Quotes About Faith

When a god is fashioned into a golden commodity (or even lesser material); divine subject becomes divine object, and agent becomes commodity.

The key insight is that honest talk transforms and emancipates when it is received in faithful seriousness.

The church will not have power to act or believe until it recovers its tradition of faith and permits that tradition to be the primal way out of enculturation.

prophetic preaching can take place only where the preacher is deeply embedded in the YHWH narrative.

As the church in reform draws closer to its core confession, it inescapably embraces its most radical vision that violates and contradicts conventional practice in its social context. What makes such reform difficult, moreover, is the fact that while we ponder the radical core claims of faith, we ourselves are variously enmeshed in conventional practices that are inimical to the gospel.

Prophecy cannot be separated very long from doxology, or it will either wither or become ideology. Abraham

As we go to the places where we are called by God—sometimes gladly, sometimes reluctantly, always in anxiety—we are drawn into the newness of God's future.

Relationship with God is not immune to the surprises and costs of our daily life.

People of faith can read the Bible so that almost any perspective on a current issue will find some support in the Bible. That rich and multivoiced offering in the Bible is what makes appeals to it so tempting—and yet so tricky and hazardous, because much of our reading of the Bible turns out to be an echo of what we thought anyway. THE ISSUE OF LAND The dispute between Palestinians and Israelis is elementally about land and secondarily about security and human rights.

every uncompromising ideology reduces faith to an idolatry

It is most unfortunate that, in the long history of the church, "faith" has been almost everywhere transubstantiated into "belief," which transposes the concrete practicality of trust into a cognitive enterprise. How ludicrous that in the long, oppressive history of orthodoxy—which guards cognitive formulations—that those who enforce right belief seem most often to be themselves unable or unwilling to engage in deep trust.

The truth that is variously enacted by such agents is not an idea or a proposition. It is rather a habit of life that simply (!) refuses the totalizing claims of power. The governor, on behalf of the empire, will continue to ask, "What is truth?" And the apostles will continue to give answer, uncommonly unintimidated: "'We must obey God rather than any human authority'" (Acts 5:29).14

The most remarkable observation one can make about this interface of exilic circumstance and scriptural resource is this: Exile did not lead Jews in the Old Testament to abandon faith or to settle for abdicating despair, nor to retreat to privatistic religion. On the contrary, exile evoked the most brilliant literature and the most daring theological articulation in the Old Testament.

Even in the wilderness with scarce resources, God mandates a pause for Sabbath for the community:

requires both the outrageousness of God and the daily work of decreasing so that Jesus and God's vision of peace may increase.

Save us, Lord, from a religion that ignores the cries of the exploited and oppressed. Lead us into a deeper faith that challenges injustice and makes the sacrifices that must be made to build a society that is ever more truly human. Amen.

we have believed that faith does not mean to acknowledge and embrace negativity.

do not think for one moment that there is any ready transfer from this narrative to our real-life crisis with the virus. The Bible does not often easily "apply." The Bible does, however, invite an open imagination that hopes for the best outcomes of serious scientific research. At the same time, it affirms that deeply inscrutable holy reality is in, with, under, and

doing economic justice for the vulnerable in generous, intentional ways, is communion with God.

The point that prophetic imagination must ponder is that there is no freedom of God without the politics of justice and compassion, and there is no politics of justice and compassion without a religion of the freedom of God.

Jesus astonishes his contemporaries by his capacity to see and act beyond conventional assumptions.

Thus the teaching of Jesus attests to the possibility of God that the world has long since taken to be impossible. That is what is wonderful about his teaching.

the threat of life, so palpable among us, is a threat that can and will be countered by the Creator who continues the work of governance, order, and sustenance. Creation faith is the summons and invitation to trust the Subject of these verbs, even in the face of day-to-day, palpable incursions of chaos. The testimony of Israel pushes toward a verdict that the One embedded in these doxological statements can be trusted in the midst of any chaos, even that of exile and finally that of death.

The old limits of the possible have been exposed as fraudulent inventions designed to keep the powerless in their places. Jesus violates such invented limitations and opens the world to the impossible. He ends that defiant declaration with the admonition: "And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me" (v. 23).