Quotes about Resistance

But Sabbath is not only resistance. It is alternative. It is an alternative to the demanding, chattering, pervasive presence of advertising and its great liturgical claim of professional sports that devour all our "rest time.

The truth that is variously enacted by such agents is not an idea or a proposition. It is rather a habit of life that simply (!) refuses the totalizing claims of power. The governor, on behalf of the empire, will continue to ask, "What is truth?" And the apostles will continue to give answer, uncommonly unintimidated: "'We must obey God rather than any human authority'" (Acts 5:29).14

The conclusion affirmed by the narrative is that wherever YHWH governs as an alternative to Pharaoh, there the restfulness of YHWH effectively counters the restless anxiety of Pharaoh. In our own contemporary context of the rat race of anxiety, the celebration of Sabbath is an act of both resistance and alternative. It is resistance because it is a visible insistence that our lives are not defined by the production and consumption of commodity goods.

The dominant ideology of our culture is committed to continuity and success and to the avoidance of pain, hurt, and loss. The dominant culture is also resistant to genuine newness and real surprise. It is curious but true, that surprise is as unwelcome as is loss. And our culture is organized to prevent the experience of both.

subversives in the face of totalism have always had to speak twice in the same utterance, once for the official record and once for the truth of bodily reality.

To participate in the Eucharist is to live inside God's imagination. It is to be caught up into what is really real, the body of Christ. As human persons, body and soul, are incorporated into the performance of Christ's corpus verum, they resist the state's ability to define what is real through the mechanism of torture.22

In our own contemporary context of the rat race of anxiety, the celebration of Sabbath is an act of both resistance and alternative. It is resistance because it is a visible insistence that our lives are not defined by the production and consumption of commodity goods.

The key players, it turns out, are those who refuse to be credentialed or curbed by traditional modes of power, who understand that the transformative power of truth is not a credible companion for consolidating modes of established power, but that truth characteristically runs beyond the confines of such power.

Those who sign on and depart the system of anxious scarcity become the historymakers in the neighborhood.

Quite clearly, the one thing the dominant culture cannot tolerate or co-opt is compassion, the ability to stand in solidarity with the victims of the present order. It can manage charity and good intentions, but it has no way to resist solidarity with pain or grief. So

Because of the fall of Adam and Eve and the natural sinfulness of the human heart that was passed onto all of us, there are those who will oppose God with all their strength. Paul was one of them. It was on his way to persecute believers in Jesus Christ that Jesus knocked him off his horse, blinded him, and spoke directly to him: "Saul! Saul! Why are you persecuting me?" (Acts 9:4). Never, never, never give up on the person in your life who seems most opposed to the gospel.

If Jesus encountered demons and evil spirits during his lifetime his followers likewise may face them.