Quotes about Jesus

our confidence is not in the solidity of Western culture or the basic goodness of modern democracy. Our confidence is in Jesus and him alone.

One way and another, all three synoptic gospels are clear: in telling the story of Jesus they are consciously telling the story of how Israel's God came back to his people, in judgment and mercy.

The kingdoms of the world run on violence. The kingdom of God, Jesus declared, runs on love. That is the good news.

But in first-century Christianity, what mattered was not people going from earth into God's kingdom in heaven. What mattered, and what Jesus taught his followers to pray, was that God's kingdom would come on earth as in heaven.

If today's, and tomorrow's, church is to engage in this kind of mission, seeking both to implement the achievement of Jesus and his resurrection and thereby to anticipate the final renewal of all things, it must itself be renewed, resourced, and reshaped for this mission.

The best guess has him a little younger than Jesus of Nazareth; a birth date in the first decade of what we now call the first century is as good as we can get. As for

without wondering what it might mean to say that the crucified and risen Jesus was the king of whom Psalm 2 had spoken.

If you want to know what it means to talk about God being 'in charge of' the world, or being 'in control', or being 'sovereign', then Jesus himself instructs you to rethink the notion of 'kingdom', 'control' and 'sovereignty' themselves, around his death on the cross.

This emerges clearly in the gospels, where Jesus's "authority" consists both in healing power and in a different kind of teaching, all of which the gospel writers—and Jesus himself—understood as part of the breaking-in of God's Kingdom.

The New Testament, with the story of Jesus's crucifixion at its center, is about God's kingdom coming on earth as in heaven.

So, many have concluded, if Jesus was wrong we must find a way of salvaging something from the wreckage. This is the point at which many writers have turned Jesus into either a moralist (the route Wilson takes) or an existentialist (Bultmann's route). That is a way of having your cake and eating it: of having Jesus, without the embarrassment of his rather odd views about the immediate future.

His larger position is what we might call messianic eschatology: if Jesus is Israel's Messiah, then Israel's God is regrouping his people around Jesus, just as other first-century messianic movements tried to corral loyal Jews around their central figure.