Quotes about Meaning

God made humans for a purpose: not simply for themselves, not simply so that they could be in relationship with him, but so that through them, as his image-bearers, he could bring his wise, glad, fruitful order to the world.

This idea of God being faithful to the covenant clearly seems to be Paul's meaning here in Romans 3.

But over against this downplaying or mocking we also see, from the earliest documents of the New Testament right on through the first five or six centuries of church history, the resolute affirmation of the cross not as an embarrassing episode best left on the margins, but as the mysterious key to the meaning of life, God, the world, and human destiny.

We should allow ourselves, on a regular basis, to be struck anew by the thick, rich, multilayered nature of these four documents, so full of vivid human scenes, but so evocative in their resonance of meaning about the world, God, life and death, and pretty much everything else.

Near the heart of my purpose in this book is to suggest that not only have we misread the gospels, but that we have made them ordinary, have cut them down to size, have allowed them only to speak about the few concerns that happened to occupy our minds already, rather than setting them free to generate an entire world of meaning in all directions, a new world in which we would discover not only new life, but new vocation.

without wondering what it might mean to say that the crucified and risen Jesus was the king of whom Psalm 2 had spoken.

Private spiritual growth and ultimate salvation come rather as the byproducts of the main, central, overarching purpose for which God has called and is calling us.

only when we see Jesus's death in its proper connection to this entire narrative, can we begin to resolve the questions we want to ask about what the early Christians actually meant.

Saying "It's true for you" sounds fine and tolerant. But it only works because it's twisting the word "true" to mean, not "a true revelation of the way things are in the real world," but "something that is genuinely happening inside you.

My main argument in this book is that when we understand the Christian message, we will see that it does indeed "make sense" of our world, because it helps us both to understand the world the way it is and to be able to contribute fresh "sense" through our own lives.

In what sense is the Bible authoritative in the first place? How can the Bible be appropriately understood and interpreted? How can its authority, assuming such appropriate interpretation, be brought to bear on the church itself, let alone on the world?

Indeed, sometimes when people are locked up by themselves they quite literally go mad. Without human society, they don't know who they are anymore. It seems that we humans were designed to find our purpose and meaning not simply in ourselves and our own inner lives, but in one another and in the shared meanings and purposes of a family, a street, a workplace, a community, a town, a nation.