Myths have a power to convey truth that literal events don’t always have.

When we try to bind the Christian faith to the affirmation of ideology and dogma, we strip it of its life-giving, creation-transforming power. Faith is about transformation, not affirmation. It’s about believing that no matter how flawed we are, how riddled with doubt we might be, how broken and sinful our lives may have become, God loves us anyway

Remember, those epistles of his are real letters to real churches; in them he gives real advice for how people in those churches should live their lives.

the ironic thing about learning. The more you know, the more you realize how much you don’t know.

We’re called to love people more than we love being right, but being right theologically rather than being in right relationship with our neighbor has become the defining identity of the church.

eisegesis: that is, a reading of a text that projects one’s own presuppositions and biases onto it in order to find a meaning one wants to be there but isn’t actually supported by the text itself.

salvation is fundamentally connected to what we do in this life, not just what we believe.

in the information age, when people quite literally carry around the totality of human knowledge in their pocket, we in the church can’t afford to pretend we know everything. We can no longer claim we have everything figured out all the time.

The New Jerusalem isn’t a goal as much as it is a way of life that is about to dawn on earth.