Quotes about Meaning

The first forty years of our life give the text, the next thirty furnish the commentary upon it, which enables us rightly to understand the true meaning and connection of the text with its moral and its beauties.

We need to shed our unearthly and nonsocial and idealistic and romantic and uber-spiritual visions of kingdom and get back to what Jesus meant. By kingdom, Jesus means: God's Dream Society on earth, spreading out from the land of Israel to encompass the whole world.

We must not forget that it is not a thing that lends significance to a moment; it is the moment that lends significance to things. —ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL

The longer you look at the idea that we read the Bible to find new meanings, the sillier it becomes. We read and return to the Bible not (just) to find something new but to hear something old, not to discover something fresh but to be reminded of something ancient.

we need to learn to tell the story that makes sense of Jesus. Not a story that we ask Jesus to fit into.

What we are looking for in reading the Bible is the ability to turn the two-dimensional words on paper into a three-dimensional encounter with God, so that the text takes on life and meaning and depth and perspective and gives us direction for what to do today.

There is no kingdom that is not about a just society, as there is no kingdom without redemption under Christ. Yet I'm convinced that both of these approaches to kingdom fall substantially short of what kingdom meant to Jesus, so we need once again to be patient enough to ponder what the Bible teaches.

Christopher Rowland, who has plumbed apocalyptic literature as well as anyone in the modern era, counters much of the common interpretation of Revelation when he says, "We should not ask of apocalypses, what do they mean? Rather, we should ask, how do the images and designs work? How do they affect us and change our lives?

If you want to know how Jesus understands the Christian life, the place to begin is with what he means by kingdom of God.

Thus, see Old Testament texts like Pss 68:5; 103:13—14; Isa 63:15—16; Jer 31:9, 20, the famous avinu malkeinu ("Our Father, our King") lines in classic Jewish prayers, like Ahabah Rabah and The Litany for the New Year, and texts like 4Q372 fragment 1:16.

Revelation "is not about a rapture out of this world but about faithful discipleship in this world.

Until we learn to read the Bible as Story, we will not know how to get anything out of the Bible for daily living.