The resurrection is God’s way of ge... - Peter J. Gomes - Quotes.Pub

The resurrection is God’s way of getting our attention.

Peter J. Gomes Quotes

The parables, however, and indeed, the miracles and the healings, are all teaching devices, exercises in interpreting the larger principles.

In reality, the world have played too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them men of much greater profundity than they really are.

We trust the text not because it is “true” in the sense of fact, but because in its infinite variety it points to the truth and communicates truth because it comes from the truth which.

The Bible is not God, nor is it a substitute for God, and to treat it as if it were God or a surrogate of God is to treat it in the very way that it itself condemns over and over again.

It does not take a great deal of imagination or courage to believe that God is on your side when you are prospering or winning; it takes a great deal of courage and imagination to believe that God is on your side when you are suffering or losing.

The question should not be 'What would Jesus do?' but rather, and more dangerously, 'What would Jesus have me do?'...As Mark Twain is said to have remarked, 'It is not what I don't understand in the Bible that troubles me; it is what is perfectly clear that does.

When I [see] Christmas lights being strung . . . and Santa Clauses in the store windows, I [know] Thanksgiving [is] not far away.

To some, the temporal triumph of the Christian community in the world is a sign of God's favor and the essential righteousness of the Christian position. The irony of the matter, though, is that whenever the Christian community gains worldly power, it nearly always looses its capacity to be the critic of the power and influence it so readily brokers.

The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus: What's So Good about the Good News? Quotes

My course is a survey of how readings of the same constant text have varied over the centuries, from the formation of the canon to our present time, dependent on context and subtext. A community in exile will read differently than a community in apparent full possession of all it surveys, with those who have nothing welcoming the promised overturning of the standing order, and those who have much of this world's goods not longing for the end of the age. Depending, then, upon how one reads and interprets, either the Bible is a textbook for the status quo, of quiescent pieties and promises, or it is a recipe for social change and transformation. There are churches dedicated to each point of view, each claiming its share of the good news; but what is good news for some is often bad news for somebody else.

The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus: What's So Good about the Good News? Quotes

It is interesting to me to note that those who most frequently call for fair play are those who are advantaged by the play as it currently is, and that only when that position of privilege is endangered are they likely to benefit from the change required to "play by the rules." What if the "rules" are inherently unfair or simply wrong, or a greater good is to be accomplished by changing them? When the gospel says, "The last will be first, and the first will be last," despite the fact it is counterintuitive to our cultural presuppositions, it is invariably good news to those who are last, and at least problematic news to those who see themselves as first.

The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus: What's So Good about the Good News? Quotes

Mystery is not an argument for the existence of God; mystery is an experience of the existence of God.

The question should not be "What would Jesus do?" but rather, more dangerously, "What would Jesus have me do?" The onus is not on Jesus but on us, for Jesus did not come to ask semidivine human beings to do impossible things. He came to ask human beings to live up to their full humanity; he wants us to live in the full implication of our human gifts, and that is far more demanding.

The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus: What's So Good about the Good News? Quotes

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