Quotes about Reflection

We sometimes have the impression that the coronavirus is providing people with a megaphone with which to say, more loudly, what they were wanting to say anyway.

My fourth starting-point towards a fresh approach is to insist on some kind of lectio continua, both personally and publicly. There are, to be sure, many times and occasions when we need to choose special readings to suit a particular moment or challenge. But the church's staple diet ought to be to work through the books of the Bible on a more or less continuous loop.

Simplicity is a great virtue, but oversimplification can actually be a vice, a sign of laziness.

His analysis here is the subsequent reflection of one who has come to believe that the crucified Jesus is Israel's Messiah.

Only in the light of Jesus can he look back and see not only that the God-given Torah had the effect of increasing "Sin," but that this was the divine intention all along.

From Plato to Hegel and beyond, some of the greatest philosophers have declared that what you think about death, and life beyond it, is the key to thinking seriously about everything else — and, indeed, that it provides one of the main reasons for thinking seriously about anything at all. This is something a Christian theologian should heartily endorse. So, without further delay, we plunge into

If we spend time in the prayer of lament, new light may come, rather than simply the repetition of things we might have wanted to say anyway.

the human calling to worship God and reflect him into his world.

There are many parts of the world we can't do anything about except pray. But there is one part of the world, one part of physical reality, that we can do something about, and that is the creature each of us calls 'myself.' Personal holiness and global holiness belong together. Those who wake up to the one may well find themselves called to wake up to the other as well.

It all becomes so complicated, people grumble—when what they really mean is, "I am so used to reading this passage one way that I find it hard to switch and consider other options.

When God goes to work-- when Jesus becomes king-- human beings are not downgraded, reduced to being pawns or ciphers. In God's kingdom, humans get to reflect God at last into the world, in the way they were meant to. They become more fully what humans were meant to be. That is how God becomes king.

Sin" is not just "doing things God has forbidden." It is, as we saw, the failure to be fully functioning, God-reflecting human beings.