Quotes About Relevance

There is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all.

When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course.

Ours is a historical faith, and to uproot the Bible from its historical contexts is self-contradictory.

The spiritual disconnection many feel today stems precisely from expecting (or being told to expect) the Bible to be holy, perfect, and clear, when in fact after reading it they find it to be morally suspect, out of touch, confusing, and just plain weird.

The first question we should ask about what we are reading is not "How does this apply to me?" Rather, it is "What is this passage saying in the context of the book I am reading, and how would it have been heard in the ancient world?

It is wholly incomprehensible to think that thousands of years ago God would have felt constrained to speak in a way that would be meaningful only to Westerners several thousand years later. To do so borders on modern, Western arrogance.

I mean, if we try to explain Jesus's handling of his Bible in terms of how many Christians today feel the Bible "ought" to be read, Jesus will look like one of my college Bible students, playing free association with the Bible. Or worse, we may try to find some way of taking Jesus out of his ancient Jewish world and making him look more like a suburban Protestant, an urban hipster, a tea party spokesman, and so on.

None of these modern adaptations is "in the Bible," and yet even the most committed "rulebook Bible" readers out there wind up adapting what the Bible says, because we have to—if we want that ancient text to continue to speak to us today.

So, too, if we wish to speak of God meaningfully, in ways that engage the people of today, we cannot do so by forcing them to swallow an ancient reality that is demonstrably not real.

And again, the genius of the laws is their ambiguity, not their clarity, for their ambiguity is the very thing that allows them to gain new life with each passing year, ensuring that past and present forever remain connected and in dialogue.

And here is the absolutely vital and life-changing take-home point for us: ancient and ambiguous laws, in order to remain relevant, needed to be adapted—which results in the diversity of the laws we see in the Old Testament.

We perceive God, think about God, and talk about God in ways that make sense to us by virtue of when and where we live.

What could be more normal than for different people, living at different times, in different places, who wrote about the past for different reasons and to different audiences, to produce different versions on the past? Nothing. And that's what we see in the Bible.

The Bible is not, never has been, and never will be the center of the Christian faith.

adapting the past to speak to changing circumstances in the present.

A God who does not connect to the world around us is a God who cannot speak to us. Believing in a God who demands that we continue to adopt only biblically ancient ways of thinking of God, which are themselves rooted in their own cultural moment, is to diminish God's active presence here and now.

AL MIRAR ATRÁS me di cuenta de que mi experiencia en Sony demostraba que contar cara a cara la historia adecuada, en el entorno preciso, en el momento idóneo y de la manera más pertinente, puede inducir a los oyentes a actuar, y también puede modificar la trayectoria de éxitos del narrador.

La misma regla es aplicable a las historias que una persona cuenta en directo ante un público empresarial.

Miss the audience's heart as a filmmaker, and the only wallet that gets hit will be your own.

Si su público no se identifica con su problema, es probable que no les interese escuchar la resolución de su historia.

He liked to believe he mattered.' Grace smiled, thinking privately, we all do.