Quotes about Understanding

To put it plainly, the life of faith is the pursuit of wisdom.

That Jesus was not and could not have been understood by walking with Jesus in and around Galilee. The disciples themselves—those Jesus handpicked to carry on his work—were utterly clueless about the big picture.

The real Jesus can only be truly understood from a later vantage point—interpreted after the resurrection when the broader implications of who Jesus was and what he did could be better grasped. That is the Jesus the Gospel writers give us, each in his own way.

The problem isn't the Bible. The problem is coming to the Bible with expectations it's not set up to bear.

We are all culturally embedded creatures—we can never untangle ourselves from our here and now. We perceive God, think about God, and talk about God in ways that make sense to us by virtue of when and where we live.

The point is that Proverbs 26:4—5 doesn't tell me what to do. It wasn't designed to. It models something better: the permission to think it through, figure it out, and learn from experience for next time. In fact, more than just giving us permission, the contradiction sets up our expectation that we will have to think it through.

Adjusting our understanding of God isn't a sign of weak faith, nor is it an attack on faith—it is faith.

Then we have the Gospel of John, the odd man out. John's story of Jesus is so out of step with the others that it is sometimes hard to see how he could be talking about the same person.

We can't get our minds around God. I don't think the Christian faith is fundamentally rational, by which I mean it cannot be captured fully by our rational faculties—and in fact, more often than not, confounds them. A God who can be comfortably captured in our minds, with little else for us to find out apart from an occasional adjustment, is no God at all. Expecting faith in God to be rational is often more the problem than the solution.

Love gives you eyes.

Now the whole world had one language and a common form of speech.

Come, let Us go down and confuse their language, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.”