Quotes about Life

Jesus was announcing that a whole new world was being born and he was "teaching" people how to live within that whole new world.

Jesus's way of life is the path of self-giving love

From Plato to Hegel and beyond, some of the greatest philosophers have declared that what you think about death, and life beyond it, is the key to thinking seriously about everything else — and, indeed, that it provides one of the main reasons for thinking seriously about anything at all. This is something a Christian theologian should heartily endorse. So, without further delay, we plunge into

Idolatry, turning away from the source of life, results in sin, which already breathes the musty air of death. And death is the ultimate denial of the goodness of God's creation—the very thing that the Temple, holding together heaven and earth, was supposed to affirm.

How, then, can the Temple be cleansed so that humans, with the polluting smell of death upon them, can nevertheless come into God's Presence? The answer supplied by the levitical rituals is that the sacrificial blood is the sign of God-given life, a life more powerful than death, a life therefore that purifies both sanctuary and worshipper.

All of this suggests that Mark's gospel, with Jesus himself as the great Character who stands behind it, is inviting us to something not so much like rule-keeping on the one hand or following our own dreams on the other, but a way of being human

God's kingdom had already been launched through the events of Jesus's life. Unless we get this firmly in our heads, we will never understand the inner dynamic of Paul's mission.

Paul is the classic example of the early Christian who has woven resurrection so thoroughly into his thinking and practice that if you take it away the whole thing unravels in your hands.

re: I Corinthians 15:34,58] "The present life of the church, in other words, is not about "soul-making," the attempt to produce or train disembodied beings for a future disembodied life. It is about working with fully human beings who will be reembodied at the last, after the model of the Messiah.

Jesus's resurrection is the beginning of God's new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. That, after all, is what the Lord's Prayer is about.

God's plan is not to abandon this world, the world which he said was "very good." Rather, he intends to remake it. And when he does he will raise all his people to new bodily life to live in it. That is the promise of the Christian gospel.

Listening to things that are not true is the first step toward ultimate bondage and death. That