Quotes about Humanity

If true humanity is bound up in community with God and godly community with others, I will never experience it when all my eyes ever see is my own need.

Just like Adam, when we blame people and situations for our problems, below the surface we are also making accusations against God.

Man is essentially 'finite freedom'; freedom not in the sense of indeterminacy but in the sense of being able to determine himself through decisions in the center of his being. Man, as finite freedom, is free within the contingencies of his finitude. But within these limits he is asked to make of himself what he is supposed to become, to fulfill his destiny.

Christianity sees in the picture of Jesus as the Christ a human life in which all forms of anxiety are present but in which all forms of despair are absent.

But if it is life alone that dies, love is born, which is the innermost part of the spirit. It is the most mature and most precious fruit of the life that sacrifices itself. Love breaks out of the prison of individualism and nationalist stupidity. Love goes to another person, even one with a different language or of a different race, and returns from him richer.

So, interpretation must proceed wholly by fitting those authors into their social and historical environments. Anything else is alleged to be a denial of history or a denial of humanity.

To love as God loves means loving not just others like us, but those who are not.

Trust your experiences, your God moments. They don't work as intellectual arguments for God, but that's exactly the point: intellectual arguments aren't enough, and wanting them to be so sooner or later leads to disappointment. God speaks to us through our whole humanity, not just through part of it. God moments can't be proven to anyone else, but that doesn't make them second best. They are proof—of another kind.

The Bible—from back to front—is the story of God told from the limited point of view of real people living at a certain place and time.

whatever it means to speak of the Bible as inspired by God clearly doesn't mean the Bible is scrubbed clean of the human experience of the writers.

If this core mystery of the Christian faith (which I believe can never be truly articulated) is true, and that the Creator not only took part in the human drama, but suffered in that drama, perhaps we have an understanding and compassionate God, not one out to get us?

Here's a simpler explanation: there were other people living outside of the Garden of Eden all along, even if the story doesn't explain it. Which leads to this: maybe the story of Adam and Eve isn't about the first human beings. Maybe it's about something else. And that something else is this: The Adam story is a story of Israel in miniature, a preview of coming attractions.