Hatching the Heart
"Spirituality is thus for the hatching of the heart. Whatever helps to open our hearts to the reality of the sacred is what we should be engaged in. This awareness leads to an image of the Christian life very different from the one with which I grew up. The Christian life is not about pleasing God the finger-shaker and judge. It is not about believing now or being good now for the sake of heaven later. It is about entering a relationship in the present that begins to change everything now. Spirituality is about this process: the opening of the heart to God who is already here."
— The God We Never Knew: Beyond Dogmatic Religion to a More Authentic Contemporary Faith
Being Born Again
"The reason we need to be born again is because we have closed hearts. . . . In severe form, hard hearts are associated with violence, brutality, arrogance, and a rapacious world-devouring greed. These all have milder forms. The mild form of violence is judgmentalism; of brutality, insensitivity; of arrogance, self-centeredness; of rapacious greed, ordinary self-interest. . . . The hatching of the heart — the opening of the self to God, the sacred — is a comprehensive image for the individual dimension of the Christian life."
— The Heart of Christianity
God
"God is the name we use for nonmaterial stupendous, wondrous 'More' that includes the universe even as God transcends the universe. This is God as the 'encompassing Spirit,' the one in whom 'we live and move and have our being,' the one who is all around us and within us. God is the one in whom the universe is, even as God is more than the universe; the Mystery who is beyond all names, even as we name the sacred Mystery in our various ways."
— The Heart of Christianity
Panentheism
"Panentheism affirms both transcendence (God's otherness or moreness) and immanence (God's presence). God is not to be identified with the sum total of things. Rather, God is more than everything, even as God is present everywhere. God is all around us and within us, and we are within God."
— The God We Never Knew
Language about God
"The large number of biblical images for God has an immediate implication: multiplicity points toward metaphoricity. . . . The reason lies in the ineffability of God: language about God must be metaphorical. Direct nonmetaphorical description of God is impossible. All of these images are metaphors.
"The defining characteristic of metaphor is comparison: something is like something else. As such, metaphors are intrinsically nonliteral. A metaphor affirms, even as it also implicitly denies: x is y, x is not y."
— The God We Never Knew
Grace
"Grace as free gift. We are now 'justified by God's grace as a gift' (3:24). What does that mean? In Romans, Paul's Greek word charis is usually translated 'grace' and understood to mean a free gift. He speaks about being 'justified by his grace as a gift' (3:24), about 'the free gift in the grace of one man, Jesus Christ' (5:15), and, like a drumbeat, about 'the free gift . . . the grace of God and the free gift . . . the free gift . . . the free gift . . . the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness' (5:15-17). But be very careful here. There is no such thing as a free gift. There can only be a free offer, which becomes a freegift when it is accepted. . . .
"Paul's good news (gospel) is that God's righteousness — that is, God's very character as distributive justice — is a grace, a free gift offered to us all absolutely and unconditionally for our justification — that is, for our collaboration with God in the transformation of God's world."
— The First Paul
Spirituality
"Spirituality combines awareness, intention and practice. I define it as becoming conscious of and intentional about a deepening relationship with God. The words are very carefully chosen. Becoming conscious of our relationship with God: I am convinced that we are all already in relationship to God and have been from our birth."
— The Heart of Christianity
Faith
"Faith as visio is a way of seeing the whole that shapes our relationship to 'what is,' that is, to God. Faith as fidelitas is faithfulness to our relationship of God. And faith as fiducia is deepening trust in God, flowing out of a deepening relationship with God. . . . Seeing, living, trusting and centering are all related in complex ways. They are all matters of the heart, and not primarily the head.
— The Heart of Christianity
The Christian Life
"The Christian life is about a relationship with God that transforms us into more compassionate beings. The God of love and justice is the God of relationship and transformation. . . . The Christian life is not about believing or doing what we need to believe or do so that we can be saved. Rather, it's about seeing what is already true — that God loves us already — and then beginning to live in this relationship. It is about becoming conscious of and intentional about a deepening relationship with God."
— The Heart of Christianity
Churches
"Churches are to be communities of transformation. This means being communities of resocialization. Most of the readers of this book have been socialized into modern Western culture, and most of us into American culture in particular. To be Christian is to be resocialized into a different understanding of reality and way of life — to live in relationship to another Lord and vision, to be shaped by the Bible and Jesus. Being Christian doesn't mean being anti-American, but it does mean that Christian identity and loyalty matter more than national identity and loyalty. When there is a conflict, Jesus is Lord. The church is the community that proclaims, incubates, and nourishes the lordship of Christ."
— Jesus
Politics of the Bible
"The Bible is political as well as personal. It combines sharp political criticism and passionate political advocacy: radical criticism of systems of domination and impassioned advocacy of an alternative social vision. Protesting the nightmare of injustice, its central voices proclaim God's dream of justice, a dream for the earth. Criticism and advocacy are grounded in their understanding of the character and passion of God: a God of love and justice whose passion for our life together is the Kingdom of God."
— The Heart of Christianity
Affirmation of Religious Pluralism
"A major task for Christians in the 21st century is grateful and enthusiastic affirmation of religious pluralism. This means accepting a relative status for Christianity, but a relative status as one of the magnificent first-magnitude stars in the constellation of the world's religions."
— God at 2000
Subversive Wisdom
"Jesus and the Buddha were teachers of a world-subverting wisdom that undermined and challenged conventional ways of seeing and being in their time and in every time. Their subversive wisdom was also an alternative wisdom: they taught a way or path of transformation."
— Jesus and Buddha: The Parallel Sayings
