Quotes about Perspective

To see what Paul sees, Christians today are summoned to join Paul: the reality of Jesus demands that the Old Testament be read not by the book, but against the grain.

whatever it means to speak of the Bible as inspired by God clearly doesn't mean the Bible is scrubbed clean of the human experience of the writers.

There is no pure "theology" to be contrasted to "feminist theology" or "Black theology," because the supposed pure theology is driven by its own encultured concerns and assumptions.

reality isn't what it used to be.

Andrew Perriman at "P.OST" (postnost.net).

Watching how the biblical writers looked at faith as trust rather than certainty helps us through our inevitable uh-oh moments from a different perspective. These moments are not proof that faith doesn't work, but only that a certain kind of faith doesn't work—one that needs correct thinking in order to survive (chapter 6).

Reading the book of Proverbs on child rearing is like paying good money for financial advice and being told after ten sessions, "Here's what I've come up with. Invest your money wisely, and you will be set for retirement." I was hoping for stock tips.

Faith describes our whole way of looking at life and how we act on that.

We reimagine God in ways that account for and make sense of our experience.

Over the years I've grown more and more convinced that "storytelling" is a better way of understanding what the Bible is doing with the past than "history writing.

What could be more normal than for different people, living at different times, in different places, who wrote about the past for different reasons and to different audiences, to produce different versions on the past? Nothing. And that's what we see in the Bible.

Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job all agree: the Bible doesn't capture a freeze-frame of God and bind him to it. If we get on board with this idea, some other things the Bible says about God will make more sense.