Quotes about God

For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God" (Rom. 13:1). God

Public theology is first and foremost a reaction against the tendency to privatize the faith, restricting it to the question of an individual's salvation. As we shall see in later chapters, the church is not a collection of saved individuals but the culmination of the plan of salvation: to create a people of God.

Pastor-theologians know something that others do not know, and they know it because the Bible tells them so. To be instructed by the Spirit in the school of the Scriptures is to be, as Peter and John had been, "with Jesus." What pastor-theologians know is something quite particular (what God was doing in Christ) but has enormous, even universal, implications.

What is the message? Can faith bereft of specific beliefs speak understanding? If so, understanding of what? My concern is that the only thing Cox has to say to young people seeking spirituality is "Do good."13 But why should we do good? And what is the good if it is not somehow rooted in the nature and work of God? Cox's Age of the Spirit needs a normative Word. For while belief without faith is empty, faith without belief is blind.

when the church responds to the word of God as it ought, the church demonstrates the love of God and the mind of Christ, in word and in deed. Just as the church comes to understand the love of God by attending to the story of Jesus and getting caught up in the gospel story, so the church in turn renders that story intelligible when it lives out the truth of the gospel.

Here is the central paradox: the pastor is a public figure who must make himself nothing, who must speak not to attract attention to himself but rather to point away from himself—unlike most contemporary celebrities. The pastor must make truth claims to win people not to his own way of thinking but to God's way. The pastor must succeed, not by increasing his own social status but, if need be, by decreasing it.

The distinct experiential end in question in the church, communion with God and others, neither justifies nor fits many marketing means. The increase of the kingdom of God owes more to the work of the Spirit than to Madison Avenue.

Para ministrar a palavra de Deus, os pastores-teólogos precisam ler não só a BÃ

The gospel (and this is a theme to which we shall frequently return) is not only good but great news: testimony to God's great saving act in Jesus Christ, a doing "than which nothing greater can be conceived.

The just is close to the people's heart, but the merciful is close to the heart of God.

The person you consider ignorant and insignificant is the one who came from God, that he might learn bliss from grief and knowledge from gloom.

The normal Christian Life is not supposed to be an exhausting wrestling match with a dead man, but is an abundant, joy-filled life with God, salted with an occasional season of strong resistance from our archenemy.