Quotes About God

the Bible as a human response to God, the Bible as sacred scripture, the Bible as sacrament of the sacred, and the Bible as the Word of God.

Cumulatively, taking the pre-Easter Jesus seriously as an epiphany of God suggests a massive subversion of the monarchical model of God and the way of life (individually and socially) to which it leads. God is not a distant being but is near at hand. God is not primarily a lawgiver and judge but the compassionate one. The religious life is not about requirements but about relationship.

Moreover, such a claim is difficult to reconcile with the centrality of grace in the Christian tradition. If one must be a Christian in order to be in right relationship with God, then there is a requirement. By definition, then, even though we may use the language of grace, we are no longer talking about grace.

being Christian is about a relationship to the God who is mediated by the Christian tradition as sacrament. To be Christian is to live within the Christian tradition as a sacrament and let it do its transforming work within and among us.

Thus the lens I am advocating does not see the Bible as a whole as divine in origin, or some parts as divine and some as human. It is all a human product, though generated in response to God.

Thus any and every claim about what a passage of scripture means involves interpretation. There is no such thing as a noninterpretive reading of the Bible, unless our reading consists simply of making sounds in the air. As we read the Bible, then, we should ask not, "What is God saying?" but "What is the ancient author or community saying?"11

The phrase "kingdom of God" (and such similar reverential phrases as "kingdom of heaven") denoted, not a place where God ruled, but rather the fact that God ruled—or, rather, that he soon would rule, because he certainly was not doing so at present in the way he intended to do.

To be Christian means to live within the world created by the Bible. We are to listen to it well and let its central stories shape our vision of God, our identity, and our sense of what faithfulness to God means. It is to shape our imagination, that part of our psyches in which our foundational images of reality and life reside. We are to be a community shaped by scripture. The purpose of our continuing dialogue with the Bible as sacred scripture is nothing less than that.14

This relationship with God, and all that flows from it, are the purpose of the Christian life. The invitation of the Christian gospel is to enter into that relationship in which our healing and wholeness lie, that relationship which transforms us by beginning to heal the wounds of existence and makes our lives in the here and now a life with God.

Christianity in the modern period became preoccupied with the dynamic of believing or not believing. For many people, believing "iffy" claims to be true became the central meaning of Christian faith. It is an odd notion—as if what God most wants from us is believing highly problematic statements to be factually true. And if one can't believe them, then one doesn't have faith and isn't a Christian

In the study of religion, a sacrament is commonly defined as a mediator of the sacred, a vehicle by which God becomes present, a means through which the Spirit is experienced.

Nature is to zoos as God is to churches.

Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe.

A Paradox, the doughnut hole. Empty space, once, but now they've learned to market even that. A minus quantity; nothing, rendered edible. I wondered if they might be used-metaphorically, of course-to demonstrate the existence of God. Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being?

They are hypocrites, they think the Church is a cage to keep God in, so he will stay locked up there and not go wandering about the earth during the week, poking his nose into their business, and looking in the depths and darkness and doubleness of their hearts, and their lack of true charity; and they believed they need only be bothered about him on Sundays when they have their best clothes on and their faces straight, and their hands washed and their gloves on, and their stories all prepared.

Human understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly. Any religion is a shadow of God. But the shadows of God are not God.

You might even provide a Heaven for them. We need You for that. Hell we can make for ourselves.

All Creatures know that some must die That all the rest may take and eat; Sooner or later, all transform Their blood to wine, their flesh to meat. But Man alone seeks Vengefulness, And writes his abstract Laws on stone; For this false Justice he has made, He tortures limb and crushes bone. Is this the image of a god? My tooth for yours, your eye for mine? Oh, if Revenge did move the stars Instead of Love, they would not shine.

Creating some god for one's inspirations was always a good way to avoid accusations of pride should the scheme succeed, as well as the blame if did not.

Those walls and bars are there for a reason," said Crake. "Not to keep us out, but to keep them in. Mankind needs barriers in both cases." "Them?" "Nature and God." "I thought you didn't believe in God," said Jimmy. "I don't believe in Nature either," said Crake. "Or not with a capital N.

My audience is God, because who the hell else could understand me?

God is a cluster of neurons.

Nature full strength is more than we can take, Adam One used to say. It's a potent hallucinogen, a soporific, for the untrained Soul. We're no longer at home in it. We need to dilute it. We can't drink it straight. And God is the same. Too much God and you overdose. God needs to be filtered.

I think that this is what God must look like: an egg. The life of the moon may not be on the surface, but inside.