Todd Hiestand » Quotables

Poverty

Todd — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 21:48:40 +0000

“Poor people die not only because of the world’s indifference to their poverty, but also because of ineffective efforts by those who do care…”

William Easterly, in the book The White Man’s Burden

Christian Contrairians

Todd — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 16:35:29 +0000

“The stickler is that Christianity doesn’t make a very good religion in this sense. Christianity is not a faith of conservation and preservation. It is a faith of creation, participation, movement, and change. For conservation to happen, something needs to be stopped. Something needs to be limited. Something needs to be ignored. And too often that ’something’ is the unstoppable, unlimited, impossible - to -ignore activity of God at work in the world.”

Doug Pagitt (From the first chapter in his new book. Read the first chapter here)

NT Wright on Preaching the Resurrection

Todd — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 16:24:23 +0000

“So many people think preaching the Resurrection means doing a little bit of apologetics in the pulpit to prove it really is true. Others simply say, “Jesus is raised, therefore there is a life after death.” This isn’t the point! Those types of sermons may be necessary, but there’s more to it than that. To preach the Resurrection is to announce the fact that the world is a different place, and that we have to live in that “different-ness.” The Resurrection is not just God doing a wacky miracle at one time. We have to preach it in a way that says this was the turning point in world history.”

NT Wright (thanks Bob for the link)

Life Together Quote

Todd — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 15:25:46 +0000

“It is not simply to be taken for granted that the Christian has the privilege of living among other Christians.”

Dietrich Bonhoffer in Life Together

Privatizing the Faith

Todd — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 02:21:24 +0000

“The community that confesses that Jesus is Lord has been, from the very beginning, a movement launched into the public life of mankind. The Greco-Roman world in which the New Testament was written was full of societies offering to those who wished to join a way of personal salvation through religious teaching and practice. There were several commonly used Greek words for such societies. At no time did the church use any of these names for itself. It was not, and could not be, a society offering personal salvation for those who cared to avail themselves of it teaching and practice. It was from the beginning a movement claiming the allegiance of all peoples, and it used for itself with almost totally consistency the name ecclesia - the assembly of all citizens called to deal with the public affairs of the city…the church could have escaped persecution by the Roman Empire if it had been content to be treated as a “cultus privatus” - one of the many forms of personal religion. But it was not. Its affirmation that “Jesus is Lord” implied a public, universal claim that was bound to eventually clash with the cultus publicus of the empire…”

Lesslie Newbigin in The Open Secret

Eugene Peterson on Life and Christ

Todd — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 13:07:24 +0000

“Rescue me from the person who tells me about life and omits Christ, who is wise in the ways of the world and ignores the movement of the Spirit.”

- Eugene Peterson in A Long Obedience in the Same DirectionA Long Obedience in the Same Direction

Newbigin on Private and Public Truth

Todd — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 22:41:18 +0000

“We read [scripture], naturally, as part of our real history, secular history, the history of which we are a part. What other history is there? There are not different histories, but there are different ways of understanding history…it is clearly an illusion to imagine that there are two kinds of history - sacred and profane, salvation history and secular history.”
- Lesslie Newbigin in Foolishness to the Greeks

Bosch and Incarnational Ministry

Todd — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 19:51:18 +0000

“It should not bother us that [during different epochs] the Christian faith was perceived and experienced in new and different ways. The Christian faith is intrinsically incarnational; therefore unless the church chooses to remain a foreign entity, it will always enter into the context in which it happens to find itself.”
David Bosch in Transforming Mission

Bonhoffer on Confession

Todd — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 21:06:30 +0000

“In confession the break-through to community takes place. Sin demands to have a man by himself. It withdraws him from the community. The more isolated a person is, the more destructive will be the power of sin over him, and the more deeply he becomes involved in it, the more disastrous is his isolation. Sin wants to remain unknown…”
Dietrich Bonhoffer in Life Together (p.112)

The Gospel

Todd — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 17:55:29 +0000

“The gospel is the work of God to restore humans to union with God and communion with others, in the context of a community for the good of others and the world.”
- Scot McKnight in Jesus Creed