Quotes about Perspective

Reading the book of Proverbs on child rearing is like paying good money for financial advice and being told after ten sessions, "Here's what I've come up with. Invest your money wisely, and you will be set for retirement." I was hoping for stock tips.

Faith describes our whole way of looking at life and how we act on that.

We reimagine God in ways that account for and make sense of our experience.

Over the years I've grown more and more convinced that "storytelling" is a better way of understanding what the Bible is doing with the past than "history writing.

What could be more normal than for different people, living at different times, in different places, who wrote about the past for different reasons and to different audiences, to produce different versions on the past? Nothing. And that's what we see in the Bible.

Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job all agree: the Bible doesn't capture a freeze-frame of God and bind him to it. If we get on board with this idea, some other things the Bible says about God will make more sense.

Wherever biblical writers talk about the past, we should expect them to be shaping the past as well.

The Bible is not, never has been, and never will be the center of the Christian faith.

It may be hard—sometimes impossible—to see the history in Israel's stories, but we do get a good picture of how these ancient Israelites experienced God.

But at least I didn't do any harm. Along the way I came to see more and more that being right about God and making sure everyone else agreed with what I knew might not be the most important thing I could do in God's eyes.

How do biblical writers talk about the past?

The real Jesus can only be truly understood from a later vantage point—interpreted after the resurrection when the broader implications of who Jesus was and what he did could be better grasped. That is the Jesus the Gospel writers give us, each in his own way.