Quotes about Humanity

Therefore, so long as we live in this fallen world, we are simul iustus et peccator (saint and sinner simultaneously), until the destruction of the old Adam is completed as God makes all things new (Rev. 21:5; Isa. 42:9; 43:19; Gal. 6:15).

God did not change his mind about us on account of the cross or on any other account. He did not need to have his mind changed. He was never opposed to us. It is not his opposition to us but our opposition to him that had to be overcome, and the only way it could be overcome was from God's side, by God's initiative, from inside human flesh — the human flesh of the Son. The divine hostility, or wrath of God, has always been an aspect of his love.

Christ's recapitulation of the human story does not simply invite us into the divine life. There is an objective reality about it; it has happened over our dead bodies, so to speak.

God's justification of sinners is not a forgetting, nor is it simply forgiveness. It is a definitive, wholesale, final assault upon and defeat of Sin, understood as a Power, and the creation of a new humanity.

For Paul, it is not God, but the curse of the Law that condemned Jesus. In his death, Paul declares, Jesus was giving himself over to the Enemy — to Sin, to its ally the Law, and to its wage, Death (Rom. 6:23; 7:8-11). This was his warfare. That is one of the most important reasons — perhaps the most important — that Jesus was crucified, for no other mode of execution would have been commensurate with the extremity of humanity's condition under Sin.

The entire human race is heir to what John Henry Newman called a "vast primordial catastrophe," and that only a stronger power from outside ourselves can repair the breach.

The two poles of Christ's exalted divinity and his suffering humanity as explicitly as does Hebrews. The result of this undertaking — the salvation of humanity — from out of the inner being of the Holy Trinity is, incredibly, that the hearts and minds of sinful human beings should be eternally perfected and at rest in the near presence of the heavenly Father.

I like people, and I like to be around people. They are fascinating. I like to behave like a common man. I am a common man.

I came into this world the way every person on the planet does - with clenched fists.

Be nice to the whites, they need you to rediscover their humanity.

I was told that Daddy was murdered by a white man. I could have adopted an attitude of hating whites. But then in 1974 my grandmother was killed by a black man, so I could have hated blacks too.

Man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.