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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 8a49806 | There are more atoms than molecules, but a molecule is more complex than an atom. There are more molecules than cells, but a cell is more complex than a molecule. And so on up the hierarchy it goes, with increasingly complex levels of organization at each higher level. | Rob Bell | ||
| a7a141f | This participation is important, because Jesus and the prophets lived with an awareness that God has been looking for partners since the beginning, people who will take seriously their divine responsibility to care for the earth and each other in loving, sustainable ways. | Rob Bell | ||
| 2a2d0ae | The elements are all there--fingers, keys, strings, ears--but there's something in the way, something inhibiting our ability to fully experience all the possibilities. The apostle Paul writes that now we see "as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face" (1 Cor. 13). Right now, we're trying to embrace our lover, but we're wearing a hazmat suit. We're trying to have a detailed conversation about complex emotions, but we're underwater. We'r.. | Rob Bell | ||
| 0297fdc | as the king rose from his seat, Ehud reached with his left hand, drew the sword from his right thigh and plunged it into the king's belly. Even the handle sank in after the blade, and his bowels discharged. Ehud did not pull the sword out, and the fat closed in over it. (That's in the Bible. Word for word.) | Rob Bell | ||
| 649dc4c | Of all the conceptions of the divine, of all the language Jesus could put on the lips of the God character in the story he tells, that's what he has the Father say. "You are always with me, and everything I have is yours." ... Millions of people in our world were told that God so loved the world, that God sent his son to save the world, and that if they accept and believe in Jesus, then they'll be able to have a relationship with God... But.. | philosophy monster-god universality theology | Rob Bell | |
| c180e1b | And to that, that impulse, craving, yearning, longing, desire-- God says yes. Yes, there is water for that thirst, food for that hunger, light for that darkness, relief for that burden. If we want hell, if we want heaven, they are ours. That's how love works. It can't be forced, manipulated, or coerced. It always leaves room for the other to decide. God says yes, we can have what we want, because love wins. | Rob Bell | ||
| 262b65d | Now imagine what happened when people would offer a sacrifice but then it didn't rain or the sun didn't shine or their animals still got diseases or they were unable to have children--obviously, they concluded, they didn't offer enough. And so they offered more. And more and more. Because religion had built into it from the very beginning something called anxiety. You never knew where you stood with the gods. The gods are angry, the gods ar.. | Rob Bell | ||
| cc81bcf | The gospel Jesus spreads in the book of Luke has as one of its main themes that Jesus brings a social revolution, in which the previous systems and hierarchies of clean and unclean, sinner and saved, and up and down don't mean what they used to. God is doing a new work through Jesus, calling all people to human solidarity. Everybody is a brother, a sister. Equals, children of the God who shows no favouritism. To reject this new social order.. | social-justice lazarus | Rob Bell | |
| ed1b47b | For Jesus the point is fruit. You'll know people by their fruit, by their life, by how they actually live in the world. Lots of people get excited about new ideas, and then they shove these new understandings in other people's faces and become the very thing they despise. (If you have bought more than five copies of Love Wins for the same person and they still haven't read it, I'm talking about you. Ha-ha.) If a new idea or understanding or.. | Rob Bell | ||
| 430f648 | What will you do with your power and wealth and might and armies? What kind of world will you create with it? Will you use it to manipulate and overpower others to build your empire even bigger, or will you use it to help the widow, the orphan, and the refugee among you? | Rob Bell | ||
| 50a01ca | The violence isn't that surprising; what's surprising is that among all that violence are new ideas about serving and blessing and nonviolence. Here's what I mean: Do you find it primitive and barbaric to care for widows, orphans, and refugees? That's commanded in the book of Deuteronomy. Do you find it cruel and violent to leave a corner of your field unharvested so the poor can have something to eat? That's commanded in the book of Leviti.. | Rob Bell | ||
| 336a7a8 | This God disrupts the familiarity of the story by interrupting the sacrifice. Picture an early audience gasping. What? This God stopped the sacrifice? The gods don't do that! Second, the God in this story provides. Worship and sacrifice was about you giving to the gods. This story is about this God giving to Abraham. A God who does the giving? A God who does the providing? | Rob Bell | ||
| 0a6800e | The story is like the other stories about gods demanding acts of devotion and obedience. Gods who are never satisfied. The first audience for this story would have heard this before--it would have been familiar. But then it's not. The story takes a shocking turn that comes out of nowhere. This God disrupts the familiarity of the story by interrupting the sacrifice. Picture an early audience gasping. What? This God stopped the sacrifice? The.. | Rob Bell | ||
| 629512d | Third, it is our responsibility to be extremely careful about making negative, decisive, | Rob Bell | ||
| f297e02 | What you find in the Bible are stories accurately reflecting the dominant consciousness of the day, and yet right in among and sometimes even within those very same violent stories, you find radically new ideas about freedom, equality, justice, compassion, and love. New ideas sit side by side with old ideas. Vicious violence is right there next to new understandings of peace and justice. (Kind of like now.) | Rob Bell | ||
| 45849de | The Bible was written by Jewish people who belonged to a Jewish minority living under the oppression of a succession of massive military superpowers who had conquered them: The Egyptians, the Persians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Greeks, the Romans. These | Rob Bell | ||
| 176a461 | Because when you can't hear the cry, when you stop caring for the widow, the orphan, and the refugee among you, it always leads to the diminishing of your empire. History | Rob Bell | ||
| c0087e5 | Can your story be retold? Can all of the various things that have happened to you and the things you have done you'd prefer to never think about again and the embarrassing parts and the painful parts--can all of it be retold in such a way that the worst parts become the most powerful, poignant parts? | Rob Bell | ||
| 716fedf | What's the Best Question to Ask When You're Reading the Bible? Why did people find this important to write down?...Why did people write this down? What was going on in their world that this was important to them? Why did they feel the need to put words to this? Start with that question. Start with those questions. And see what happens. | Rob Bell | ||
| 6c34c70 | Why didn't they just skip the whole sacrificial system all together? That would have been amazing. Just scrap the whole thing. Announce that the final sacrifice has been offered and there's no more need to do such things. Declare that the temple is going to be torn down. Proclaim that it is finished. Oh wait, we're getting ahead of ourselves, aren't we? (Please tell me you enjoyed that last paragraph.) | Rob Bell | ||
| 058cfba | Richard Price: One of my favorite things that David (Simon) did - one of the sentimental tropes - is that if you take a kid on the street corner, and this kid is dealing and he's holding together the business, he's got the inventory, he's got sales, he's got police pressure, he's got higher-ups pressure. If this kid can keep numbers in his head and make money, they say, "Well, if this was a white kid and you put him in Wharton and he came o.. | Jonathan Abrams | ||
| af28d47 | Because if something is wrong with your God, if your God is loving one second and cruel the next, if your God will punish people for all of eternity for sins committed in a few short years, no amount of clever marketing or compelling language or good music or great coffee will be able to disguise that one, true, glaring, untenable, unacceptable, awful reality. | Rob Bell | ||
| 1000d97 | Great artists know that it isn't just about what you add; sometimes the most important work is knowing what to take away. Removing clutter, excess, all the superfluous elements--and finding out in the process what's been in there the whole time. | Rob Bell | ||
| e7c6e18 | What does Jesus mean when he uses that word "heaven"? ___________________ First, there was tremendous respect in the culture that Jesus lived in for the name of God--so much so that many wouldn't even say it. That is true to this day. I occasionally receive e-mails and letters from people who spell the name "G-d." In Jesus's day, one of the ways that people got around actually saying the name of God was to substitute the word "heaven" for t.. | Rob Bell | ||
| 33db618 | Second, Jesus consistently affirmed heaven as a real place, space, and dimension of God's creation, where God's will and only God's will is done. Heaven is that realm where things are as God intends them to be. | Rob Bell | ||
| 0369487 | On earth, lots of wills are done. Yours, mine, and many others. And so, at present, heaven and earth are not one. What Jesus taught, what the prophets taught, what all of Jewish tradition pointed to and what Jesus lived in anticipation of, was the day when earth and heaven would be one. The day when God's will would be done on earth as it is now done in heaven. The day when earth and heaven will be the same place. This is the story of the B.. | Rob Bell | ||
| f2c23a2 | To name is to order, to participate, to partner with God in taking the world somewhere. | Rob Bell | ||
| cbc9c56 | This participation is important, because Jesus and the prophets lived with an awareness that God has been looking for partners since the beginning, people who will take seriously their divine responsibility to care for the earth and each other in loving, sustainable ways. They centered their hopes in the God who simply does not give up on creation and the people who inhabit it. The God who is the source of all life, who works from within cr.. | Rob Bell | ||
| 32a347a | Why is it that the choice among churches always seems to be the choice between intelligence on ice and ignorance on fire? --as quoted by Diana Butler Bass1 | Brian D. McLaren | ||
| 0fa42c0 | Never accept and be content with unanalyzed assumptions, assumptions about the work, about the people, about the church or Christianity. Never be afraid to ask questions about the work we have inherited or the work we are doing. There is no question that should not be asked or that is outlawed. The day we are completely satisfied with what we have been doing; the day we have found the perfect, unchangeable system of work, the perfect answer.. | Brian D. McLaren | ||
| 5d6efad | Even though Pope Urban VIII reversed the pronouncements of his predecessors by declaring slavery unacceptable in the mid-seventeenth century, the vast majority of Protestant Christians in America considered slavery and white supremacy to be absolutely consistent with "biblical" Christianity. It would take American Protestants over a hundred years to make slavery history. Even then, they would find ways to cleverly camouflage the old Doctrin.. | Brian D. McLaren | ||
| 7801c74 | I've come to see that just as the Doctrine of Discovery was used to justify white Christian supremacy and the exploitation of nonwhites and non-Christians, the "doctrine of dominion" (Genesis 1:28) is still being used to justify human supremacy and the exploitation of the earth and all its creatures. Aided and abetted by harmful doctrines about the future (especially "left behind" dispensationalist eschatology), industrial-era Christians ha.. | Brian D. McLaren | ||
| 64207df | In case after case in the past, there is a kind of Bible-quoting intoxication under the influence of which we religious people lose the ability to distinguish between what God says and what we say God says. | Brian D. McLaren | ||
| 170562c | The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better. | Brian D. McLaren | ||
| 46bbd8c | There's one thing worse than a failed old religion: a naive and arrogant new one. | religion | Brian D. McLaren | |
| 275ad81 | In religion as in parenthood, uncritical loyalty to our ancestors may implicate us in an injustice against our descendants: imprisoning them in the errors of our ancestors. | religion | Brian D. McLaren | |
| 456bea4 | The man who must brag for himself knows that no one else will. | Robin Hobb | ||
| eea8531 | Growing numbers of us are acknowledging with grief that many forms of supremacy--Christian, white, male, heterosexual, and human--are deeply embedded not just in Christian history but also in Christian theology. We are coming to see that in hallowed words like almighty, sovereignty, kingdom, dominion, supreme, elect, chosen, clean, remnant, sacrifice, lord, and even God, dangerous viruses often lie hidden, malware that must be identified an.. | Brian D. McLaren | ||
| 60ada73 | Jesus faithfully and courageously represented the nonviolent and loving heart of God. Jesus and his way of nonviolent, self-giving love, the text suggests, will earn the trust of all humanity. We will ultimately migrate, in other words, toward the way of Jesus. | Brian D. McLaren | ||
| 01c3031 | Such a possibility raises a question: if one dares to let one's traditional and inherited "Christian" understanding of God be converted under the influence of Jesus, can one still be considered a Christian? Or, conversely, if one refuses to let one's traditional understanding be converted under the influence of Jesus, can one still be considered a Christian? Be that as it may, growing numbers of us are coming to realize this simple truth: f.. | Brian D. McLaren | ||
| e01b929 | To everyone, Jesus issues an invitation to abandon the story they will lose themselves in, and instead, to enter the story they will find themselves in. | Brian D. McLaren | ||
| 18ac57f | Sometimes, we become so familiar with the primal sacred story of the Bible that we need some fresh takes on it, telling us the same thing in different ways, or giving us some new vantage points to see what was always there, things we'd missed before. | Brian D. McLaren | ||
| 10344a1 | Our interpretations reveal less about God or the Bible than they do about ourselves. They reveal what we want to defend, what we want to attack, what we want to ignore, what we're unwilling to question. | Brian D. McLaren | ||
| d2c5e9b | As I said before, evolution doesn't bother me. If you tell me that God created the earth "by hand" in six days some thousands of years ago, I am impressed. If you tell me instead that God set a whole cosmos in motion some billions of years ago, a cosmos perfectly calibrated within the narrowest of margins to produce at least one planet where life would be developed through cause-effect chains that were designed into it by a purposeful Desig.. | Brian D. McLaren |