Quotes about Jesus

Jesus's message to his contemporaries, and the church's message about Jesus, never fit what people expect. Often enough, they don't fit what the church itself expects.

The mystery of Jesus Christ, for Paul, is that in him is revealed not only the glory of the one creator God but the true glory of humankind, lost at the fall.

There was no template of expectations out of which, granted the crucifixion of Jesus, one might have anticipated the sophisticated range of interpretation that the early Christian movement in fact produced, understanding the death of Jesus as a messianic victory and connecting it with the long-awaited divine return.

sovereignty let loose through Jesus and the Spirit and aimed at the healing and renewal of all creation.

Among other beliefs, I hold more firmly than ever to the conviction that serious study of Jesus and the gospels is best done within the context of a worshipping community.

in the ancient Near East the idea of a single community across the traditional boundaries of culture, gender, and ethnic and social groupings was unheard of. Unthinkable, in fact. But there it was. A new kind of "family" had come into existence. Its focus of identity was Jesus; its manner of life was shaped by Jesus; its characteristic mark was believing allegiance to Jesus.

Caesar is only mentioned once in the gospels, and there Jesus says that there's a clear division between God and Caesar, a split of church and state, so that never the twain shall meet. Well, not so fast. We'll get to that. It sounds suspiciously modern. Did Jesus really anticipate post-Enlightenment Western ideology so exactly?

But the demonstration of the power of Jesus' name took place, not in the Temple, but outside the gate. God is on the move, not confined

The story of Acts, even after Jesus's ascension, is about what Jesus continued to do and teach. And the way he did it and taught it was—through his followers.

Our task is to implement Jesus' unique achievement . We are like the musicians called to play and sing the unique and once-only-written musical score. We don't have to write it again, but we have to play it. Or, in the image Paul uses in I Corinthians 3, we are now in the position of young architects discovering a wonderful foundation already laid by a master architect and having to work out what sort of building was intended.

The four gospels, again in their very different ways, are all written to tell the story of Jesus as the story of Israel, and the story of Israel's God, reaching their proper climax, so as thereby to tell the story of how Israel's God becomes king of the whole world.

Paul's powerful, spirit-driven proclamation of Jesus as "son of God" can hardly be called "preaching," if by "preaching" we mean the sort of thing that goes on in churches week by week in our world. This was a public announcement, like a medieval herald or town crier walking through the streets with a bell, calling people to attention and declaring that a new king had been placed on the throne.