Quotes about Belief

But every step away from the Jewish narrative, in this case the Jewish narrative as reaching its focal point in Israel's Messiah, is a step toward paganism.

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. And—supposing someone came forward out of the fog to meet us? That, of course, is the central though often ignored Christian belief.

They believed that God was going to do for the whole cosmos what he had done for Jesus at Easter.

What drove Paul, from that moment on the Damascus Road and throughout his subsequent life, was the belief that Israel's God had done what he had always said he would; that Israel's scriptures had been fulfilled in ways never before imagined; and that Temple and Torah themselves were not after all the ultimate realities, but instead glorious signposts pointing forward to the new heaven-and-earth reality that had come to birth in Jesus.

Conservative churches have spoken of miracles, in the sense of a god normally outside suddenly reaching in, doing something dramatic, and then going away again.

What has happened in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, in other words, is by no means limited to its effects on those human beings who believe the gospel and thereby find new life here and hereafter. It resonates out, in ways that we can't fully see or understand, into the vast recesses of the universe.

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.

But pistis could also point to the personal commitment that accompanies any genuine belief, in this case that Jesus was now "Lord," the world's rightful sovereign. Hence the term means "loyalty" or "allegiance." This was what Caesar demanded from his subjects.

This is where the Platonizing of our eschatology has led not only to bad atonement-theology but to the twin dangers of rationalism (imagining that being Christian is a matter of figuring out and then believing a true set of ideas) and romanticism (supposing that being a Christian is about people [122] having their hearts strangely warmed).

By the time Jesus's body was taken down from the cross, Paul believed, these "rulers and authorities" had been stripped, shamed, and defeated.

His analysis here is the subsequent reflection of one who has come to believe that the crucified Jesus is Israel's Messiah.

so far as I can tell, most people simply don't know what orthodox Christian belief is.