Quotes about God

The Creator is being reimagined all the time and can be reimagined through the lens of any culture, of any time and place. No one culture, and certainly not the (largely white male affluent) Western culture I inhabit, can claim superior status for reimagining God once and for all. The Creator doesn't need any of us to sit atop the mountain and speak down to everyone else.

N. T. Wright's Justification: God's Plan and Paul's Vision or What Paul Really Said.

Doubt means spiritual relocation is happening. It's God's way of saying, "Time to move on.

There's an irony: the passionate defense of the Bible as a "history book" among the more conservative wings of Christianity, despite intentions, isn't really an act of submission to God; it is making God submit to us.

Doubting God is painful and frightening because we think we are leaving God behind, when in fact we are only leaving behind ideas about God that we are used to surrounding ourselves with—the small God, the God within our control, the God who moves in our circles, the God who agrees with us.

Doubt strips away distraction so we can see more clearly the inadequacies of whom we think God is and move us from the foolishness of thinking that our god is the God.

Wisdom is about the lifelong process of being formed into mature disciples, who wander well along the unscripted pilgrimage of faith, in tune to the all-surrounding thick presence of the Spirit of God in us and in the creation around us.

If this core mystery of the Christian faith (which I believe can never be truly articulated) is true, and that the Creator not only took part in the human drama, but suffered in that drama, perhaps we have an understanding and compassionate God, not one out to get us?

Trust like this is an affront to reason, the control our egos crave. Which is precisely the point. Trust does not work because we have captured God in our minds. It works regardless of the fact that, at the end of the day, we finally learn that we can't.

I definitely get where these questions are coming from, and remember: I don't think "knowing" or seeking to think "correctly" about God is wrong. Not at all. The problem is preoccupation with correct thinking—mistaking our thoughts about God with the real thing, and then to base our faith on holding on to that certainty.

And taking seriously the historically shaped biblical portrayal of a violent God drives us to ask for ourselves, "Is this what God is like?

The God I read about in the Bible is not what God is like—in some timeless abstraction, and that's that—but how God was imagined and then reimagined by ancient people of faith living in real times and places.