Quotes About Truth

I hear Aslan's words to Shasta: "'Child,' said the Lion, 'I am telling you your story. . . . I tell no one any story but his own.

whatever it means to speak of the Bible as inspired by God clearly doesn't mean the Bible is scrubbed clean of the human experience of the writers.

reality isn't what it used to be.

Doubt strips away distraction so we can see more clearly the inadequacies of whom we think God is and move us from the foolishness of thinking that our god is the God.

The Bible's diversity is the key to uncovering the Bible's true purpose for us.

I definitely get where these questions are coming from, and remember: I don't think "knowing" or seeking to think "correctly" about God is wrong. Not at all. The problem is preoccupation with correct thinking—mistaking our thoughts about God with the real thing, and then to base our faith on holding on to that certainty.

And it's always a bad move to invent a Jesus who agrees with us rather than challenges us.

Over the years I've grown more and more convinced that "storytelling" is a better way of understanding what the Bible is doing with the past than "history writing.

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.

Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job all agree: the Bible doesn't capture a freeze-frame of God and bind him to it. If we get on board with this idea, some other things the Bible says about God will make more sense.

Wherever biblical writers talk about the past, we should expect them to be shaping the past as well.

as Christ is both God and human, so is the Bible.

We do not honor the Lord nor do we uphold the gospel by playing make-believe. Neither are those who engage the kinds of issues discussed in this book necessarily on the slippery slope to unbelief. Our God is much bigger than we sometimes give him credit for. It is we who sometimes wish to keep him small by controlling what can or cannot come into the conversation.

Without its unwavering commitment to adaptation over time, the Bible would have died a quick death over two thousand years ago. Its existence as a source of spiritual truth that transcends specific times and places is made possible by its flexibility and adaptive nature—one of the many paradoxes we need to embrace when it comes to the Bible.

I believe that God knows best what sort of sacred writing we need. And these three characteristic ways the Bible behaves, rather than posing problems to be overcome, are telling us something about how the Bible actually works and therefore what the Bible's true purpose is—and the need to align our expectations with it.

Wisdom teaches us to embrace both the adequacy and the limitations of our God-talk, to keep the two in tension. Perhaps accepting that paradox is true faith.

He'd learned long ago that logic and facts never meant anything to true believers—of anything.

You're wrong," she said. "Both of you. If I know anything now, it's that our religions are lies. Horrid, dirty lies. I don't believe in God, or destiny, not any more.

Acceptance of truth is fundamental to our ethos. To determine truth we must first listen to all opinion.

One of them is your ex-wife, and we know she didn't do it.

And who decides what true is?

once you eliminated the impossible, what remained had to be the truth.

Our perception of the Silfen as gentle and kind is our own stupid, convenient illusion. We wanted to believe in elves. And how many human bodies lie out there under the snow because of that?

You convinced yourselves we're just a bunch of regular lads who got a bad break in life. Anything else would have cracked your dream open and made you face reality. Illusion is easy. Illusion is the loser's way out. Your way.