Quotes About Understanding

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.

getting the Bible right and getting Jesus right are not the same thing.

God doesn't change, but God—being God—is never fully captured by our perceptions. As people continue to live and breathe and experience life, how they see God changes too.

A story like the exodus story is what happens when, as I said previously, God lets his children tell the story—in ways they understand and that is packed with meaning for them.

followers of Jesus always have and always will meet Jesus and see him from where they are and they will experience Jesus differently as a result.

They were writing and reading these stories to understand their own relationship with God.

We do not comprehend but can only trust that our heavens, as it was for the psalmist, are declaring for us the glory of God. And that glory is as far from our understanding as are the distant galaxies that swirl about in the infinite expanses of the universe.

To see what Paul sees, Christians today are summoned to join Paul: the reality of Jesus demands that the Old Testament be read not by the book, but against the grain.

Transposing the past is an act of wisdom. It is not scripted. It can't be predicted.

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.

I still think and talk about what I think God is like, but I've hopefully learned (feel free to keep me honest here, people) that being right and winning isn't the endgame here. Loving as God loves is.

Reading the situation—not simply the Bible—is what wisdom is all about.

Doubt signals that this process of dying and rising is underway. Though God feels far away, at that moment God may be closer than we realize—especially if "know what you believe" is how we're used to thinking of our faith.

These ancient writers had an adequate understanding of God for them in their time, but not for all time—and if we take that to heart, we will actually be in a better position to respect these ancient voices and see what they have to say rather than whitewashing the details and making up "explanations" to ease our stress.

Wisdom leads us to dialogues with the past. It doesn't lead us back to the past.

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.

The findings of the past 150 years have made extrabiblical evidence an unavoidable conversation partner. The result is that, as perhaps never before in the history of the church, we can see how truly provisional and incomplete certain dimensions of our understanding of Scripture can be. On the other hand, we are encouraged to encounter the depth and riches of God's revelation and to rely more and more on God's Spirit, who speaks to the church in Scripture.

This is how they connected with God—in their time, in their way.

But at least I didn't do any harm. Along the way I came to see more and more that being right about God and making sure everyone else agreed with what I knew might not be the most important thing I could do in God's eyes.

To put it plainly, the life of faith is the pursuit of wisdom.

Placeholder theology is the very nature of theology. By it we acknowledge the human need to say something about ultimate meaning concerning the Creator and the creation while also understanding that what we say will never say it all.

That Jesus was not and could not have been understood by walking with Jesus in and around Galilee. The disciples themselves—those Jesus handpicked to carry on his work—were utterly clueless about the big picture.

The real Jesus can only be truly understood from a later vantage point—interpreted after the resurrection when the broader implications of who Jesus was and what he did could be better grasped. That is the Jesus the Gospel writers give us, each in his own way.

The problem isn't the Bible. The problem is coming to the Bible with expectations it's not set up to bear.