He wrote: "A religion to be true must include everything from the amoeba to the milky way." Nothing must be excluded from our view and purview for any faith to be true.
Instead of imposing new obligations, (Christians) should appear as people who wish to share their joy, who point to a horizon of beauty and who invite others to a delicious banquet.
If we are cut loose from the anchor of God's Word, we will not be free. We will be slaves of personal passions and popular trends.
The three jewels of Tao: compassion, moderation, and humility. Balthasar said compassion leads to courage, moderation leads to generosity, and humility leads to leadership.
If there was anything I learned from John the Baptist, it was that the sooner you confess a mistake, the quicker you can get on to making new and better mistakes.
I tried not to laugh. I thought about how my Southern Baptist friends would respond to the suggestion that their entire denomination was making people gay.
If we want to give grace to our children, then first we must be willing to receive it ourselves from God.
God in his unending greatness and glory and man in his unending littleness, prepared for the worst but rarely for the best, prepared for the possible but rarely for the impossible.
... the preacher speaks both the word of tragedy and the word of comedy because they are both of them the truth and because Jesus speaks them both...
The knowledge worker cannot be supervised closely or in detail. He must direct himself toward performance and contribution
Marriage is the union of two people who arrive toting the luggage of life. And that luggage always contains sin.
The gospel is the gospel of the cross. This means that God loves the objects of his wrath and that he, in his love, embraces men alienated from him.
A church that does not provoke any crisis, preach a gospel that does not unsettle, proclaim a word of God that does not get under anyone's skin or a word of God that does not touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed: what kin...
For years I thought my assignment or the Church's assignment was to articulate the Gospel and nothing more. Now I believe that if we don't support the verbal expression of the Gospel with physical demonstration of compassion, we are not imitating Jes...
When you don't have your work clearly defined, there can never be any finish point.
I argue that the Jesus of the Gospels is essentially a myth. The Gospels are largely fiction. They were created around the turn of the first and second century in order to give concreteness and substance to the Jesus who, as the Messiah, had appeared...
The weekly worship service can be very effective in evangelism of non-Christians and in edification of Christians if it does not aim at either alone but is gospel centered and in the vernacular.
it is contrary to our natural logic that God would choose to use the foolish and the weak to show himself to be wise. We have difficulty seeing how God is praised through our insufficiencies
There's also a lot of random stuff about poetry, flowers and lute music, plus kissing and cuddling (lots of this), wearing similar outfits, talking incessantly about the current object of devotion, and generally losing one's faculties.
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.
First and foremost, God is the true hero of the story. No matter how captivating the other characters may be, our top priority is to discover what the Bible reveals about God.
