Quotes About Perspective

But just because I would rather eat part of a dead cow than part of a dead rat, that doesn't mean that I don't care whether my steak is properly cooked;

The 'popular Paul' has all too often been addressing sixteenth-century questions in a nineteenth-century tone of voice

History is always a matter of trying to think into the minds of people who think differently from ourselves.

Take Psalm 73. The writer knows the 'normal' line: good things come to good people, bad things to bad. But it hasn't worked out like that. The wicked are flourishing, and the righteous are crushed under their feet. It's only when the poet goes into God's temple that a larger, healing viewpoint can be glimpsed.

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.

Stories are a basic constituent of human life; they are, in fact, one key element within the total construction of a worldview. I

Put like that, of course, it seems absurd; and yet the absurdity lies in the attempt to picture God as just like us only a bit bigger and more all-seeing.

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

For John, the cross reveals God's glory; for Paul, God's "righteousness"; for both, God's love.

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.

don't believe everything you read about the Rapture. In fact, don't believe most of what you read about the Rapture.

Notoriously, the accounts of Easter do not fit snugly together.1 How many women went to the tomb, and how many angels or men did they meet there? Did the disciples meet Jesus in Jerusalem or Galilee or both? And so on. But, as with Cambridge in 1946, so with Jerusalem in a.d. 30 (or whenever it was): surface discrepancies do not mean that nothing happened.

Since the Bible has quite a lot to say about truth—and since it also has plenty to say about how particular individuals relate to that truth—it has become easy to imagine that its claims can and should be reduced to particular, and highly relative and situational, angles of vision.

What God had done in and through Jesus was, from Paul's perspective, the launching of a heaven-and-earth movement, not the offer of a new "otherworldly" hope.

science takes things apart to see how they work, but religion puts things together to see what they mean.

No, insists Paul, once you learn the meaning of the gospel, you have to see everything inside out.

He does not here ask the different groups to give up their practices; merely not to judge one another where differences exist. As Paul well knew (though we sometimes forget), this is actually just as large a step, if not larger, than a change in practice itself. The move from regarding something as mandatory to regarding it as optional is vast, just as vast in fact as the move from regarding something as forbidden to regarding it as available.

If we spend time in the prayer of lament, new light may come, rather than simply the repetition of things we might have wanted to say anyway.

Put tradition first, and scripture will be muzzled and faded. Put scripture first, and tradition will come to new life. Better

It all becomes so complicated, people grumble—when what they really mean is, "I am so used to reading this passage one way that I find it hard to switch and consider other options.

Heaven is important, but its not the end of the world

Arguments about God are] like pointing a flashlight toward the sky to see if the sun is shining.

Many of the questions we ask God can't be answered directly, not because God doesn't know the answers but because our questions don't make sense. As C.S. Lewis once pointed out, many of our questions are, from God's point of view, rather like someone asking, "Is yellow square or round?" or "How many hours are there is a mile?