Humour is, in fact, a prelude to faith; and laughter is the beginning of prayer … Laughter is swallowed up in prayer and humour is fulfilled by faith.

If I said God is “outside” or “beyond” space-time, I should mean as Shakespeare is outside The Tempest; i.e. its scenes and persons do not exhaust his being.

The only one we can trust is the Holy Spirit. Man’s theology and doctrine will constantly change with time. We can always count on the Holy Spirit to speak the mind of God.

Very small errors in our understanding of the Gospel can result in very big problems.

I had not known before that love is obedience. You want to love, and you can’t, and you hate yourself because you can’t, and all the time love is not some marvelous thing that you...

How does “Let go and let God” measure up against Scripture? Remember, the test isn’t what sounds deep, what sounds holy, or even what makes sense to us. For the Christian, the test is Scripture.

For wordsmiths and masters of words, without necessarily being harsh with words, the words have a tendency to shoot straight to the hearts of people, and this either deeply touches them or deeply angers them....

gospel” was the very presence of Jesus himself, and the joy and fellowship that he brought to the poor.

Do not try to make the Bible relevant. Its relevance is axiomatic. Do not defend God’s word, but testify to it. Trust to the Word. It is a ship loaded to the very limits of...

If the Gospel of Judas found in Codex Tchacos can be convincingly identified as being a Coptic translation of the original Greek Gospel of Judas that Bishop Ireneaus mentioned around A.D. 180 in his book,...

Christ did not die to forgive sinners who go on treasuring anything above seeing and savoring God. And people who would be happy in heaven if Christ were not there, will not be there. The...

When man is with God in awe and love, then he is praying.

God’s revelation… unmasks our illusions about ourselves. It exposes our pride, our individualism, our self-centeredness – in short, our sin. But worship also offers forgiveness, healing, transformation, motivation, and courage to work in the world...

The Psalms wrap nouns and verbs around our pain better than any other book.

Towards the end of the Second World War, when I was sixteen years old, I was taken out of school and forced into the army. After a brief period of training at a base in...

Religion is about hospitality and responsibility, and about neighbor/enemy-love-as-self-love in a Christian term that requires one to turn a new _gaze_ onto others––what I call a _cosmopolitan gaze_.

Violence is spiritual junk food, and boredom is spiritual anorexia.

Before we apply Joshua to our lives, we need to make sure which side of the Jordan we are living on. Militarism invites God’s wrath.

God split himself into a myriad parts that he might have friends. This may not be true, but it sounds good—and is no sillier than any other theology.

I dared, for the first and last time in my life, to express a theological conclusion: “But how can a necessary being exist totally polluted with the possible? What difference is there, then, between God...

When I realize that God makes his gifts fit each person, there’s no way I can covet what you got because it just wouldn’t fit me.

Let us put theology out of religion. Theology has always sent the worst to heaven, the best to hell.

The notion that evil is non-rational is a more significant claim for Eagleton than at first appears, because he is (in this book [On Evil] as in others of his recent ‘late period’ prolific burst)...

With what dread and apprehension we entrust important jobs into the hands of others. Imagine the love of a needless God who is willing to want our work.

disciple” – but also perpetual Christ incarnators . . .

Now, as it happens, theology is actually a pitilessly demanding discipline concerning an immense, profoundly sophisticated legacy of hermeneutics, dialectics, and logic; it deals in minute detail with a vast variety of concrete historical data;...

Plato utterly condemns the poets for publishing trivial, false and indeed wicked stories about the gods, such as that they fight with each other, or are overcome by emotions like grief, anger, mirth. Reluctantly, he...

Wherever there is abuse there is also corruption. Politics, philosophy, theology, science, industry, any field with the potential to affect the well-being of others can be destroyed by abuse and saved by good will.

Its helpful to know the reasons for our faith…it helps us not be so vulnerable to doubt, and it helps us not be so vulnerable to false doctrine.

The Church does not dispense the sacrament of baptism in order to acquire for herself an increase in membership but in order to consecrate a human being to God and to communicate to that person...

Isn’t that funny, that deity is passe but the attributes and implications of deity linger–

I want you to see persecution and opposition and slander and misunderstanding and disappointment and self-recrimination and weakness and danger as the normal portion of faithful pastoral ministry.

The difference between us and the papists is that they do not think that the church can be ‘the pillar of the truth’ unless she presides over the word of God. We, on the other...

I write with the entire alphabet, not just the popular letters.Readers don’t want to lose themselves in the text. They want to find themselves in it.

Easter was when Hope in person surprised the whole world by coming forward from the future into the present.

The question is not, therefore, _whether_ a theory is grand or small, or whether it is universal/global or particular/local, but _what function_ a theory plays and _whose interest_ it serves.

I recall the story of the philosopher and the theologian… The two were engaged in disputation and the theologian used the old quip about a philosopher resembling a blind man, in a dark room, looking...

There is a beauty in paradox when it comes to talking about things of ultimate concern. Paradox works against our tendency to stay superficial in our faith, or to rest on easy answers or categorical...

She had experimented with Wicca eight years ago, found that her spells did not produce the desired results of making her every bully bald and fat, and threw it in the corner of her soul...

God impressed me with this a long time ago: ‘Roddy, I will never do anything through you until I have done it to you!’.”~R. Alan Woods [1998]

But here we see the peace of God is not the absence of negative thoughts, it is the presence of God himself.

For Calvin, the creation reflects its Creator at every point. Image after images flashed in front of our eyes, as Calvin attempts to convey the multiplicity of ways in which the creation witnesses to its...

When they realized they were in the desert, they built a religion to worship thirstiness.

I do not think either virginity or old age contemptible, and some of the shrewdest minds I have met inhabited the bodies of old maids.

But it was never actually that big a deal. Jenkins didn’t really disbelieve in the Resurrection: he merely questioned the historical veracity of the New Testament narratives. It was mildly interesting: one side saying “I...

It is fundamental to both Taoist and Confucian thought that the natural man is to be trusted, and from their standpoint it appears that the Western mistrust of human nature-whether theological or technological-is a kind...

…the operative idea here is that there is a right and wrong theology — a right God and a wrong God. But this is an invalid premise. All versions of God are the same thing:...

How can we turn our knowledge about God into knowledge of God? The rule for doing this is simple but demanding. It is that we turn each Truth that we learn about God into matter...

It helps to not confuse theological philosophers with evangelists. There is a difference but objectively neither better than the other: an evangelist’s mission is to convert; a theological philosopher’s mission is to build an understanding...

The Christian is free from all other human beings. He does not have to live over against others, controlled by their actions and responses. Rather, he lives according to Christ’s commands. This is Christian freedom....