Quotes About Spirituality

A person who knows himself to be the divinely begotten Son of God (and even the second person of the Trinity) and who has divine knowledge and power is not a real human being. Because he is more than human, he is not fully human.

God is the one in whom "we live and move and have our being."6 Notice how the language works. Where are we in relation to God? We are in God; we live in God, move in God, have our being in God. God is not "out there," but "right here," all around us.

But the claim does mean that for us, as Christians, Jesus is the decisive revelation of God, and of what a life full of God is like. Indeed, I see this as the defining characteristic that makes us Christian rather than something else.

John Dominic Crossan wrote in the concluding chapter, "Mine Eyes Decline the Glory," of his wonderful memoir, A Long Way From Tipperary [2000]. I'll just read this:

The change in my worldview has made it possible for me once again to take God seriously. I am convinced that the sacred is real.

As swimmers dare to lie face to the sky and water bears them, as hawks rest upon air and air sustains them; so would I learn to attain free fall and float into Creator Spirit's deep embrace, knowing no effort earns that all-surrounding grace.3

the story of Jesus is thus a story of God and us. This does not mean, of course, that the historical Jesus was God. But because the completed story affirms that God was present in and through Jesus, the story of Jesus becomes a disclosure of God, the revelation and epiphany of God. As a

we are to participate with God in bringing about the world promised by Christmas.

Does that make him ordinary? No. I think he is one of the two most remarkable human beings who ever lived. I don't really care who the other one was—my point is that what we see in Jesus is a human possibility. That's what makes him so remarkable. If he was also divine, then he's not all that remarkable. If he had the knowledge and power of God, he could have done so much more.

Huston Smith's book Why Religion Matters

When we emphasize his divinity at the expense of his humanity, we lose track of the utterly remarkable human being he was.

the classic and traditional Christian affirmation about Jesus, namely, that Jesus is for us as Christians the decisive revelation of what a life full of God is like.

Jewish mystic and Christian messiah describe how I see Jesus before and after Easter. To use language from my previous chapter, I see the pre-Easter Jesus as the former and the post-Easter Jesus as the latter.

Postcritical naivete is the ability to hear the biblical stories once again as true stories, even as one knows that they may not be factually true and that their truth does not depend upon their factuality.

The pre-Easter Jesus is dead and gone; he's nowhere anymore. This statement does not deny Easter in any way, but simply recognizes that the corpuscular Jesus, the flesh-and-blood Jesus, is a figure of the past.

Each morning's worship service began with a confession of sin. I thought to myself, "It's nine o'clock in the morning, and we've already been bad.

The way of seeing and reading the Bible that I describe in the rest of this book leads to a way of being Christian that has very little to do with believing. Instead, what will emerge is a relational and sacramental understanding of the Christian life.

Being Christian, I will argue, is not about believing in the Bible or about believing in Christianity. Rather, it is about a deepening relationship with the God to whom the Bible points, lived within the Christian tradition as a sacrament of the sacred.

We learned, in the opening words of the Lord's Prayer, that God is "in heaven." But we also learned that God is everywhere—that is, omnipresent. When one combines the two, the result is panentheism. It is orthodox Christian theology.

Paying attention to our relationship with God matters because we ourselves are ultimately relational. It is not that wr first become selves and then have relationships. Rather, we are constituted by our relationships; they shape and form us. So also paying attention to our relationship with God will shape us.

Faithfulness leads us to pay attention to our relationship to God—through such attention, we become even more deeply centered in God. Trust is the fruit of that deeper centering. It grows as we center more and more in God.

I am convinced that salvation in the biblical tradition has to do primarily with this life.

and mediators of the sacred and, at worst, a snare. He knew an oppressive and exploitative social order that legitimated itself in the name of God, and he knew this was not God's will. And he knew all of this most foundationally because he knew God.

It is a life of deep commitment and gentle certitude. Deep commitment, because it involves one's whole being. Gentle certitude, because it is gentle, soft, regarding particular verbal formulations of Christianity, including precise doctrinal statements. These are always human products. They are to be valued as such and to be reformulated when necessary. Depth of commitment and dogmatic certainty about a particular set of beliefs are not the same thing.