Quotes About Truth

How much easier to produce moral musings than present the fresh challenge of the kingdom!

The point about truth, and about Jesus and his followers bearing witness to it, is that truth is what happens when humans use words to reflect God's wise ordering of the world and so shine light into its dark corners, bringing judgment and mercy where it is badly needed. Empires can't cope with this. They make their own 'truth,' creating 'facts on the ground' in the depressingly normal way of violence and injustice.

Transcending "Revelation" All this alerts us to the fact that scripture is more than simply

The Christian role, as part of naming the name of the crucified and risen Jesus on territory presently occupied by idols, is to speak the truth to power and especially to speak up for those with no power at all.

those who invoke YHWH as the judge of all must themselves live in the light of that coming judgment.

Perhaps, indeed, that is what "holy scripture" really is — not a calm, serene list of truths to be learned or commands to be obeyed, but a jagged book that forces you to grow up in your thinking as you grapple with it.

Read John 14:1-31. Why does Jesus feel the need to reassure the disciples at this point (v. 1)? 2. What bold claim does Jesus make about himself in verse 6? 3. Why does this kind of claim often make people uncomfortable?

there is no such thing as a god's-eye view (by which would be meant a Deist god's-eye view) available to human beings, a point of view which is no human's point of view.

Saying "It's true for you" sounds fine and tolerant. But it only works because it's twisting the word "true" to mean, not "a true revelation of the way things are in the real world," but "something that is genuinely happening inside you.

Ultimately, the so-called 'gnostic gospels' would be a denial of what Jesus and the church believed about God himself and what the canonical gospels are inviting the rest of the world, ourselves included, to believe about God. The canonical gospels are saying, in form and overall substance, that the word 'God' properly belongs to the creator God, the God of Israel, the God who has kept his promises to creation and to Israel and has done so in this way.

We cannot use a supposedly objective historical epistemology as the ultimate ground for the truth of Easter. To do so would be like someone who lit a candle to see whether the sun had risen.

genuine faith is always seeking the Word hidden in the flesh, not using the Word simply as a way of getting at the flesh.

Jesus as a "teacher" is much safer than Jesus as the gospels actually present him.

We see through a glass darkly, says St. Paul as he peers toward what lies ahead. All our language about future states of the world and of ourselves consists of complex pictures that may or may not correspond very well to the ultimate reality. But that doesn't mean it's anybody's guess or that every opinion is as good as every other one.

We mustn't imagine that our feeling of being close to God is a true index of the reality.

truth is what happens when humans use words to reflect God's wise ordering of the world and so shine light into its dark corners, bringing judgment and mercy where it is badly needed.

The whole truth is that Jesus himself, in his risen physical body, is the beginning of God's new creation.

And all this "works" because Jesus is Israel's Messiah, representing his people, so that what is true of him is true of them.

Jesus—the Jesus we might discover if we really looked!—is larger, more disturbing, more urgent than we—than the church!—had ever imagined.

The voice of Satan is often hard to recognise precisely because it appears so frequently as the voice of common sense, of prudence, of reason.

To imagine a world without the gospel of Jesus is to imagine a pretty bleak place

Faith involves believing that certain things are true, of course. But (here's another caricature we have to put firmly to bed) this isn't about odd, detached dogmas. It's about certain things in the light of which everything else at last comes into focus.

This is not psychoanalysis. It is history.

Part of Christian belief is to find out what's true about Jesus and let that challenge our culture.