Quotes from Scot McKnight

If you compare the written prayers from the psalms, the Lord's Prayer, or those we find in the prayer books of the church, one thing will immediately strike any reader: The prayers from those sources are theologically rich and aesthetically appropriate. I cannot always say this of the spontaneous prayers of many Christians—and I am not impugning their motives or questioning their hearts.

God gave the Bible not so we can know it but so we can know and love God through it.

Though Son of God and though entitled to provisions, Jesus didn't let his physical desires dictate decisions.

The atonement is designed by God to restore cracked Eikons into glory-producing Eikons by participation in the perfect Eikon, Jesus Chirst, who redeems the cosmos. To be an Eikon, then, is to be charged with a theocentric and missional life. Prior to the fall, Adam and Eve did what they were supposed to do: they "eikoned." And cracked Eikons are being restored so that they can eikon now and so that they will eikon forever.

Gospels of Sin Management" presume a Christ with no serious work other than redeeming humankind … [and] they foster "vampire Christians," who only want a little blood for their sins but nothing more to do with Jesus until heaven. Dallas

The end of the Sermon makes it clear that Jesus expects his followers to take up his words and live them out regardless of the cost. I know of no alternative. Take them or leave them, is what I say to myself.

the God of the Bible is so immense, omnipotent, and omniscient that for God, knowing each of us in the depths of our beings is an afternoon walk in Sydney's botanical garden. The God of Jesus knows us by name, knows our minds and hearts and emotions, loves us (anyway), and summons us, as it were, into the divine presence to lay out our requests.

I believe that the broad sweep of the way in which prayer works in the Bible — and I'm thinking here of Jonah and the repentance of Nineveh — teaches us that God, in his sovereignty, has established a kind of contingency in the universe, and that God genuinely interacts with humans who pray in such a way that the universe changes as a result of our prayers.

John does not adjudicate how to engage in politics. Instead, John instructs Christians how to discern the moral character of governments and politicians and policies and laws.

What Jesus has in mind here is not fear about speaking but profound respect for the gloriousness of the gospel, a desire to honor God, and an approach to gospeling that does the most service to Christ. In other words, we need to ask if speaking up in a given situation will honor or vilify Christ, and then to act accordingly.

The book of Revelation requires us to take a stand for the Lamb in this world. To read it well we must learn to think "theo-politically," or to say this another way, the entire book of Revelation is about public discipleship.

The first principle of spiritual formation is this: A spiritually formed person loves God and others.