I got the following quote from Jesus Needs New PR, who got it from Aaron Reddin’s site

Here’s the quote about Christians doing good works regardless of institutional lines, emphasis mine.

I did get to see liberals working with conservatives. Black people working with white people. Men working with women. Teens working with elders. Denominations working with “nons”. And even churches working with the de-churched. … It has been remarkable. It hasn’t been about what church was doing what. It’s been about identifying needs and finding ways to meet them, no matter the cost.

The last part about no matter the cost that struck me. I wonder if I’ve done anything this past year — or plan anything for the year ahead — that I would pursue no matter the cost.

Henry Neufeld discusses a shocking-sounding quote from someone named Richard Cunningham who said “God never forgives — he punishes.”

Mr. Neufeld comments:

This looks to me like an example of the problem we get into when we regard a metaphor as the actual core of the truth. Substitution, even penal substitution is a good metaphor, but it remains one metaphor. When you put it at the center of your doctrine of the atonement and then build everything else around that, oddities like this result.

My evangelical Christian education taught me that penal substitution and atonement were one and the same. God didn’t actually forgive us our sins so much as He allowed His unforgiveness and punishment of our sins to be directed at someone else — Jesus. I began having problems with this idea of forgiveness when I became a parent, however, and was regularly called upon to forgive the trespasses of my own children. I would use punishments as a form of correction, hoping to steer them away from evil and into the right. Once they turned, however, it was now my turn to demonstrate true forgiveness. I would forgo further retribution and make the effort to heal our relationship. I might feel that their sin had inflicted harm on me (physically or else to my sense of honor) but forgiveness meant to let that go so that we could be of one mind again.

From a blog post by jps at Idle Musings of a Bookseller

I received a catalog from STL Distribution which included Husbands, Wives, God: Introducing the Marriages of the Bible to Your Marriage.

Now, aside from the questionable hermeneutics, think of the marriages in the Bible. Which of those would you want to model your marriage after? Abraham and Sarah? Really? Have your wife call you brother…I don’t think so. Isaac isn’t any better. And, don’t get me started on Jacob, to say nothing of Hosea and Gomer.

He’s got a point. The stories in the Bible tend not to give us shining examples of getting it right. I say this as someone whose marriage has benefited greatly from a study about Biblical principles of marriage. That is, if you’re a Christian then the person you should be most diligent about practicing your Christianity toward is your spouse. But I agree with jps’s closing paragraph:

No, the Bible isn’t about good marriages—or any marriages. It is about a God who became flesh and dwelt among us, died for us, and was resurrected that we might live a new life to his glory and praise through the power of the Holy Spirit who lives within us. Now, that is a story I can endorse whole-heartedly!

From the blog Sects and Violence in the Ancient World, some thoughts about the modern world view vs. those world views found in the Bible.

Even though there is now an international space station orbiting out of sight above our heads, and even though quarks, leptons, and bosons fly out of cyclotrons large enough to encircle most small towns, God still holds a quill pen.

A convicting line from a Crucial Encounter post about modern-day slavery and human trafficking:

Knowledge is power, yet we choose ignorance, because it’s bliss.

Great opening line from an Amazon.com book review of former evangelical Christian Frank Schaeffer’s book Patience with God

Former evangelical Christian political agitator Schaeffer has been born yet again.

From a book review at Undeception.com

But the simple fact is that these people who are the quickest to demand scriptural support can point to no scriptural basis for this belief [in biblical inerrancy as opposed to biblical inspiration]. No passage speaks of the entire canon in which it has become enclosed, much less claiming inspiration or inerrancy for it. Instead, their belief comes down to “logic”, falsely so-called: if the Bible is inspired from start to finish — as surely it ought to be — than it will be inerrant — for surely, it ought to be.

Punctuation help from Sussex University

Adding more dots and squiggles to this perfectly clear sentence would do absolutely nothing to improve it. No punctuation mark should be used if it is not necessary.

One of their example sentences is too good to not pass along:

Mae West had one golden rule for handling men: “Tell the pretty ones they’re smart, and tell the smart ones they’re pretty.”

I like this quote about Bible interpretation from the blog Confessions of a Doubting Thomas

I’m not sure I was ever of the opinion: “The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it”, but I’m now a bit further from that opinion. I’m now more like: “The Bible says it, that shows us something of what the person who wrote that bit of the bible believed, that opens up a whole heap of interesting questions…”

A quote from George Murphy about Adam, Eve, and the first sin:

The latter view, in which humanity was created in an immature condition and expected to grow, corresponds best to our scientific picture. The earliest human sin was not a fall from perfection but a start along a path that led away from God.

The first humans would have inherited tendencies for selfish behaviors that injured their fellows. Sin has to do with our relationship with God, and didn’t exist before God revealed his will to our ancestors. But when God told them not to harm others, they would have been tempted to ignore him.

Humanity could theoretically have obeyed God, for our behaviors are not hardwired. Sin wasn’t “necessary” but was “inevitable.” Refusing to obey God, humanity turned from God’s intended goal and started on a road to perdition. Science of course supplies further details about early humanity, but we’re concerned here with theology rather than history.

This corresponds to the picture we get from Genesis.