Quotes from Scot McKnight

From nature one can learn the lessons of divine providence, and some of us need to be reminded of this because we can look and not see a world alive with God's presence.

Any serious pondering of all of life through the Golden Rule is dangerous for our moral health because it will summon us — I know I feel this way just writing the above paragraphs — to live under the King and as one of his kingdom citizens.

It is a fact that many statements about what the Bible says are derived from contextless exegeses of a former generation

The Psalter is responsible for creating the prayers in the church. It remains the core of all Christian prayers. Whenever we pray with psalms, we are joining the universal Church in prayer.

It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me; it is the parts I do understand." Whoever said that may well have been thinking about Matthew 5 or even our specific passage.

Calvin saw in the words "Do not judge" a tendency to become overly curious about the sins of others (including those closest to us) that needed to be checked and handed over to God—who alone is the Judge.

In Acts 10—11, in the encounter of the Torah-observant Peter with the God-fearing Gentile Cornelius, we see what "fulfill" looks like for the apostles: it means some radical revisioning without abolishing. Paul's words about accommodating himself to Gentile ways in 1 Corinthians 9:19—23 also illustrate how the apostles "applied" this claim by Jesus. Second lesson in Bible reading: looking to Jesus means following him and through him the Torah.

In his book The Indelible Image, New Testament scholar Ben Witherington III reiterates a common piece of interpretive wisdom: "A text without a context is just a pretext for what we want it to mean.

One reason why so many Christians today don't know the Old Testament is because their "gospel" doesn't even need it!

The clearest way to put this is to say that Jesus thinks that following him means following the Torah. Those who follow him (and his teaching of the Torah) will be called "great" in the kingdom. Anyone who denies his teachings and teaches others not to follow him (and through him the Torah) will be called "least" in the kingdom.

Jesus is infallible and we are not.

The language describes the royal entourage who will ascend to welcome the King of Glory in the air (air does not mean heaven), in order to usher him back to earth in royal celebration. In other words, the language signals a common image: when the watchmen of a walled city heard the trumpet sound, signaling the proximity of their royal king, they would send out an entourage and create a royal procession as the victorious king returned.