In Jesus we know what God is like. Half the mental suffering one meets springs from wrong ideas about God. Because they have found God in themselves, or in nature, or in philosophy, as soon as suffering comes, people develop a grudge against the universe. Their God is no bigger than themselves, and they hate him and revile him, as you may, I am told, see a savage beating his idol when things have gone wrong. But we meet another... Read more
When people demanded a sign from Jesus he refused point blank. He refused because they were asking for something incontrovertible, something by which God would compel persons to accept Jesus as his Son, his Chosen One, something that would fetter their reason and overpower their will. And God does not go in for that kind of sign. All God’s signs are open to contradiction. So it is in the Old Testament—there is nothing compulsive in Isaiah and his children with... Read more
For the mainstream of the world’s traffic, by now, has built a bypass around Bethlehem. It isn’t interested. It still goes to Rome. To the ideal of brute strength and vitality of empire and domination.— C.K. Barrett Read more
Niebuhr famously once said about liberal Protestant theology that it promulgated “a God without wrath brings men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through a ministry of a Christ without a cross.” I would paraphrase and amplify that to say—- According to a predominant liberal view of Christian history, Jesus came into a world that was not fallen, to die a death that was not absolutely necessary, to save humanity from a sin that was neither original nor hereditary... Read more
Used by kind permission of my friend Mark Frontziak. Read more
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