Quotes About Faith

But these matters of life and faith cannot be expressed in the tongues of modernity, for it is this very epistemology that has consigned us to death and despair.

Along with anger, God makes a second response to our guilt. Anger at the throne is compounded by God's utter anguish at having hoped and been betrayed, at having yearned and failed. The

paraphrasing 1 Cor. 1:25) that the fictions of God are truer than the facts of men.13

I had come for certitude, but the poetic speech does not give certitude.

to domesticate God and so to curb the freedom that belongs to this erupting God (Exod. 20:4

First, that wherever you live, it is probably Egypt; second, that there is a better place, a world more attractive, a promised land; and third, that "the way to the land is through the wilderness." There is no way to get from here to there except by joining together and marching.

In practice, I suggest that it is the liturgy that is to enact the settled coherence of church faith, and the sermon that provides the "alien" witness of the text, which rubs against the liturgic coherence.118 There can, in my judgment, be no final resolution of the tension between the systemizing task of theology and the disruptive work of biblical interpretation. It is the ongoing interaction between the two that is the work of interpretation.

we will not have a politics of justice and compassion unless we have a religion of God's freedom.

Reading Jeremiah alone leaves faith in death where God finally will not stay. And reading Second Isaiah alone leads us to imagine that we may receive comfort without tears and tearing. Clearly, only those who anguish will sing new songs. Without anguish the new song is likely to be strident and just more royal fakery.

So in Psalm 73, when life is inequitable, the speaker is aware of a skewed relationship in which one is less than human: When my soul was embittered, when I was pricked in heart, I was stupid and ignorant; I was like a brute beast toward you. (Ps. 73:21-22; cf. 102:7-8)49

It is rather the conviction that God will not quit until God has arrived at God's good intention.

If one is linked to a flat, one-dimensional faith, then this verse is a bitter loss of faith . But if we think in terms of obedience on its way to risky imagination, then this verse is an opening for new faith beyond the conventions and routines that secure but do not reckon with God's awefulness .

The key players, it turns out, are those who refuse to be credentialed or curbed by traditional modes of power, who understand that the transformative power of truth is not a credible companion for consolidating modes of established power, but that truth characteristically runs beyond the confines of such power.

Those who sign on and depart the system of anxious scarcity become the historymakers in the neighborhood.

Sabbath becomes a decisive, concrete, visible way of opting for and aligning with the God of rest.

Faith is both the conviction that justice can be accomplished and the refusal to accept injustice.

Intercession, that is, intrusion into the courts of power on behalf of another, is central to the church's action in prayer.

Let it be affirmed right away that the central theme of both the Old and New Testaments is Christ.[2]

Promise did not oppose God's law, for both promise and law came from the same covenant-making God. Neither did law provide a separate means, not even a hypothetical means, for obtaining salvation. Instead, the law provided a means for maintaining fellowship with God.

the Pentateuch really intended to teach faith and belief in God and his promise. Obedience to the law, then, was the natural evidence that one had really trusted the Lord and believed his promise.

I felt that I had been driven from the temple where for nineteen years, along with other believers, I had worshiped the great god News on a daily basis.

The primary task of the Church is not to mend the manners of the community, but to proclaim the matchless Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. When men hear that Gospel and believe it, their lives will give evidence of their faith.

We are *all* we are, and all in a sense we care to dream we are. And for that matter, anything outlandish, bizarre, is a godsend in this rather stodgy life. It is after all just what the old boy said – it's only the impossible that's credible; whatever credible may mean...

Most Christians seem to have two kinds of lives, their so-called real life and their so-called religious one. Not (C. S.) Lewis. The barrier so many of us find between the visible and the invisible world was just not there for him. It had become natural for Lewis to live ordinary life in a supernatural way.