Role reversal
The ancient man approached God (or even the gods) as the accused person approaches his judge. For the modern man the roles are reversed. He is the judge: God is in the dock. He is quite a kindly judge: if God should have a reasonable defence for being the god who permits war, poverty and disease, he is ready to listen to it. The trial may even end in God’s acquittal. But the important thing is that Man is on the Bench and God in the Dock.
—C. S. Lewis in
God in the Dock
Real retreat
When Jesus went up on a mountainside by Himself to pray, we can rest assured He wasn’t heading off for the latest Rabbi Retreat featuring “The Day’s Most Dynamic Communicators” along with “The Finest in Contemporary Jewish Music.”
—Philip Wiebe in The
Christian Leader (April 9, 1991)
Celebrating the now
We look forward to the promise of each day, having discovered the secret that the good old days are here and now.
—Denis Waitley in
Seeds of Greatness
The boring church
Because we have been so willing to accommodate the message of the Bible to the limitations of contemporary culture, the modern world does not regard the church as a threat; I suspect that it regards us as merely boring. We are giving the modern world less and less in which to disbelieve because it senses no difference between what the church is saying and what is being said by a variety of secular voices. Thus, the modern world is not called up actively to decide for or against the church, because it sees in the church so little against which to take a stand. The world which once imprisoned our ancestors now responds to an utterly enculturated church with mere indifference.
—William H. Willimon in
Shaped by the Bible
Environmentalists and human life
I don’t understand how some of my friends can get worked up about the death of a dolphin, forest, veal calf, or lab rat and not care about a being who, if given half a chance, will grow up to look just like them.
—Kenneth Guentert in “Is There
Room for Discussion in the
Abortion Debate?” (U.S.
Catholic, April 1991)
A God untamed by us
It is curious to realize that people like you and me, who set such store by being settled and secure, should worship a God whose revelation was to nomads and wanderers. We try to domesticate God, try to get God to settle down with us—but never succeed.
—Barbara Moorman in The
Other Side (Nov.–Dec. 1990)
In the beginning
In the opening sentences of the Bible, God spoke a world of energy and matter into being—light, moon, stars, earth, vegetation, fish, birds, man, woman—not love and virtue, faith and salvation, hope and judgment, though they will come soon enough. The opening lines of Genesis sound more like minutes copied out in a physics laboratory than in a prayer meeting. But in the Psalms physics and prayer occupy the same space.
—Eugene Peterson in
Answering God
