because we ourselves are ultimately relational. It is not that wr first become selves and then have relationships. Rather, we are constituted by our relationships; they shape and form us. So also paying attention to our relationship with God will shape us.

The possibility that Jesus didn't think he was the messiah has often seemed to threaten the truth of Christianity itself. Could Jesus be the messiah if he didn't think he was?

I am convinced that salvation in the biblical tradition has to do primarily with this life.

He points beyond himself to God—to God's character and passion. This is the meaning of our christological language and our credal affirmations about Jesus: in this person we see the revelation of God, the heart of God. He is both metaphor and sacrament of God.

But I do see the phrase "kingdom of God" as central to Jesus. As I have argued elsewhere, I see it as a metaphor or symbol with a range of meanings rather than as a concept with a single meaning. In the message and activity of Jesus, its meanings include the following.

What, then, did Jesus mean by his kingdom announcement? Let me anticipate my conclusion. Jesus was telling his contemporaries that the kingdom was indeed breaking into history, but that it did not look like what they had expected.

Thus any and every claim about what a passage of scripture means involves interpretation. There is no such thing as a noninterpretive reading of the Bible, unless our reading consists simply of making sounds in the air. As we read the Bible, then, we should ask not, "What is God saying?" but "What is the ancient author or community saying?"11

The issue is no longer believing that Jesus was literally the Son of God, but appreciating the richness of meaning suggested by the multiplicity of Christological images. He was "the Son," yes, but also the incarnation of the Word, which was also the Wisdom of God. He was the Son of God, the logos of God, and the Sophia of God.

Christianity in the modern period became preoccupied with the dynamic of believing or not believing. For many people, believing "iffy" claims to be true became the central meaning of Christian faith. It is an odd notion—as if what God most wants from us is believing highly problematic statements to be factually true. And if one can't believe them, then one doesn't have faith and isn't a Christian

O noble philosophy! Why, they seem to take the sun out of the universe when they deprive life of friendship, than which we have from the immortal gods no better, no more delightful boon.

It's like I've been chosen. But chosen for what? I ask. The answer is quite simple: To care.

But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.

What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.

The Eskimo has fifty-names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love.

When any civilization is dust and ashes, he said, art is all that's left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning—human meaning, that is—is defined by them. You have to admit that.

There's the story, then there's the real story, then there's the story of how the story came to be told. Then there's what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.

Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, 'I'll be dead,' you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul - it was a consequence of grammar.

You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn't necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labeled bones.

So this was the rest of his life. It felt like a party to which he'd been invited, but at an address he couldn't actually locate. Someone must be having fun at it, this life of his; only, right at the moment, it wasn't him.