Quotes about New Testament

Love, as Paul and the New Testament presents it, is not action—not even action with a special intention—but a source of action.

I believe one reason why so many people do in fact fail to immerse themselves in the words of the New Testament, and neglect or even avoid them, is that the life they see there is so unlike what they know from their own experience.

New Testament passages make plain that this kingdom is not something to be "accepted" now and enjoyed later, but something to be entered now (Matt. 5:20; 18:3; John 3:3, 5). It is something that already has flesh-and-blood citizens (John 18:36; Phil. 3:20) who have been transformed into it (Col. 1:13) and are fellow workers in it (Col. 4:11).

Christianity today is so subnormal that if any Christian began to act like a normal New Testament Christian, he would be considered abnormal

Officially, the New Testament church at an early stage took seriously their responsibility for widows who lacked family or other resources. The office of deacon was instituted initially to address this pressing need.

A Building? There is not a single place in the New Testament where the term "church" refers to a building — not one! It wasn't until A.D. 190 that Clement of Alexandria referred to a meeting place as a "church." He was also the first person to use the phrase "go to church."34 Every single one of the appearances of the word ecclesia in the New Testament refers to a gathering or network of believers in Christ, not a physical structure or place.

Eternal torture is nowhere suggested in the Old Testament Scriptures, and only a few statements in the New Testament can be so misconstrued as to appear to teach it; and these are found either among the symbolisms of Revelation, or among the parables and dark sayings of our Lord, which were not understood by the people who heard them (Luke 8:10) and which seem to be but little better comprehended today.

behind every idol is a demon. Someone may say, "Well, that's just an Old Testament problem." No, it's a New Testament problem too:

The true reason why faith is given such an exclusive place by the New Testament, so far as the attainment of salvation is concerned, over against love and over against everything else in man...is that faith means receiving something, not doing something or even being something. To say, therefore, that our faith saves us means that we do not save ourselves even in slightest measure, but that God saves us.

The irony of New Testament lordship is that only in slavery to Christ can a man discover authentic freedom.

In the New Testament, the concept of myth is not simply a harmless feature of a primitive world-view, requiring only to be reinterpreted for modern man ... Myth is that which "diminishes the truth of salvation."

The fact that Bultmann proceeds from a pastoral and missionary motive - namely, to preserve modern man from rejecting the New Testament because of its mythical structure - does not diminish by one iota the theological presumption of this undertaking.