Quotes About Faith

Theology, after all, was made for the sake of the church, not the church for theology. I

is simply a reminder of what the greatest systematic theologians have always known and recognized – that theology is a matter of loving God with our minds and that loving does not mean merely admiring or 'being intellectually interested in'.

There is no way back. No other explanations have been offered, in two thousand years of sneering skepticism toward the Christian witness, that can satisfactorily account for how the tomb came to be empty, how the disciples came to see Jesus, and how their lives and worldviews were transformed.

Did Paul "switch religions"? Or can we accept Paul's own account that, in following the crucified Jesus and announcing that Israel's God had raised him from the dead, he was actually being loyal to his ancestral traditions, though in a way neither he nor anyone else had anticipated?

Faith can't be forced, but unfaith can be challenged. That is how it has always been, from the very beginning, when people have borne witness to Jesus's resurrection.

There is a danger in Christians supposing that they simply have to be flaky, awkward, against the government all the time, continually doing things upside down and inside out. Some people of course seem to be born that way, and use the gospel imperative as an excuse for foisting their own cussedness or arrogance on everyone else.

Even when Polycarp is on trial for his life, he is content to say, like Jesus before Pilate in John 19.11, that God has appointed the pagan governor who is about to [165] pass sentence.

My main argument in this book is that when we understand the Christian message, we will see that it does indeed "make sense" of our world, because it helps us both to understand the world the way it is and to be able to contribute fresh "sense" through our own lives.

Whoever heard of a crucified Messiah?

The good news is bigger, better, fuller than you ever imagined.

The resurrection isn't just a surprise happy ending for one person; it is instead the turning point for everything else. It is the point at which all the old promises come true at last: the promises of David's unshakable kingdom; the promises of Israel's return from the greatest exile of them all; and behind that again, quite explicit in Matthew, Luke, and John, the promise that all the nations will now be blessed through the seed of Abraham. If

The resurrection of Jesus is the launching of God's new world.

But the early Christians—who themselves knew only too well that the world had not turned into Utopia overnight and that they still faced suffering, prison, and death—firmly believed that what had happened on the cross was the Messianic victory. That is why they told the story the way they did.

In particular, it may explain how the mission of the church is organically and intimately related to the great events at the heart of the faith.

First, Jesus was going to take us to be with him in heaven. There are different ways people have imagined this happening, but the message is still the same. Somehow, the good news in the past (what Jesus did two thousand years ago) points forward to one particular piece of good news about the future (he will take us to heaven). This completes the new relationship with God that is for many the sole focus of the good news. And this is seriously misleading.

All this means a vital shift from the usual reading of Romans to a truly Pauline one. Paul is not saying, "God will justify sinners by faith so that they can go to heaven, and Abraham is an advance example of this." He is saying, "God covenanted with Abraham to give him a worldwide family of forgiven sinners turned faithful worshippers, and the death of Jesus is the means by which this happens.

From the beginning no serious Christian has been able to say 'This is my culture, so I must adapt the gospel to fit within it', just as no serious Christian has been able to say 'This is my surrounding culture, so I must oppose it tooth and nail'. Christians are neither chameleons, changing colour to suit their surroundings, nor rhinoceroses, ready to charge at anything in sight.

The reason we commit "sins" is because, to some extent at least, we are failing to worship the one true God and are worshipping instead some feature or force within the created order. When we do that, we are abdicating our responsibilities, handing to the "powers" in question the genuine human authority that ought to be ours.

Resurrection, by contrast, has always gone with a strong view of God's justice and of God as the good creator.

Israel's hopes were not for the demise of the space-time universe, but for the earth to be full of God's glory. It

Those twin beliefs give rise not to a meek acquiescence to injustice in the world but to a robust determination to oppose it. English

We expect to suffer, but we know already that we are victorious.

Skepticism is no more "neutral" or "objective" than faith. It has thrived in the post-Enlightenment world, which didn't want God (or, in many cases, anyone else either) to be king. Saying this doesn't, of course, prove anything in itself. It just suggests that we keep an open mind and recognize that skepticism too comes with its own agenda.

Though we sing with the tongues of men and of angels, if we are not truly worshipping the living God, we are noisy gongs and clanging cymbals. Though we organize the liturgy most beautifully, if it does not enable us to worship the living God, we are mere ballet-dancers. Though we repave the floor and reface the stonework, though we balance our budgets and attract all the tourists, if we are not worshipping God, we are nothing.