Quotes about New Testament

The New Testament called it salvation or enlightenment, the Twelve Step Program called it recovery. The trouble is that most Christians pushed this great liberation off into the next world, and many Twelve Steppers settled for mere sobriety from a substance instead of a real transformation of the self. We have all been the losers, as a result—waiting around for "enlightenment at gunpoint" (death) instead of enjoying God's banquet much earlier in life.

Only with a notion of the Preexisting Christ can we recover where this Jesus was "coming from" and where he is leading us—which is precisely into the "bosom of the Trinity" (John 1:18). "I shall return to take you with me, so that where I am you also may be" (John 14:3), the Christ has promised. That might just be the best and most succinct description of salvation there is in the whole New Testament.

According to the New Testament, saints are those who belong to Christ, in whom Christ lives. We are meant to be saints not only when we get to heaven, but right here in this world.

The early church worked secretly and illegally, and it triumphed. We must learn again to work in the same manner. Until the Communist era, I never understood why so many persons in the New Testament are called by nicknames...We continue to use secret names in our work in captive nations.

The actual word "hell" is used roughly twelve times in the New Testament, almost exclusively by Jesus himself. The Greek word that gets translated as "hell" in English is the word "Gehenna." Ge means "valley," and henna means "Hinnom." Gehenna, the Valley of Hinnom, was an actual valley on the south and west side of the city of Jerusalem. Gehenna, in Jesus's day, was the city dump.

The New Testament does not envisage solitary religion; regular assembly for worship is everywhere in the epistles.

The New Testament, they tell us, is founded upon the prophecies of the Old; if so, it must follow the fate of its foundation.

The New Testament calls this "the peace that passes understanding," because it goes beyond thinking—no amount of mental churning will get you there.

The New Testament evinces its universal design in its very, style, which alone distinguishes it from all the literary productions of earlier and later times.

To the first class belong the Gospels and Acts to the second, the Epistles to the third, the Revelation.

THE NEW TESTAMENT TEACHING REGARDING THE BAPTISM with the Holy Spirit has been immersed in controversy, especially during the last century. For one thing, should it be called baptism in the Holy Spirit, by the Holy Spirit, or with the Holy Spirit?

and the birth of Jesus, two things become clear. First, in the witness to Jesus by the early Christians in the New Testament, they relied heavily on Old Testament "anticipations" of the coming Messiah. But second, Jesus did not fit those "anticipations" very well, such that a good deal of interpretive imagination was required in order to negotiate the connection between the anticipation and the actual bodily, historical reality of Jesus.