Quotes about Perspective

History is always a matter of trying to think into the minds of people who think differently from ourselves.

Take Psalm 73. The writer knows the 'normal' line: good things come to good people, bad things to bad. But it hasn't worked out like that. The wicked are flourishing, and the righteous are crushed under their feet. It's only when the poet goes into God's temple that a larger, healing viewpoint can be glimpsed.

Instead of "thinking God's thoughts after him," science was now studying the world as though God didn't exist.

But what Saul believed about Jesus meant that the underlying center of spiritual gravity had shifted.

We see through a glass darkly, says St. Paul as he peers toward what lies ahead. All our language about future states of the world and of ourselves consists of complex pictures that may or may not correspond very well to the ultimate reality. But that doesn't mean it's anybody's guess or that every opinion is as good as every other one.

Stories are a basic constituent of human life; they are, in fact, one key element within the total construction of a worldview. I

Put like that, of course, it seems absurd; and yet the absurdity lies in the attempt to picture God as just like us only a bit bigger and more all-seeing.

We mustn't imagine that our feeling of being close to God is a true index of the reality.

Faith involves believing that certain things are true, of course. But (here's another caricature we have to put firmly to bed) this isn't about odd, detached dogmas. It's about certain things in the light of which everything else at last comes into focus.

don't believe everything you read about the Rapture. In fact, don't believe most of what you read about the Rapture.

Since the Bible has quite a lot to say about truth—and since it also has plenty to say about how particular individuals relate to that truth—it has become easy to imagine that its claims can and should be reduced to particular, and highly relative and situational, angles of vision.

What God had done in and through Jesus was, from Paul's perspective, the launching of a heaven-and-earth movement, not the offer of a new "otherworldly" hope.