Quotes about Change

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

Whenever God does something new, he involves people — often unlikely people, frequently surprised and alarmed people. He asks them to trust him in a new way, to put aside their natural reactions, to listen humbly for a fresh word and to act on it without knowing exactly how it's going to work out.

the radically new thing God did was nevertheless the thing he'd always promised

Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which boils down in popular discourse to saying that the very act of observing things changes the things you observe, works just as well, worryingly, when you look in the mirror.

Anyone who supposes that, because a church has officially renounced some doctrine, nobody thereafter will hold to it, has little experience of real church life.

To be baptized was therefore to die and rise with Jesus, to leave behind the old life and to be reborn into the new one.

He does not here ask the different groups to give up their practices; merely not to judge one another where differences exist. As Paul well knew (though we sometimes forget), this is actually just as large a step, if not larger, than a change in practice itself. The move from regarding something as mandatory to regarding it as optional is vast, just as vast in fact as the move from regarding something as forbidden to regarding it as available.

If you want to know why the "new atheists" like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Atkins sell so many books, the answer is that they're offering the modernist version of the good old-fashioned theological term "assurance." They are assuring anxious ex-believers that the nightmare of small-minded and stultifying "religion" is gone

As we should know, there is nothing inevitable about such things.

Since Paul knew that his own hard and bitter heart had been changed by God's grace, he also knew that there was nobody this side of the grave who could not in principle be similarly reached and changed.

Suffering and dying is the way by which the world is changed. This is how the revolution continues.

It all becomes so complicated, people grumble—when what they really mean is, "I am so used to reading this passage one way that I find it hard to switch and consider other options.