Quotes from Scot McKnight

We don't ask what the Bible says, we ask what God says to us in that Bible. The difference is a difference between paper and person.

God's idea of redemption is community-shaped.

... the Eucharist profoundly enables the grace of God to be received with all its glories and blessings.

The ultimate end of redemption is that we worship God with our whole being and in the whole company of the redeemed.

Angels will frequently - even when they're comforting us with good news - touch the awe of God's eternal presence and drive us to our knees before our God of glory.

Prayer is the way to die to our own wishes and surrender everything to God.

Those who aren't following Jesus aren't his followers. It's that simple. Followers follow, and those who don't follow aren't followers. To follow Jesus means to follow Jesus into a society where justice rules, where love shapes everything. To follow Jesus means to take up his dream and work for it.

God did not give the Bible so we could master him or it; God gave the Bible so we could live it, so we could be mastered by it. The moment we think we've mastered it, we have failed to be readers of the Bible.

We need to shed our unearthly and nonsocial and idealistic and romantic and uber-spiritual visions of kingdom and get back to what Jesus meant. By kingdom, Jesus means: God's Dream Society on earth, spreading out from the land of Israel to encompass the whole world.

The assumption that the gospel can be reduced to a note card is already off on the wrong track.

Too many people think repenting means feeling terrible about something someone has done. Feeling bad is fine, and it often accompanies repentance, but repentance is not so much about what we feel but the twofold prong of owning up to our own injustices and failures to love, and starting all over by living justly and lovingly.

What must be emphasized in all of this is the difference between trusting Christ, the real person Jesus, with all that that naturally involves, versus trusting some arrangement for sin-remission set up through him — trusting only his role as guilt remover.