39 William H. Willimon Quotes on Bloodshed, Cross and Calling & Character: Virtues Of The Ordained Life - Quotes.pub

Here you will find all the famous William H. Willimon quotes. There are more than 39 quotes in our William H. Willimon quotes collection. We have collected all of them and made stunning William H. Willimon wallpapers & posters out of those quotes. You can use this wallpapers & posters on mobile, desktop, print and frame them or share them on the various social media platforms. You can download the quotes images in various different sizes for free. In the below list you can find quotes in various categories like Bloodshed, Cross and Calling & Character: Virtues Of The Ordained Life

We reject the charge of tribalism, particularly from those whose theologies serve to buttress the most nefarious brand of tribalism of all – the omnipotent state. The church is the one political entity in our culture that is global, transnational, transcultural. Tribalism is not the church determined to serve God rather than Caesar. Tribalism is the United States of America, which sets up artificial boundaries and defends them with murderous intensity.
William H. Willimon
We are right to trust descriptions of Jesus given by those most disrupted by Jesus.
William H. Willimon
Avid TV viewers are more likely than others to believe their neighborhoods are unsafe, assume that crime rates are rising, and overestimate their odds of becoming a victim, and they are more likely to own guns.
William H. Willimon
The thousands of black bodies incarcerated on death row are one legacy of lynching. The highest rates of execution in the United States can be correlated with those states where lynching was most prevalent. America’s practice of lynching morphs rather than dies.
William H. Willimon
When there is a racial tragedy, the inclination of white Americans is to grieve, to brush ourselves off, and to get back to being the “real America.” But white supremacy is the “real America.” As Christians, we need to see that these tragic, cruciform moments can be opportunities to hear God’s word in a fresh, new way. God doesn’t bring the tragedy upon us, but we know from scripture that God is relentlessly redemptive, eager to transform our evil into God’s good.
William H. Willimon
The most important decision in Christian theology is to decide whether you will speak of God as a person or as a concept, as a name or as an idea. Talk about God as, to use Paul Tillich’s term, “ultimate reality,” and you will get a safe, dead abstraction that you can utilize in whatever salvation project you happen now to be working. Name God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and God will enlist you in God’s move upon the world.
William H. Willimon
On one occasion Walter Brueggemann said, “If you are a coward by nature, don’t worry. We can still use you. You can get down behind the biblical text. You can peek out from behind the text, saying, ‘I don’t know if I would say this, but I do think the text does.’ ” I like that image – the preacher hunkered down, taking cover behind the biblical text, speaking a word not of the preacher’s devising.
William H. Willimon
The gospels tell us that knowing where this gift came from, who his people were, isn’t going to help us much. If you want to know about Jesus, if you want to know him, you’ve got to meet him on the road.
William H. Willimon
Mainline American Protestantism, as is often the case, plodded wearily along as if nothing had changed. Like an aging dowager, living in a decaying mansion on the edge of town, bankrupt and penniless, house decaying around her but acting as if her family still controlled the city, our theologians and church leaders continued to think and act as if we were in charge, as if the old arrangements were still valid.
William H. Willimon
Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony Quotes
The bombing of helpless and unprotected civilians is a strategy which has aroused the horror of all mankind. I recall with pride that the United States consistently has taken the lead in urging that this inhuman practice be prohibited.
William H. Willimon
Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony Quotes
It was a short step from the liberal Christ-the-highest-in-humanity to the Nazi Superman.
William H. Willimon
Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony Quotes
The loss of Christendom gives us a joyous opportunity to reclaim the freedom to proclaim the gospel in a way in which we cannot when the main social task of the church is to serve as one among many helpful props for the state.
William H. Willimon
Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony Quotes
So there are no nontheologians; there is just good theology and bad theology.
William H. Willimon
Why I Am a United Methodist Quotes
For Barth, and for us, Nazi Germany was the supreme test for modern theology. There we experienced the “modern world,” which we had so labored to understand and to become credible to, as the world, not only of the Copernican world view, computers, and the dynamo, but also of the Nazis.
William H. Willimon
Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony Quotes
Just let the Pope tell us that our Western middle-class need for uninhibited sexual self-expression is less important to him and the church than the poor of Latin America, and some of our brightest academic ethicists shall attempt to relegate him to the domain of those who are out of it, behind the times.
William H. Willimon
Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony Quotes
A Princeton student being interviewed by a reporter was questioned about the prospect of American troops going to Afghanistan when the Soviet Union invaded there. “There’s nothing worth dying for,” was her response. Which means of course that one day she shall have the unpleasant task of dying for nothing.
William H. Willimon
Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony Quotes
The charge of blasphemy, if it is ever made, is treated as a quaint anachronism; but the charge of treason, of placing another loyalty above that to the nation state, is treated as the unforgivable crime.
William H. Willimon
Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony Quotes
A sovereign, creative, truthful God is not threatened by our human attempts to describe and better to understand the nature and purposes of God.
William H. Willimon
United Methodist Beliefs Quotes
Most ethics since Kant has sought to be democratic. Kant’s “categorical imperative” underwrote the assumption that all people could be moral without training since they had available to them all they needed insofar as they were rational. Kant’s project, therefore, was to free the moral agent from the arbitrary and contingent characters of our histories and communities.
William H. Willimon
Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony Quotes
The challenge of Jesus is the political dilemma of how to be faithful to a strange community, which is shaped by a story of how God is with us. In this chapter we will challenge the assumption, so prevalent at least since Constantine, that the church is judged politically by how well or ill the church’s presence in the world works to the advantage of the world.
William H. Willimon
Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony Quotes
Atheism slips into the church where God really does not matter, as we go about building bigger and better congregations (church administration), confirming people’s self-esteem (worship), enabling people to adjust to their anxieties brought on by their materialism (pastoral care), and making Christ a worthy subject for poetic reflection (preaching). At every turn the church must ask itself, Does it really make any difference, in our life together, in what we do, that in Jesus Christ God is reconciling the world to himself?
William H. Willimon
Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony Quotes
what good is a peace movement that works for peace for the same idolatrous reasons we build bombs—namely, the anxious self-interested protection of our world as it is? Christians are free to work for peace in a nonviolent, hopeful way because we already know something about the end. We do not argue that the bomb is the worst thing humanity can do to itself. We have already done the worst thing we could do when we hung God’s Son on a cross. We do not argue that we must do something about the bomb or else we shall obliterate our civilization, because God has already obliterated our civilization in the life, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
William H. Willimon
Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony Quotes
loneliness is endemic to the human condition, and it is more intense in our society, where we are taught to call our loneliness “freedom of the individual.
William H. Willimon
Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony Quotes
sentimentality makes ministry impossible. If the ministry is reduced to being primarily a helping profession then those who take up that office cannot help being destroyed if they have any integrity. For they will find themselves frustrated by a people not trained on the narrative of God’s salvation, not trained to want the right things rightly, but rather a people who share the liberal presumption that all needs which are sincerely felt are legitimate.
William H. Willimon
Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony Quotes
If Jesus is no more than a helpful moral example, a wise teacher of ethics, an empathetic friend, then why pray at all? What good can even the best moral exemplar do for our enhancement? After even our best moral efforts, after all our good deeds are done, there is still a great surplus of suffering and pain left over, still too much untouched evil. Therefore it makes a great deal of difference whether or not God hears us and acts when we pray. Otherwise our prayer is merely autosuggestion, self-therapy, not up to the battle.
William H. Willimon
Lord Quotes Teach Us: The Lord's Prayer & the Christian Life Quotes
The Bible’s concern is not if we shall believe but what we shall believe.
William H. Willimon
Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony Quotes
God" is the name Christians are told to call Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. You cannot get this name through long walks in the woods, hugging trees, delving into your psyche, sitting quietly in your room, or getting in touch with your inner child. This God cannot be known other than by revelation. Any other claimant to the name "God" is an idol and the first commandment has already warned us about idolatry.
William H. Willimon
The Truth About God: The Ten Commandments in Christian Life Quotes
we can speak of marriage as an adventure, but only because for disciples, marriage is now subsumed under the category of an aspect of our adventure in Christ. How on earth could we explain how ordinary people could risk commitment to another person for a lifetime, especially since we have no way of knowing all the implications that this commitment entails?
William H. Willimon
Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony Quotes
When the only contemporary means of self-transcendence is orgasm, we Christians are going to have a tough time convincing people that it would be nicer if they would not be promiscuous.
William H. Willimon
Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony Quotes
Having no use for such bourgeois virtues as tolerance, open-mindedness, and inclusiveness (which the revolutionary knows are usually cover-ups that allow the powerful to maintain social equilibrium rather than to be confronted and then to change), revolutionaries value honesty and confrontation—painful though they may be.
William H. Willimon
Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony Quotes
What we don’t need is central economic planning or new laws, more taxes or fewer good-paying jobs. What we need is something much more difficult to get than a Porsche—character. We need the sort of character that is able to look at the world and all it has to offer and at certain key moments say simply, “Thank you, but I’m now satisfied.” It takes a huge amount of moral stamina to be able to say, “Yes, we could afford it, but we are not going to buy it, because it does little to contribute to the basic goodness of our lives.” We need to switch our economic thinking from the supply side to the desire side of the equation.
William H. Willimon
Sinning Like a Christian: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins Quotes
We reject the charge of tribalism, particularly from those whose theologies serve to buttress the most nefarious brand of tribalism of all—the omnipotent state. The church is the one political entity in our culture that is global, transnational, transcultural. Tribalism is not the church determined to serve God rather than Caesar. Tribalism is the United States of America, which sets up artificial boundaries and defends them with murderous intensity.
William H. Willimon
Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony Quotes
To be a Christian means gradually, Sunday after Sunday, to be subsumed into another story, a different account of where we have come from and where we are going, a story that is called “gospel.” You are properly called a “Christian” when it’s obvious that the story told in Scripture is your story, above all other stories that the world tries to impose on you, and that the God who is rendered in Scripture is the God who has got you.
William H. Willimon
United Methodist Beliefs Quotes
we are forever getting confused into thinking that scripture is mainly about what we are supposed to do rather than a picture of who God is.
William H. Willimon
Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony Quotes
A good teacher must be content to be a sower rather than a reaper," he said. "Teachers must not expect to see immediate, specific, concrete results of their efforts. If they have any effect upon their students, it will show up later in life, long after their students have left them." The same can be said of the pastoral ministry.
William H. Willimon
Pastor: The Theology and Practice of Ordained Ministry Quotes
It takes great faith in Easter, particularly faith in the gift of the Holy Spirit, to be honest with our people that we have not a clue to the meaning of some biblical passage, or that we have no sense of a satisfying ending for a sermon, or that we are unsure of precisely what the congregation ought to do after hearing a given text. The most ethically dangerous time within a sermon is toward the end of the sermon, when we move from proclamation to application and act as if we know more than God. 133
William H. Willimon
Calling & Character: Virtues Of The Ordained Life Quotes Ministry Quotes Preaching Quotes Sermons Quotes
. . . when we take upon ourselves his yoke of obedience, his yoke is easy, his burden is light (Matt. 11:28-30). When is a burden light? It is when we find our burdensome lives caught up, elevated, borne aloft by something greater than our lives. Mission gives meaning. Jesus does not come to us to relieve us of all yokes or burdens; rather, he comes offering us a yoke worth wearing, a burden worth bearing. It is a great gift not to have to make your life mean something, to have your life given significance by the Lord whose cross, when taken up, takes us up as well. 119-120
William H. Willimon
Calling & Character: Virtues Of The Ordained Life Quotes Christianity Quotes Cross Quotes Gospel centred Quotes Meaning Quotes
Jesus didn't die as a frustrated failed revolutionary. His death was the revolution.
William H. Willimon
Cross Quotes Jesus christ Quotes Revolution Quotes
Despite our earnest efforts, we couldn't climb all the way up to God. So what did God do? In an amazing act of condescension, on Good Friday, God climbed down to us, became one with us. The story of divine condescension begins on Christmas and ends on Good Friday. We thought, if there is to be business between us and God, we must somehow get up to God. Then God came down, down to the level of the cross, all the way down to the depths of hell. He who knew not sin took on our sin so that we might be free of it. God still stoops, in your life and mine, condescends. “Are you able to drink the cup that I am to drink?” he asked his disciples, before his way up Golgotha. Our answer is an obvious, “No!” His cup is not only the cup of crucifixion and death, it is the bloody, bloody cup that one must drink if one is going to get mixed up in us. Any God who would wander into the human condition, any God who has this thirst to pursue us, had better not be too put off by pain, for that's the way we tend to treat our saviors. Any God who tries to love us had better be ready to die for it. As Chesterton writes, “Any man who preaches real love is bound to beget hate … Real love has always ended in bloodshed.
William H. Willimon
Love Quotes / Bloodshed Quotes Cross Quotes Crucifixion Quotes Divine condescension Quotes Easter Quotes Good friday Quotes
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