My friend Adele describes fundamentalism as holding so tightly to your beliefs that your fingernails leave imprints on the palm of your hand... I think she's right. I was a fundamentalist not because of the beliefs I held but because of how I held them: with a death grip. It would take God himself to finally pry them out of my hands. (p.17-18)
God's ways are higher than our ways not because he is less compassionate than we are but because he is more compassionate than we can ever imagine.
What a comfort to know that God is a poet.
Caring for the poor, resting on the Sabbath, showing hospitality and keeping the homeβthese are important things that can lead us to God, but God is not contained in them.
(About changing faith) At our best, Christians embrace it, leaving enough space within orthodoxy for God to surprise us every now and then.
Like all who search for truth out of fear, I desperately wanted someone else to tell me exactly what to do.
When you stop trying to force the Bible to be something it's not--static, perspicacious, certain, absolute--then you're free to revel in what it is: living, breathing, confounding, surprising, and yes, perhaps even magic.
My interpretation can only be as inerrant as I am, and that's good to keep in mind.
You can't get too far into the Gospels without noticing that Jesus made a pretty lousy apologist.
When we refer to 'the biblical approach to economics' or the biblical response to politics' or 'biblical womanhood,' we're using the Bible as a weapon disguised as an adjective.
Invariably, I will be referred to Gleason Archer's massive Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties, a heavy volume that seeks to provide the reader with sound explanations for every conceivable puzzle found within the Bible - from whether God approved of Rahab's lie, to where Cain got his wife. (Note to well-meaning apologists: it's not always the best idea to present a skeptic with a five-hundred-page book listing hundreds of apparent contradictions in Scripture when the skeptic didn't even know that half of them existed before you recommended it.)
