15 quotes
The Sermon on the Mount is not a blue print for society or an individual’s rule of life. It is an introduction to the passion, and invitation to Good Friday.
Trust in an Age of Arrogance (2010)
The righteousness whereby we are accepted by God is the righteousness of Christ imputed to us when we are incorporated in Christ.
The Rise of Moralism (1966)
When we realize before God that we have deserved no forgiveness, yet are forgiven, the heavy burdens of hatred, resentment, and bitterness are removed from our souls.
Trust in an Age of Arrogance (2010)
Christianity did not and cannot start with people who have forsaken sin. It receives them and begins to free them from the bondage that is sin.
The Cruelty of Heresy (1994)
The Sermon on the Mount is a deeper unfolding of the law of Moses. It leaves no hope that human goodness can replace (or make waste of) the costly betrayal, rejection, passion, suffering, death, and resurrection of God’s action in Jesus Christ.
Trust in an Age of Arrogance (2010)
When Christianity is reduced to be like Jesus, it loses its grace and becomes a mere law that can be obeyed only by inflated confidence in human nature’s ability to fulfill all obligations and/or by lowering the law to levels that one can obey.
Trust in an Age of Arrogance (2010)
One of the spiritual hazards of scholarship is that it can become Gnostic. A lifetime of submersion in conceptual and subtle complexities with an ever more sophisticated vocabulary can seduce some of the best scholars into elitism, inept pedagogy, and irrelevance.
The Cruelty of Heresy (1994)
St. Paul established the guidelines for all subsequent orthodoxy that race, nationality, degree of servitude, and gender are not barriers to identification with Christ’s saving humanity, and it is an Antiochene heresy to say that any of these differences is a barrier.
The Cruelty of Heresy (1994)
A common expression: “heaven for the climate, but hell for the company” is an indication how people react to Pharisaical Christians. They would rather be in hell with other sinners than in heaven with those who thought that they were good enough to be there.
Trust in an Age of Arrogance (2010)
If our hope lies in human ability to make all things right, the tendency is to believe that some historical action, program or ideal could bring the ultimate victory for which everyone yearns. No matter how commendable and beneficial such programs or ideals, they will inevitably become occasions of dangerous and destructive idols.
Trust in an Age of Arrogance (2010)
When one begins with the false assumption of being free, all concern will be involved with how to keep such freedom in check, how to control sin. The result is the deadly religion of the Pharisee. If one begins with the assumption of bondage, the concern will be how to proclaim the gospel story in kindness, patience, and love so that people are enabled to be set free.
Trust in an Age of Arrogance (2010)
Clergy often make the mistake of thinking, when they preach from one of the Gospels, that they are preaching good news. Most of the gospel material is not gospel but what leads up to the good news of Good Friday and Easter. A large part of the Gospels is conviction of sinners, rebuke of Israel’s unfaithfulness, disappointments of expectation, and declaring salvation as a human impossibility.
Trust in an Age of Arrogance (2010)
One can understand his caution in telling of God’s unmerited mercy, forgiveness and love, lest people get the impression that it is unnecessary to behave. This reaction to the gospel has been with us since the beginning, “Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?” (Rom 6:1). Fear of antinomianism seems always to be a justification for Pharisaism.
Trust in an Age of Arrogance (2010)
When Christianity is reduced to a religion of control, an endeavor to keep order by condemning sinners are giving no word that enables us to escape our bondage, it loses all joy and love. People will naturally turn away from such an atmosphere and seek the worldliness of the Sadducee rather than the joylessness of the Pharisee.
Trust in an Age of Arrogance (2010)
Christians are justified by the righteousness of Christ whereby they dwell in him and are thus acceptable to God, but this is not on account of any inherit righteousness of their own. The righteousness of sanctification is that whereby we grow in grace by virtue of being in Christ. It is a grateful response to a gratuitous justification.
The Rise of Moralism (1966)