Quotes from Fleming Rutledge

The entire thrust of this season at the end of the church year is designed to bring us face-to-face with reality—reality about sin and death, reality about the human race, reality about God. Something ultimate has entered our world, something or Someone that calls us to attention, calls us out of our daily preoccupations and our routine points of view. That is what this season with its special biblical readings is designed to reveal.

Evil is more than the sum of individual misdeeds. Evil has a life of its own. It is not enough to stand aside from it. If it is not actively resisted, it sweeps all before it. Part of a Christian's calling is to resist evil, and in doing so, to endure to the end.

Nothing in the Bible makes any religious sense unless we are people of faith who believe that God's own self speaks to us in this living Word.

The drift away from the Bible has weakened the church.

The scandalous "word of the cross" is God's own Word. The link between scandal and God is in itself irreligious; this is another aspect of the uniqueness of the Christian message.

The scandalous "word of the cross" is not a human word. It is the Spirit-empowered presence of God in the preaching of the crucified One.

The Holy Spirit, so central to New Testament writings as diverse as those of Paul, John, and the author of Acts, inhabits the message and empowers the speaker, so that the proclamation of God's act in Christ is the new occasion of creation, issuing from the Trinitarian power of the originating Word itself.

Should be clear by now that this making-right, or rectification, is not a process. It is already true, in Christ; but it is true eschatologically, from the perspective of the End. The now—not yet dynamic is operative here, as always.

Therefore, so long as we live in this fallen world, we are simul iustus et peccator (saint and sinner simultaneously), until the destruction of the old Adam is completed as God makes all things new (Rev. 21:5; Isa. 42:9; 43:19; Gal. 6:15).

By becoming one of the poor who was deprived of his rights, by dying as one of those robbed of justice, God's Son submitted to the utmost extremity of humiliation, entering into total solidarity with those who are without help.

The case being tried involves a question of ultimate truth — the question of who God is and where he stands; and for just that reason, it is God who will inevitably do the judging.

It is God's new creative act, his great reclamation project that is even greater than the creation itself, because whereas we are "wonderfully created," we are "yet more wonderfully restored."