Beware lest you make Christ into a Moses, and the gospel into a book of law or doctrine… In fact, however, the gospel demands no works to make us holy and to redeem us. Indeed, it condemns such works, and demands only faith in Christ, because he has overcome sin,...
We do not live by faith in God’s intervention. We live by faith in God’s grace when there is no intervention. from When God Interrupts
To believe in Christ’s rising and death’s dying is also to live with the power and the challenge to rise up now from all our dark graves of suffering love. If sympathy for the world’s wounds is not enlarged by our anguish, if love for those around us is not expanded,...
I am not an evangelical and don’t want to be one. But my life was made immeasurably better by some of the truths evangelicals taught me. The power of those truths stayed with me even though I never signed on again. The same is true for many people. And so I am not...
What we really believe is what our actions show that we believe. When we realize that faith is not what we believe but what we do, then we have to take some account of our actions. Given what we profess, we may just have to change how we live, and that may mean that...
Faith becomes the one wholly inflexible ground for resistance to violence, precisely because it teaches us how to face death—not in excited expectation of reward, but in the sober letting-go of our fantasies in the sure hope that a faithful God holds us firmly in life...
All the persons of faith I know are sinners, doubters, uneven performers. We are secure not because we are sure of ourselves but because we trust that God is sure of us.
Far from putting doubts to rest, religion has the effect of intensifying them. It judges those who profess faith more harshly than it judges unbelievers. It holds them up to a standard of conduct so demanding that many of them inevitably fall short… For those who take...
Even so, however strongly we believe that our relationship with God begins here and now, life in its fullness—life described as “eternal” because it only rings true if it is somehow analogous to the depth and quality of our best, seemingly timeless, earthly...
The stranger is also a central figure in biblical stories of faith, and for good reason. The religious quest, the spiritual pilgrimage, is always taking us into new lands where we are strange to others and they are strange to us. Faith is a venture into the unknown,...