Quotes from Gregory Boyd

History teaches that the best way to destroy the Church is to give it political power.

I ask him to sanctify my imagination and help me experience the real Jesus "with all five senses."

Love is the central command in Scripture and judgment the central prohibition. Indeed, judgment is the "original sin" in Scripture. This is why the forbidden tree in the center of the garden—the prohibition around which life in the garden revolved—was called the "Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil."

The flesh is not a nature that is essential to someone's identity. It is rather a deceptive way of seeing and experiencing oneself and one's world and thus a deceptive way of living in the world.

Every day we choose not to commit suicide we are manifesting our fundamental conviction that life is worth it, despite all the pain we may experience.

The "days" of Genesis 1 are part of a literary structure that serves to support the theological claim that Yahweh-God alone is Creator-King! They are not meant to satisfy modern curiosity as to how long it took God to create the world.

In the first few centuries of church history, theologians reacted strongly against the prevalent opinion that things happen by fate. As a result, they emphasized human freedom and tended to believe that God did not control everything that happened.

The idol from which we strive to get life determines what behaviors we must display and what realities we must conceal.

We can think of the Matrix as the total web of lies we've internalized that keep us living in contradiction to our true self— the self that is defined by God through Christ alone.

There is no single, all-determinative divine will that coercively steers all things, and hence there is here no supposition that evil agents and events have a secret divine motive behind them. Hence too, one need not agonize over what ultimately good, transcendent divine purpose might be served by any particular evil event.

The literary framework view not only avoids this problem but actually explains it. The order of the days is not meant to reflect the chronology of creation. It is rather meant to express thematically the problems of darkness, watery abyss, formlessness, and void expressed in Genesis 1:2. 4.

How do we reconcile the fact that Jesus was fully God with the fact that Jesus was fully human? It is an issue that has been discussed in Christian circles throughout the church's history. All Christians believe that Jesus was both fully God and fully man. This doctrinal belief was formalized with the Council of Chalcedon in AD 451 and became one of the central beliefs of Christianity.