Quotes about Perspective

Like the Hindu in Belfast who was asked whether he was a Catholic Hindu or a Protestant Hindu, those of us who follow this fresh reading of the New Testament want to say to our critics right and left, 'Don't imagine that because we don't check all your fundamentalist boxes, we must be modernists, or that because we don't check all your modernist boxes, we must be fundamentalists.

believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

If the promised final future is simply that immortal souls will have left behind their mortal bodies, why then death still rules - since that is a description, not of the defeat of death, but simply of death itself, seen from a different angle.

heaven is undoubtedly important, but it's not the end of the world.

The reason history is fascinating is because people in other times and places are so like us. The reason history is difficult is because people in other times and places are so different from us. History is, to that extent, like marriage

Jews too, have assumed otherwise (suggesting, for instance, that Paul the Apostle was a traitor to the Jewish world or that he had never really understood it in the first place), the point is worth stressing before we even approach the main work of Paul's life.

there is no such thing as a god's-eye view (by which would be meant a Deist god's-eye view) available to human beings, a point of view which is no human's point of view.

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.

History is always a matter of trying to think into the minds of people who think differently from ourselves.

Take Psalm 73. The writer knows the 'normal' line: good things come to good people, bad things to bad. But it hasn't worked out like that. The wicked are flourishing, and the righteous are crushed under their feet. It's only when the poet goes into God's temple that a larger, healing viewpoint can be glimpsed.

Instead of "thinking God's thoughts after him," science was now studying the world as though God didn't exist.

But what Saul believed about Jesus meant that the underlying center of spiritual gravity had shifted.