Quotes about Ancient

Whatever else the ancient Israelites believed about their God, he was not a tame God.

Another part of the problem is that exegetes have for years simply not been trained in the political thinking of the ancient world, so that just as we have exported sixteenth-century theology back into ancient Galatia and made Paul's letter address our post-Reformation concerns in their own terms, we have exported modern political assumptions back into ancient Asia Minor and made Revelation, and Paul too for that matter, address our political anxieties in their own terms.

And John, like all the early Jesus followers, is clear that this is the story about how the ancient divine intention was fulfilled at last and about how, through these events, a justice-filled world comes to birth. Now at last the possibility of setting things right comes into view.

The Bible is part of God's answer to the ancient human quest for justice, spirituality, relationship, and beauty. Read it and see.

There were no other groups in the ancient world going around claiming to be the human race.

It would mean that the One God was acting at last to fulfill his ancient promises, and the mode of that action would be to set up a new regime, a new authoritative rule.

When we open the Bible and read it, we are eavesdropping on an ancient spiritual journey.

Reading the Bible responsibly and respectfully today means learning what it meant for ancient Israelites to talk about God the way they did, and not pushing alien expectations onto texts written long ago and far away.

What makes the Bible God's Word isn't its uncanny historical accuracy, as some insist, but the sacred experiences these stories point to, beyond the words themselves. Watching these ancient pilgrims work through their faith, even wrestling with how they did that, models for us our own journeys of seeking to know God better and commune with him more deeply.

If we let the Bible be the Bible, on its own terms—on God's terms—we will see this in-fleshing God at work, not despite the challenges, the unevenness, and ancient strangeness of the Bible, but precisely because of these things. Perhaps not the way we would have written our sacred book, if we had been consulted, but the one that the good and wise God has allowed his people to have.

The first question we should ask about what we are reading is not "How does this apply to me?" Rather, it is "What is this passage saying in the context of the book I am reading, and how would it have been heard in the ancient world?

When we open the Bible and read it, we are eavesdropping on an ancient spiritual journey. That journey was recorded over a thousand-year span of time, by different writers, with different personalities, at different times, under different circumstances, and for different reasons. In