Quotes from Gregory Boyd

When New Testament authors stress that salvation is not arrived at by works, as first-century Jews, these authors are referring to works of the law. They are saying that God's righteousness does not come by external obedience to the law, as some Jews of their day supposed.

Disagreements over the interpretation of Genesis 1 are not new. Early church fathers such as Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Augustine wrestled with this issue hundreds of years ago. However, the debate within Christian circles over the age of creation has intensified during the last 150 years, largely in response to the Darwinian theory of evolution.

Rather, it provided a literary framework within which the author could effectively express the Hebraic conviction that one God created the world by bringing order out of chaos. He was interested in thematic rather than chronological organization.

We are to see a need and meet it—no questions asked. We are to love even our enemies with an unconditional, nonjudgmental love, and, thereby, offer everlasting life to all who are thirsty. To do this means we must refrain from doing what Jesus never did: namely, positioning ourselves as wiser, morally superior guardians and "fixers" of others. Moral guardianship is what the Pharisees did—not Jesus.

They are descriptions of what real life looks like, not prescriptions for how to get life.

Our fundamental sin is that we place ourselves in the position of God and divide the world between what we judge to be good and what we judge to be evil. And this judgment is the primary thing that keeps us from doing the central thing God created and saved us to do, namely, love like he loves.

God is light and in him there is no darkness" (1 John 1:5). Indeed, God's "eyes are too pure to behold evil" (Hab. 1:13). How are these verses consistent with the view that everything— including all the evil that people have experienced throughout history—is part of God's sovereign will?

Let us say once again that the doctrine of the Trinity does not divide God up into "thirds." Because God is Spirit, God is unquantifiable and indivisible. Any other view of God is really pagan, anthropomorphic, and materialistic.

The sinner... while retaining the ability to imagine, has forfeited the basis on which to imagine God.

We can acknowledge that while all good things in creation come from God (James 1:17), all evil in creation comes from wills other than that of God. God allows evil to take place because he desires humans to have the potential to love, and for this they must be free. But in no sense does he will their evil.

Why did God even bother to create minds that naturally gauge their level of confidence in a belief on the evidence and arguments for and against it if he's only pleased with minds that can make themselves more certain than the evidence and arguments for it warrant? I just don't get it!

The greatest miracle of omnipotence was in creating beings who had the potential to resist it.