Quotes about Witness

Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.

He imagines the plane exploding as it touches down, ignited by one of its glints, in a ball of red flame shadowed in black like you see on TV all the time, and he is shocked to find within himself, imagining this, not much emotion, just a cold thrill at being a witness, a kind of bleak wonder at the fury of chemicals, and relief that he hadn't been on the plane himself but was instead safe on this side of the glass, with his faint pronged sense of doom.

You may be the only Bible some people ever read. So the question is: Are you a good translation?

Christian proclamation might make the gospel audible, but Christians living together in local congregations make the gospel visible (see John 13:34—35). The church is the gospel made visible.

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.

If we don't show our love to one another the world has a right to questions whether Christianity is true...

The church is not simply a religious body looking for a safe place to do its own thing within a wider political or social world. The church is neither more nor less than people who bear witness, by their very existence and in particular their holiness and their unity (Colossians 3), that Jesus is the world's true lord, ridiculous or even scandalous though this may seem.

The gospels are, and were written to be, fresh tellings of the story of Jesus designed to be the charter of the community of Jesus's first followers and those who, through their witness, then and subsequently, have joined in and have learned to hear, see, and know Jesus in word and sacrament.

The point about truth, and about Jesus and his followers bearing witness to it, is that truth is what happens when humans use words to reflect God's wise ordering of the world and so shine light into its dark corners, bringing judgment and mercy where it is badly needed. Empires can't cope with this. They make their own 'truth,' creating 'facts on the ground' in the depressingly normal way of violence and injustice.

The church is to live as the alternative polis, not by separating itself into sectarian isolation but by bearing witness, like Daniel and his friends, before kings and rulers. The aim is not to damn, but to redeem; the leaves on the tree are for the healing of the nations, and the gates stand open for the kings of the earth to bring their treasures. Only if we keep that goal before us will we avoid the isolation which is the mirror image of collusion.

There is no way back. No other explanations have been offered, in two thousand years of sneering skepticism toward the Christian witness, that can satisfactorily account for how the tomb came to be empty, how the disciples came to see Jesus, and how their lives and worldviews were transformed.

Faith can't be forced, but unfaith can be challenged. That is how it has always been, from the very beginning, when people have borne witness to Jesus's resurrection.