Eugene Peterson

Shun spirituality that does not require commitment. Personal commitment to the God personally revealed in Jesus is at the heart of spirituality. Faddish spiritualities, within or without the church, ignore or deny commitment…
Spirituality without commitment is analogous to sexuality without commitment—quick and casual, superficial and impersonal, selfish and loveless—eventually a parody of its initial [...]

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C.F. Blumhardt

You rack your brain to solve the mystery of the Savior, but you would do better to examine the puzzle of your own heart. You should be wondering why you are so impenetrable: why your intentions, which are always so noble, are followed by so few good deeds; why, despite your pious impulses, your life [...]

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Eugene Peterson

What happens here [in Mark’s Gospel] is that we are invited into becoming full participants in the story of Jesus and shown how to become such participants. We are not simply told that Jesus is the Son of God; we not only become beneficiaries of his atonement; we are invited to die his death and [...]

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Eugene Peterson

The world, for all its vaunted celebration of sensuality, is relentlessly anaesthetic, obliterating feeling by ugliness and noise, draining the beauty out of people and things so that they are functionally efficient, scornful of the aesthetic except as it can be contained in a museum or flower garden. (Eugene Peterson, Subversive Spirituality, p. 14)

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Christopher Moore

You two [Jesus and his friend, Biff] are the ninnies here. You both rail on them [the 12 apostles] about their intelligence, when that doesn’t have anything to do with why they’re here [following Jesus]. Have either one of you heard them preach? I [Mary Magdalene] have. Peter can heal the sick now. I’ve seen [...]

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John Calvin

It is certain that man never achieves a clear knowledge of himself unless he first has looked upon God’s face, and then descends from contemplating him to scrutinize himself. (John Calvin – Institutes of the Christian Religion I:1:2 [page 37 of the Battles Translation]. Calvin was a 16th c. protestant reformer, pastor and theologian).

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Lauren Winner

The Latin credo means literally, ‘I give my heart.’ The word believe is a problematic one today, in part because it has gradually changed its meaning from being a language of certainty so deep that I could give my heart to it, to the language of uncertainty so shallow that only the ‘credulous’ would rely [...]

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Miroslav Volf

If God were not angry at injustice and deception and did not make a final end to violence – that God would not be worthy of worship…the only means of prohibiting all recourse to violence by ourselves is to insist that violence is legitimate only when it comes from God…My thesis that the practice of [...]

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Arthur C. Clarke

It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create him. (Arthur C. Clarke – Atheist and British science fiction author, most famous for 2001: A Space Odyssey. [1917-2008])

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Unknown

As we grow older, it becomes difficult to just believe. It’s not that we don’t want to, but too much has happened that we just can’t.

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