Home > Work > The Story We Find Ourselves in: Further Adventures of a New Kind of Christian
1 " I guess you could say that the Bible is a book that doesn't try to tell you what to think. Instead, it tries to teach you how to think. It stretches your thinking; it challenges you to think bigger and harder than you ever have. "
― Brian D. McLaren , The Story We Find Ourselves in: Further Adventures of a New Kind of Christian
2 " 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. "
3 " With Sir Isaac Newton's laws of physics, and God being seen as the powerful machine operator who perfectly controls the machine through these orderly laws, we end up with the opposite problem, the very opposite of the ancient situation. Now, instead of chaos reigning and us wondering if there's any order, order reigns supreme, and we wonder if there's any freedom. "
4 " God unleashes history in the beginning. God helps the baby to stand in the beginning. But God is also out ahead, calling history homeward across the field or across the room. God doesn't force it. Sometimes history responds, or some parts of history respond, but others resist or rebel. But God keeps calling. "
5 " seeing history in this new way-not just being pushed from the past, or even engineered in the present, but being pulled, invited, called, into the future, which keeps coming to us as a gift. "
6 " I so wish people had seen it your way, but I think too many of us have read the story to say it gives European white males carte blanche to play God over creation; so `having dominion' gives them a license to pollute and exploit. "
7 " For me, Carol, we can't be faithful to God unless we're faithful to the facts, faithful to the data if you will. And so, instead of hiding from evolution, I think we'd be more faithful to God to look it right in the eye and learn from it. "
8 " The cross calls humanity to stop trying to make God's kingdom happen through coercion and force, which are always self-defeating in the end, and instead, to welcome it through self-sacrifice and vulnerability. "
9 " I guess you could say that the Bible is a book that doesn't try to tell you what to think. Instead, it trys to teach you how to think. It stretches your thinking; it challenges you to think bigger and harder than you ever have. "
10 " Sometimes, webecome 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. "