"Jag är för stor för Märsta pingst."

 

Johannes Amritzer förklarar varför han skall starta en ny församling...  Hybris är ju också ett skäl...

"Now what man of intelligence will believe that the first and the second and the third day, and the evening and the morning existed without sun, mooon and stars? And that first day, if we may so call it, was even without a heaven? And who could be silly enough to believe that God, after the manner of a farmer, planted a paradise eastward in Eden and set in it a visible and palpable tree of life of such a sort that anyone who tasted its fruit with his bodily teeth would gain life; and
again that one could partake of good and evil by masticating the fruit taken from the tree of that name? And when God is said to walk in the paradise in the cool of the day and Adam to hide hmself behind a tree, I do not think anyone will doubt that these are figurative expressions which indicate certain mysteries through a semblance of history and not through actual event..."

 

Origenes (185-254 e.kr.), On first principles. Att Bibeln inte MÅSTE försts bokstavligt är inte en helt ny tanke. Kristna har haft hjärnor, länge.

Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing.

 

Albert Schweitzer

"Is prayer your steering wheel or your spare tyre?"

 

Corrie Ten Boom

When I pray, coincidences happen, and when I don't pray, they don't.

 

William Temple

Do all the good you can. By all the means you can. In all the ways you can. In all the places you can. At all the times you can. To all the people you can. As long as ever you can.

 

John Wesley

"He who thinks he leads and has no one following him is only taking a walk."

 

Okänd

"Människor som brinner med ett budskap är besvärliga därför att vi inte kan komma undan dem. De skriver inte sitt budskap på banderoller eller traktat. De tilltalar oss med sina liv. De använder sina egna kroppar som bläck. Som Jesus."

 

Åsa Molin, krönika i "Direkt från EFK" Feb 2009

"In times of profound change, the learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists."

 

Al Rogers

The only way to propagate a message is to live it.

 

Jim Wallis

The Bible is not so interested in our academically proving, as in our holistically seeing, the truth, in our believing the gospel and obeying God. This is something I have had to learn myself, and it is a liberating truth

 

C. Pinnock - The Scripture Principle

All models are wrong. Some models are useful.

 

George Box

Opposites are not contradictory but complementary.

 

Niels Bohr

Den som påstår att det är omöjligt att genomföra bör inte avbryta den som gör det.

 

Okänd

Vilka grundprinciper har då människan att förhålla sig till? Om ett demokratiskt samhälle skall överleva och utvecklas, måste en hörnsten vara en djup respekt för svaghet. Vidare måste varje människa ses som ett mål i sig och inte som ett medel. En annan grundpelare är också känslan av vördnad inför Livet, något som är större och vidare än hon själv – eller med andra ord; helighet inför något. Det som är heligt är okränkbart och något som det finns god anledning att vörda.

 

Ur Värdegrunden –
finns den?, 2003, Runa, Malmö, Orlenius

Medicine makes people ill, mathematics makes them sad, and theology makes them sinful.

 

Martin Luther

Igår läste jag ikapp lite på olika bloggar som är för viktiga för att inte läsa, men med författare så självgoda att jag inte orkar läsa dem för ofta. Läsningen påminde mig om om följande citat:

 

"Blygsamhet är konsten att se ödmjuk ut när man berättar för folk hur duktig man är."

 

Lee Jackson

Mod är ofta brist på kunskap, medan feghet i många fall är baserat på god information.

 

Peter Ustinov

"Den som sträcker ut en hand åt båda sidor får räkna med att bli korsfäst"

Peter Landgren

"If we had been holier people, we would have been angrier oftener."

 

John Templeton, via impossibleape

"It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong."

G.K. Chesterton

"I would like to buy $3 worth of God, please

 

- not enough to explode my soul or disturb my sleep,

but just enough to equal a cup of warm milk or a snooze in the sunshine.

I don't want enough of him to make me love a foreigner or pick beets with a migrant worker.

 

I want ecstasy, not transformation;

I want the warmth of a womb, not a new birth.

I want a pound of the Eternal in a paper sack.

 

I'd like to buy $3 worth of God, please."

 

Wilbur Rees, via Ben Witherington

"The primary spiritual struggle in contemporary Australia is not between Christianity and secularism, or Christianity and Islam, but between Jesus’ kingdom and Christianity. At the root of the widespread apathy in the church and the broadly acknowledged lack of intimacy with God, is confusion between Christianity and Christ.

 

Contemporary Western Christianity largely defines itself by its relationship with itself and its history. It is extremely introverted. This is indicated, for example, by the inordinate focus on leadership, ministry, church growth, gifts, the Bible, anointing, prosperity, revival etc. rather than on the person of Jesus and his living presence amongst us.

 

The people of God can only know their deepest inward identity as the Bride of Christ through an immediate and passionate awareness, in the Spirit, that Jesus is their Bridegroom. Where this is lacking, much of what transpires as Christian spirituality is simply “spiritual masturbation."

 

 John Yates, via Hamo på Backyard Missionary

 

Författaren föreslår ett "Jesus-test". När du hör en predikan; ta tiden på hur länge det tar innan Jesus nämns, och se om Jesus bara används som illustration för predikantens poäng, eller om Jesus är poängen. Uppenbarligen har de som använt testet (speciellt i pingst/karismatiska sammanhang) ogillat resultatet...

"Nietzsche hade en viss naturlig fallenhet för sarkasm; han kunde hånle, men inte skratta."

 

G.K. Chesterton, Ortodoxi, sid 60

"Ödmjukheten är avsedd att sätta en hämsko på människans arrogans och aptit ... Men vad som idag är fel är att ödmjukheten är så att säga placerad på fel ställe. Blygsamheten har flyttat från ambitionens till övertygelsens organ, där den aldrig var avsedd att finnas. Människan skall tvivla på sig själv, inte tvivla på sanningen, nu råder motsatt förhållande ... Den gamla ödmjukheten gjorde att en människa tvivlade på sina ansträngningar. Gjorde att hon kanske arbetade hårdare. Men den nya ödmjukheten åstadkommer att hon tvivlar på sitt mål och gör att hon fullständigt slutar arbeta."

 

G.K. Chesterton, Ortodoxi, sid 44

"Hos dem alla [de moderna filosoferna] finner vi ... kombinationen av ett expansivt och uttömmande logiskt resonemang med ett förkrympt sunt förnuft. De är endast universella i det avseendet att de först tar en otillfredställande förklaring och sedan förklarar allt med den. Men något småprickigt får inte större prickar även om det utbreder sig oändligt".

 

G.K. Chesterton, Ortodoxi, sid 29

"Det finns i allting en förnuftig arbetsfördelning. Jag har skrivit denna bok och ingenting på jorden kan förmå mig att läsa den"

G.K. Chesterton i förordet till "Ortodoxi". Jag förstår hur han tänker...

"Mixing the church and state is like mixing ice cream and cow manure. It may not do much to the manure, but it sure messes up the ice cream."

 

Tony Campolo, citerad i Shane Claibornes "Jesus for president"

"Religionen är en väg, inte ett hus."

 

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

"What a theologian feels as true, must be false: One has therein almost a criterion of truth."

 

Friedrich Nietzsche

 

... och kritik från Nietzsche ser jag nästan som beröm!

“Wherever St. Paul went, there was a riot. Wherever I go, they serve tea.”

 

NT Wright

"The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He
loves us; just as the roof of a sunhouse does not attract the sun because it is bright, but becomes bright because the sun shines on it."

CS Lewis

"The test of whether one has learned Torah is not revealed in a blue book, a task completed or a successful event but in a life well lived. To empower others to live lives of goodness and wholeness requires more than skill and knowledge. To assist others in living full lives involves nothing less than devotion, love and steadfastness. To be a mentor is to lead and transform through relationship."

Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson, Gift of Soul, sid 43

"After Rabbi Noah's succession as rabbi at Lechivitz, some Hasidim inquired of him, "Why don't you conduct yourself like your father, the late rabbi?" "I do conduct myself like him," retorded rabbi Noah. "He did not imitate anybody, and I likewise do not imitate anybody."

 

Hassidisk tradition citerad i Bradley Shavit Artson, Gift of Soul, sid 89

"Truth can never be fully verbalized, nor can it ever be made fully explicit. Instead, a mentor works to bring his or her disciples to the brink of insight, providing just enough tools to allow the partner to intuit the truth."

Bradley Shavit Artson, Gift of Soul, sid. 42

"What are cultivated as goals in Western education...are competence and skepticism...We learn to compare and contrast, but we are not trained to harmonize and synthesize...This causes wisdom to drop out of favor as a goal of education. We teach people to have a career, but we don't prepare them to have a life...The motivation may be reasonable, but the result is shallow and unworthy."

Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson, Gift of soul, gift of wisdom

"The only people on earth who do not see Christ and His teachings as nonviolent are Christians"

 

Gandhi

“According to the early Christians, the church doesn’t exist in order to provide a place where people can pursue their private spiritual agendas and develop their own spiritual potential. Nor does it exist in order to provide a safe haven in which people can hide from the wicked world and ensure that they themselves arrive safely at an otherworldly destination. Private spiritual growth and ultimate salvation come rather as the by-products of the main, central, overarching purpose for which God has called and is calling us. The purpose is clearly stated in various places in the New Testament: that through the church God will announce to the wider world that he is indeed its wise, loving and just creator; that through Jesus he has defeated the powers that corrupt and enslave it; and that by his Spirit he is at work to heal and renew it. The church exists, in other words, for what we sometimes call “mission” to announce to the world that Jesus is its Lord.”

N.T. Wright

“My proposal is not that we understand what the word ‘god’ means and manage somehow to fit Jesus into that. Instead, I suggest that we think historically about a young Jew, possessed of a desperately risky, indeed apparently crazy, vocation,
riding into Jerusalem in tears, denouncing the Temple, and dying on a Roman cross - and that we take our courage in both hands and allow our meaning for the word ‘god’ to be recentered around that point.”

 

N.T. Wright

“Heaven is important, but its not the end of the world.”

N.T. Wright

"The longer you look at Jesus, the more you will want to serve Him in His world. That is, of course, if it's the real Jesus you're looking at. Plenty of people in the church and outside it have made up a 'Jesus' for themselves, and have found that this invented character makes few real demands on them. He makes them feel happy from time to time but doesn't challenge them, doesn't suggest they get up and do something about the plight of the world. Which is, of course, what the real Jesus had an uncomfortable habit of doing.

...In fact, the Gospels themselves, which set out to tell their readers about Jesus Himself, go about this task in such a way as to say to their readers: the ball is now in your court; the true Jesus is summoning you to follow Him to a life of discipleship."

NT Wright, Following Jesus

"The Kingdom of God appears in the Gospel as at once a fulfilment of the ancient prophecies of the restoration of Israel, and as a new world order which would renew heaven and earth, but it was also a new life, a transforming leaven, a seed in the heart of man. And the source of the new order was found, not in a mythological figure, like the Saviour Gods of the mystery religions, nor in an abstract cosmic principle, but in the historical personality of Jesus, the crucified Nazarene.

 

For Christianity taught that in Jesus a new principle of divine life had entered the human race and the natural world by which mankind is raised to a higher order.

 

Christ is the head of this restored humanity, the first born of the new creation, and the Church consists in the progressive extension of the Incarnation by the gradual incorporation of mankind into this higher unity. Hence the Absolute and the Finite, the Eternal and the Temporal, God and the World were no longer conceived as two exclusive and opposed orders of being standing over against one another in mutual isolation.

 

The two orders interpenetrated one another, and even the lower world of matter and sense was capable of becoming the vehicle and channel of the divine life."

Christopher Dawson, Progress and Religion, sid. 124

"Again and again in the Pentateuch, the psalms, the prophets, and the subsequent writings which derive from them, the claim is made that the creator of the entire universe has chosen to live uniquely on a small ridge called Mount Zion, near the eastern edge of the Judean hill-country. The sheer absurdity of this claim, from the standpoint of any other worldview (not least that of Enlightenment philosophy), is staggering. The fact that Assyria, Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Egypt again, Syria and now Rome had made explicit mockery of the idea did not shake this conviction, but only intensified it. This was what Jewish monotheism looked like on the ground."

 

N.T. Wright

"Christendom has done away with Christianity without being quite aware of it."

 

Sören Kierkegaard, Time, 16 December 1946

"This biblical shaping of eschatology, leading in turn to a missional ecclesiology, is the subject of the first chapter of Ephesians, and I have often reflected that if the Western church had been as much shaped by Ephesians as it has been by Romans and Galatians we wouldn’t be in some of the messes we are in."

"Let the Bible shape your eschatology; let that biblical eschatology shape your mission; and then let that eschatologically-shaped mission shape your view of the church; and you’ll find that, instead of the shrill functional pragmatism of today’s muddled left, insisting on breaking old rules because they’re outdated, and the equally shrill and functional pragmatism of today’s muddled right, insisting on keeping old rules because they’re the old rules even at the cost of unity, you will have a robust, biblical, Christ-centred, Spirit-led, costly ecclesiology that will be in good shape to take forward God’s mission into the next generation."

 

Tom Wright i artikeln "Conflict and covenant in the Bible", via Nextreformation

Hjälp till att kategorisera troende:

1. Judarna är de som inte erkänner Jesus som Messias
2. Protestanter är de som inte erkänner påven som kyrkans överhuvud
3. Frikyrkliga är de som inte känner igen varandra på Systembolaget

Anonym

"If I had to describe hell, it would be as a place without books."

Elie Wiesel: From the Kingdom of Memory: Reminiscences (1990)

.

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library."

Jorge Luis Borges

"Att vara ledare, är som att vara dam. Om du måste berätta för människor att du är det, så är du det inte".

 

Margaret Thatcher, härifrån

"Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about - quite apart from what I would like it to be about - or my life will never represent anything real in the world, no matter how earnest my intensions. That insight is hidden in the word vocation itself, which is rooted in the Latin for "voice". Vocation does not mean a goal that I pursue. It means a calling that I hear. Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am."

 

Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak, citerad i Intuitive Leadership av Tim Keel.

"Faithfulness demands more than the recounting of received orthodoxy; it requires the encounter of a living tradition with a continually changing culture."

 

Mike Riddell, från Paul Fromonts blog