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That’s when I learned how to read Scripture. I also came to see that, when we turn to the scriptures, we have to turn to the whole of the scripture. We have to use the whole of scripture to interpret the parts. When we do that, the central and overwhelming message – the metanarrative of the Bible – is a story of God’s inclusive and inexhaustible love for all humankind.

http://www.markfeldmeir.com/without-let-or-hindrance-a-sermon-on-homosexuality-and-the-christian-faith/

The Lord commands us to do ‘good unto all people,’ universally, a great part of whom, estimated according to their own merits, are very undeserving; but here Scripture assists us with an excellent rule when it inculcates that we must not regard the intrinsic merit of a person, but must consider the image of God in them, to which we owe all possible honor and love.

John Calvin http://www.convergentbooks.com/disdain-the-poor-youre-not-in-great-company/

You have always embraced me and you have never judged me. So I am deeply saddened and shocked over the current legislation that is now in place against the LGBT community here in Russia. In my opinion, it is inhumane and it is isolating. ... Music is a very powerful thing. It brings people together irrespective of their age, their race, their sexuality, or their religion. It does not discriminate. Look around you tonight. You see men, women, young and old, gay and straight. Thousands of Russian people enjoying the music. We’re all here together in harmony and harmony is what makes a happy family and a strong society.

Sir Elton http://thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/elton-john-speaks-in-russia-slams-putins-inhumane-and-isolating-anti-gay-laws/politics/2013/12/06/79824#.UqXrvXG9LCQ

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

Carl Sagan, in Pale Blue Dot Via Barry Taylor

Two things inspire me to awe: the starry heavens above and the moral universe within.

Immanuel Kant

The faith passes, so to speak, through a distiller and becomes ideology. And ideology does not beckon [people]. In ideologies there is not Jesus: in his tenderness, his love, his meekness. And ideologies are rigid, always. Of every sign: rigid. And when a Christian becomes a disciple of the ideology, he has lost the faith: he is no longer a disciple of Jesus, he is a disciple of this attitude of thought… For this reason Jesus said to them: ‘You have taken away the key of knowledge.’ The knowledge of Jesus is transformed into an ideological and also moralistic knowledge, because these close the door with many requirements… The faith becomes ideology and ideology frightens, ideology chases away the people, distances, distances the people and distances of [sic] the Church of the people. But it is a serious illness, this of ideological Christians.

Pope Francis http://en.radiovaticana.va/news/2013/10/17/pope_francis_at_mass_calls_for_greater_openness_/in2-738150

So let me confess my faith in a different way. Let me say instead that I know that Christianity is a right and true religion.

- John Shore http://johnshore.com/2013/10/27/the-three-letter-word-that-causes-wars/

...the Bible is a library of radically progressive books, books that were ahead of their time, books that tell stories about human interactions with the divine being who never, ever gives up on us and never stops calling us and pulling us and inviting us into new and better futures.

Rob Bell, What We Talk About When We Talk About God

....And I get that Fox opposes a Syria peace plan because its motus operandi is to foment dissent in the form of a relentless and irrational contrarianism to Barack Obama and all things Democratic to advance its ultimate objective of creating a deliberately misinformed body politic whose fear, anger, mistrust and discontent is the manna upon which it sustains its parasitic succubus-like existence.

John Stewart

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/09/11/stewart-destroys-fox-news-parasitic-succubus-like-existence-in-hyper-speed-rant/

Studying the Bible and Israel’s past is a regular reminder to me that my object of trust is God, not the Bible. That’s not knocking the Bible. It’s acknowledging that the Bible–even where it talks about God–is not a heavenly tablet dropped from heaven, but a relentlessly contextual collection of ancient literature that takes wisdom and patience to handle well.

Peter Enns http://www.patheos.com/blogs/peterenns/2013/09/god-is-bigger-than-the-bible/#sthash.f40aObEr.dpuf

Works of art cannot save us. They can simply render us more sensitive to what needs to be repaired.

Terry Eagleton

We believe that the death of Christ is just that point in history at which something absolutely unimaginable from outside shows through into our own world. ...Theories about Christ's death are not Christianity; they are explanations about how it works... mere plans or diagrams to be left alone if they do not help us, and, even if they do help us, not to be confused with the thing itself.

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity

#atonement

The New Testament is ubiquitously clear: don’t retaliate with evil for evil; do good to those who hate you; embrace your enemy with a cross-shaped, unyielding divine love.

Preston Sprinkle

To take the scriptures seriously is not to take them literally. Literalism is invariably the lowest and least level of meaning. Most Biblical authors understood this, which is why they felt totally free to take so many obvious liberties with what we would call “facts.” In many ways, we have moved backwards in our ability to read spiritual and transformative texts, especially after the enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when religious people got on the defensive and lost their own unique vantage point. Serious reading of scripture will allow you to find an ever new spiritual meaning for the liberation of history, the liberation of the soul, and the liberation of God in every generation. Then the text is true on many levels, instead of trying to prove it is true on just the one simple, factual level. Sacred texts always maximize your possibilities for life and love, which is why we call them sacred. I am afraid we have for too long used the Bible merely to prove various church positions, which largely narrows their range and depth. Instead of transforming people, the Biblical texts became utilitarian and handy ammunition.

Richard Rohr http://huff.to/1dTkcYD

#bible #hermeneutics

Well worth your time.

If the Bible is treated as a compendium of factually inerrant propositions about everything in heaven and earth, then it is impossible to explain both the contradictions between parts of the Bible and things we certainly know as the results of the work of science, and also the obvious inconsistencies within the Bible itself on factual matters. Even the most convinced fundamentalist who lives in the modern world has to rely at innumerable points on knowledge provided by science and not by the Bible. In fact this way of looking at the Bible is nearer to the Muslim way of looking at the Qur’an and prompts the question: “Why, then, did Jesus not write a book as the Prophet did?”

Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, p. 9 http://www.patheos.com/blogs/peterenns/2013/08/inerrantism-is-more-muslim-than-christian-a-though-from-lesslie-newbigin/#sthash.qNtcvOSP.dpuf

The new barbarians are the fundamentalists who seek to impose a single truth on a plural world. Though many of them claim to be religious, they are actually devotees of the will to power. Defeating them will take the strongest possible defence of freedom, and strong societies are always moral societies. That does not mean that they need be religious. It is just that, in the words of historian Will Durant, ‘There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.’ I have no desire to convert others to my religious beliefs. Jews don’t do that sort of thing. Nor do I believe that you have to be religious to be moral. But Durant’s point is the challenge of our time. I have not yet found a secular ethic capable of sustaining in the long run a society of strong communities and families on the one hand, altruism, virtue, self-restraint, honour, obligation and trust on the other. A century after a civilisation loses its soul it loses its freedom also. That should concern all of us, believers and non-believers alike.

Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sachs

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