on coffee

Labels: quote

In his Letters from Prison, Bonhoeffer shared something of great importance,

"I often ask myself why a 'Christian instinct' often draws me more to the religionless people than to the religious, but which I don’t in the least mean with any evangelizing intention, but, I might almost say, “in brotherhood.” While I’m often reluctant to mention God by name to religious people – because that name somehow seems to me here not to ring true, and I feel myself to be slightly dishonest (it’s particularly bad when others start to talk in religious jargon; I then dry up almost completely and feel awkward and uncomfortable) – to people with no religion I can on occasion mention him by name quite calmly and as a matter of course..."

Labels: quote

It is not allowable to love the Creation according to the purposes one has for it, any more than it is allowable to love one’s neighbor in order to borrow his tools.

Wendell Berry: The Gift of Good Land

Labels: quote

"When we say, 'I love Jesus, but I hate the Church,' we end up losing not only the Church but Jesus too. The challenge is to forgive the Church. This challenge is especially great because the Church seldom asks us for forgiveness."

Henri Nouwen

Labels: quote

Jesus’ compassion is characterized by a downward pull. That is what disturbs us. We cannot even think about ourselves in terms other than those of an upward pull, an upward mobility in which we strive for better lives, higher salaries, and more prestigious positions. Thus, we are deeply disturbed by a God who embodies a downward movement. Instead of striving for a higher position, more power, and more influence, Jesus moves, as Karl Barth says, from “the heights to the depth, from victory to defeat, from riches to poverty, from triumph to suffering, from life to death.”

Jesus’ whole life and mission involve accepting powerlessness and revealing in this powerlessness the limitlessness of God’s love. Here we see what compassion means. It is not a bending toward the underprivileged from a privileged position; it is not a reaching out from on high to those who are less fortunate below; it is not a gesture of sympathy or pity for those who fail to make it in the upward pull. On the contrary, compassion means going directly to those people and places where suffering is most acute and building a home there. God’s compassion is total, absolute, unconditional, without reservation. It is the compassion of the one who keeps going to the most forgotten corners of the world, and who cannot rest as long as he knows that there are still human beings with tears in their eyes. It is the compassion of a God who does not merely act as a servant, but whose servanthood is a direct expression of his divinity. Henri Nouwen, Compassion

Labels: nouwen, quote

If men and women today began by the thousands experiencing the depths of Jesus Christ in a transforming way, there would simply be no place for their expression of experience to fit into present-day straitjackets of Christianity.

Protestant or Catholic, neither one is structured to contain a mass of devoted people who long for spiritual depth. We are structured towards infancy.

Nothing has messed with my theology more than reading my Bible.

Labels: quote, theology

"Truth by itself is a very dangerous thing. Fundementalism is very crude and very harsh and it's done more damage to the world than anything else. Jesus Christ didn't just come with truth - He came with grace."

Rob Rufus: Grace-Hating Spirit 1
City Church International, Hong Kong - 22/08/04

"Cessationism is the greatest lie causing the greatest damage that we Baptists have pushed on the church."

Labels: quote

I hope you’ve met at least one Kingdom person in your life. They are surrendered people. You sense that life is OK at their core. They have given control to Another and are at peace. A Kingdom person lives for what matters, for life in its deepest sense. There’s a kind of gentle absolutism about their life-style, a kind of calm freedom. Kingdom people feel like grounded yet spacious people. Whatever they are after, they already seem to be enjoying it - and seeing it in unlikely places. Kingdom people make you want to be like them…. Kingdom people are anchored by their awareness of God’s love deep within.

Richard Rohr: Jesus’ Plan for a New World

Labels: kingdom, quote

People are preoccupied with other things. They’re fine people. They’re good-hearted people. They mean well. But they’re just cut off from ever realizing their potential by the rat race, or whatever kind of race people are puttin’ on now. The cares of the world, the distractions of this age, and the deceitfulness of riches, these things just choke them out and prevent them from ever maturing.

By and large, I think, Christians are good people. They’re nice, middle class, suburban people. They’re well-educated; they mean well. They don’t hate Jesus. In fact, they love him, if he’ll stay in his place. And they don’t mean him any harm. It’s just that they are so busy. They’ve got to go here; they’ve got to go there. They’re busy with their houses; they’re busy with their automobiles; they’re busy with their business. They just don’t have time to think and they don’t have time to get on the ball. So, they’re choked out.

Clarence Jordan, Cotton Patch Parables of Liberation

Labels: quote

• (18) "It is much better to desire God without being able to think clearly of Him, than to have marvelous thoughts about Him without desiring to enter into union with His will...." Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation.
  
  
• (24) "It is easier to define ourselves by what we accomplish than by our new identity in Christ. For some, the Christian life consists more of fellowship, service to those in need, witnessing, and worship than of becoming intimate with Jesus. This leads to the problem of ministry without the manifest presence of God."
  
  
• (24) "God is an intensely personal and relational Being, and it is an insult for us to treat Him as though He were a power or a principle. Some of us find it easier to be comfortable with abstract principles and ideas than with people and intimacy. As we have seen, good things like the Bible, theology, ministry, and church can become substitutes for loving Him. As a countermeasure, it is good to ask God for the grace of increased passion for His Son so that, by the power of the Spirit, we will come to love Him as the Father loves Him."

Labels: quote

“Seriousness is not a virtue. It would be a heresy, but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice. It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one’s self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do. It is much easier to write a good Times leading article than a good joke in Punch. For solemnity flows out of men naturally, but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.”

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Labels: quote

Anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity. It is the fruit of unanswered questions. But questions cannot go unanswered unless they first be asked. And there is a far worse anxiety, a far worse insecurity, which comes from being afraid to ask the right questions–because they might turn out to have no answer. One of the moral diseases we communicate to one another in society comes from huddling together in the pale light of an insufficient answer to a question we are afraid to ask.

Thomas Merton, Prologue to No Man Is an Island

Labels: quote

The problem of belief in God has never been solely to convince the conscious mind. if it were, He would need only to raise up forensic debaters or brilliant apologists rather than pastors and churches who nurture. "For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation." (Rom. 10:10, KJV, emphasis added). It seems to me that too often we have all mistranslated the passage: "For with the mind man comes to believe and confesses with his mouth." It is easy to confuse deep, heartfelt conviction with mere intellectual assent and to think salvation is thereby accomplished.

John Loren and Paula Sandford, Transforming the Inner Man, p. 25

Labels: quote

a church which pitches its tents without constantly looking out for new horizons, which does not continually strike camp, is being untrue to its calling.... [We must] play down our longing for certainty, accept what is risky, live by improvisation and experiment.

Labels: quote

Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.

Bernard Berenson

Every one says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 1952

Labels: quote

Labels: quote

"I believe in getting into hot water. I think it keeps you clean."

G.K. Chesterton

Labels: quote

The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world?

Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.

I open the New Testament and read: “If you want to be perfect, then sell all your goods and give to the poor and come follow me.” Good God, if we were to actually do this, all the capitalists, the officeholders, and the entrepreneurs, the whole society in fact, would be almost beggars! We would be sunk if it were not for Christian scholarship! Praise be to everyone who works to consolidate the reputation of Christian scholarship, which helps to restrain the New Testament, this confounded book which would one, two, three, run us all down if it got loose (that is, if Christian scholarship did not restrain it).

Soren Kierkegaard, provocations pp 201-202

Labels: quote

Labels: quote

If it’s normal to wake up in the morning and just try to make it through the day, then I vote for abnormality. I choose insanity.

Shane Claiborne

Labels: quote