Quotes about Understanding

History is always a matter of trying to think into the minds of people who think differently from ourselves.

genuine faith is always seeking the Word hidden in the flesh, not using the Word simply as a way of getting at the flesh.

I received mercy, because in my unbelief I didn't know what I was doing.

having a hard enough time explaining to his disciples that he had to die; they never really grasped that at all, and they certainly didn't take his language about his own resurrection as anything more than the general hope of all Jewish martyrs. How could they possibly have understood him saying something about further events in what would have been, for them, a still more unthinkable future? Of

the four gospels are trying to say that this is how God became king. We have, partly deliberately and partly accidentally, forgotten this massive claim almost entirely. Since we cannot stop reading the gospels without ceasing to be proper Christians, we have developed all kinds of strategies for making alternative sense of the gospels and so screening out the dangerous

Logic cannot comprehend love; so much the worse for logic. That

Faith involves believing that certain things are true, of course. But (here's another caricature we have to put firmly to bed) this isn't about odd, detached dogmas. It's about certain things in the light of which everything else at last comes into focus.

My third note is that when we therefore use scripture in little bits, cut off from their proper context and made to dance to our tunes instead, all sorts of doubts can creep in, like weeds among the wheat.

But if Christians don't get Jesus right, what chance is there that other people will bother much with him?

science takes things apart to see how they work, but religion puts things together to see what they mean.

This makes the rather obvious logical mistake analogous to that of a soldier who, receiving orders through the mail, concludes that the letter carrier is his commanding officer. Those who transmit, collect and distribute the message are not in the same league as those who write it in the first place.

No, insists Paul, once you learn the meaning of the gospel, you have to see everything inside out.