Tony Jones > Quotes

“There are two ways,” he told me, “and they are love and not love. I choose love.”
― Tony Jones

“God’s power, it turns out, comes in God’s willingness to abdicate power. God saves the world through submission to the point of solidarity with human weakness. Jesus’ final teaching to his disciples was to wash their feet and then tell them to go and do likewise, to act as servants to the world. Too often, Christians have done just the opposite.”
― Tony Jones, Did God Kill Jesus?: Searching for Love in History's Most Famous Execution – Essential Biblical Theology on Atonement and Grace

“Paul famously wrote, “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”5 How often do we measure Christian ideas and beliefs by these criteria?”
― Tony Jones, Did God Kill Jesus?: Searching for Love in History's Most Famous Execution – Essential Biblical Theology on Atonement and Grace

“One of our group said that a lot of people in church spend a lot of time correcting each other these days, but in order to correct another person in love, you really have to know that person. Only then, she told us, can you practice the kind of community that the Didache teaches.”
― Tony Jones

“What the Didache doesn’t say is that the community should shun or excommunicate those who commit the forbidden sins. In fact, “correct some, pray for others, and some you should love more than your own life” makes plain that the worst sinners should be showered with the most love.”
― Tony Jones

“Research shows that those who believe in a wrathful God are more likely to suffer from depression and anxiety disorders than those who believe in a loving, merciful God.”
― Tony Jones, Did God Kill Jesus?: Searching for Love in History's Most Famous Execution – Essential Biblical Theology on Atonement and Grace

“No matter the reason, the people didn’t turn on Jesus because they were Jews. They turned on Jesus because they were human.”
― Tony Jones, Did God Kill Jesus?: Searching for Love in History's Most Famous Execution – Essential Biblical Theology on Atonement and Grace

“To whom should we listen? The loudest voices? The most educated? The formerly marginalized? The formerly powerful? Those with the most retweets? Those who have traditionally spoken for God are now looked at askance by many people, and with good reason. Too often they’ve used their Christian platform for political and military gain. They’ve forgotten that the story of God, exemplified in Jesus, is an abdication of power. It’s a story of self-limitation and humility. It’s a story lived in solidarity with those at the margins. To whom should we listen? To Jesus on the cross.”
― Tony Jones, Did God Kill Jesus?: Searching for Love in History's Most Famous Execution – Essential Biblical Theology on Atonement and Grace

“God is one with the powerless, one with the hopeless, one with the broken. And we know this because of Jesus. Jesus is the most fully realized revelation of God that we’ve got, and what we can see of God in the life of Jesus is the perfect example of self-limitation and humility.”
― Tony Jones, Did God Kill Jesus?: Searching for Love in History's Most Famous Execution – Essential Biblical Theology on Atonement and Grace

“Contrary to popular belief, they were not carnival acts meant to wow the crowds and convince everyone of his divinity—if that were the case, the miracles failed miserably, since none of Jesus’ followers seemed to consider him a divine being until after his resurrection.”
― Tony Jones, A Holy Week Reader

“the crucifixion of Jesus, while violent, must be the key to ending violence.”
― Tony Jones, A Holy Week Reader

“Triumph in the face of adversity”
― Tony Jones

“One hundred years ago my great-grandfather thought women shouldn't vote. He was absolutely certain about that, and I'm absolute certain he was wrong. Two hundred years ago my great-great-great=great grandfather believed that white men should own black men. He was absolutely certain about that, and I am certain that he was wrong. I'm humble because I don't know what I'm wrong about today. I'll speak with confidence and I'll speak with passion, but I won't speak with certainty.”
― Tony Jones, The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier

“an unknown and forgotten treasure of the earliest Christians, a manual for living used by the generation of Jesus followers immediately after the apostles.”
― Tony Jones

“the Bible is the second most important revelation of God to humanity. The most important revelation of God is Jesus himself.”
― Tony Jones, Did God Kill Jesus?: Searching for Love in History's Most Famous Execution – Essential Biblical Theology on Atonement and Grace

“on the cross, just moments before his death, Jesus cries out in anguish and dereliction, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” That is the pivot point of all cosmic history, for in that moment God became fully human. Only when God felt abandoned, alone in the universe, did God gain total empathy with the human condition.”
― Tony Jones, Did God Kill Jesus?: Searching for Love in History's Most Famous Execution – Essential Biblical Theology on Atonement and Grace

“I, too, want to advocate for a theological stance that takes a pastiche approach. Each of the theories above, and the one below, come from a certain context. Each was developed in order to solve a contemporary problem with the atonement. Each did that, albeit imperfectly. So I’d like us to embrace them all, realizing their shortcomings.”
― Tony Jones, A Better Atonement: Beyond the Depraved Doctrine of Original Sin

“The early church did not understand the death of Christ as paying a penalty in some transactional sense that only God’s son could pay. The crucifixion is not, in that sense, cosmically necessary to reconcile God and humanity. Instead, Christ’s death is God’s victory over sin and death. God conquers death by fully entering into it. God conquers Satan by using the very means employed by the Evil One. Thus, the crucifixion is not a necessary transaction to appease a wrathful and justice-demanding deity, but an act of divine love.”
― Tony Jones, A Better Atonement: Beyond the Depraved Doctrine of Original Sin

“Bad theology begets ugly Christianity. Good theology begets beautiful Christianity.”
― Tony Jones, Did God Kill Jesus?: Searching for Love in History's Most Famous Execution – Essential Biblical Theology on Atonement and Grace

“The problems with this concentration on God’s wrath are pluriform. First and foremost, it contradicts the experience that most of us have with God, and that a lot of us have with the Bible. Our experience of God is not of wrath, but of love. Indeed, that’s how most people experience God even before they accept the idea that Christ stands between us and God. So it seems odd to first have to convince people that God’s wrath burns against them, then to convince them that Jesus lovingly took on that wrath.”
― Tony Jones, A Better Atonement: Beyond the Depraved Doctrine of Original Sin

“If we can fight the tendency to let it become so familiar that we don’t notice it, we can be challenged every week to remember that God doesn’t want our bloody victories and that sacrifice doesn’t really overcome our rivalries. At least for Christians, that crucifix should be the emblem of the end of violence.”
― Tony Jones, Did God Kill Jesus?: Searching for Love in History's Most Famous Execution – Essential Biblical Theology on Atonement and Grace

“In other words, God’s love is not a characteristic of God. For example, maybe you’ve heard someone say, “Sure, God is loving, but his love is balanced with his justice.” Or, “Without justice, love is not possible.” These statements talk of God’s love as an attribute of God. But, for Eastern Christians, God’s very nature is love. It’s not an aspect of God’s being, it is God’s very being.”
― Tony Jones, A Better Atonement: Beyond the Depraved Doctrine of Original Sin

“So when Jesus defended his disciples for picking grain on the Sabbath, he was essentially telling his interrogators that they misunderstood God’s relationship with human beings. He was saying, in effect, Yes, there are rules, but don’t let the rules get in the way of loving God and others. And when Jesus healed a leper, he was giving an object lesson in the same: by the power of God’s Spirit, the people who have been excluded are now included.”
― Tony Jones, Did God Kill Jesus?: Searching for Love in History's Most Famous Execution – Essential Biblical Theology on Atonement and Grace

“Yes, it is hard to conceive of orthodox Christian faith without the idea of original sin. That’s a sign of just how successful Augustine’s ideas have been in the Western church. But that does not make the idea biblical or right. One can acknowledge the universality of the human proclivity toward sin without affirming either Calvin’s total depravity or Augustine’s original sin. One merely has to accept simple human fallibility. We’re neither immortal nor perfect. We’re fallible. We make mistakes. And we die.”
― Tony Jones, Did God Kill Jesus?: Searching for Love in History's Most Famous Execution – Essential Biblical Theology on Atonement and Grace

“Possibly the most famous quote in all of Orthodox theology comes from Athanasius (c. 293–373), who in his book, On the Incarnation, wrote of Christ, “For he was made man so that we might become God.”
― Tony Jones, Did God Kill Jesus?: Searching for Love in History's Most Famous Execution – Essential Biblical Theology on Atonement and Grace

“The New Testament varies widely as well, with the Gospel writers understanding Jesus’ death as a Passover sacrifice and the author of Hebrews considering it a Yom Kippur sacrifice. Mixing those two is a bit like putting a Christmas tree up on Easter, which is basically what Paul does in his various letters.”
― Tony Jones, Did God Kill Jesus?: Searching for Love in History's Most Famous Execution – Essential Biblical Theology on Atonement and Grace

“ago, Augustine argued that if God knows something’s”
― Tony Jones, Did God Kill Jesus?: Searching for Love in History's Most Famous Execution – Essential Biblical Theology on Atonement and Grace

“God cannot be bound by a law, a moral code, a universal sense of justice, or a “deep magic from the dawn of time.” God could have forgiven us of our sin however God wanted too—with or without the execution of his son.”
― Tony Jones, A Better Atonement: Beyond the Depraved Doctrine of Original Sin

“But the hope within our faith is that we can draw meaning out of what is meaningless, through the theopraxis of learning to love one another better–and that, in the global scheme of things, means living for the good of everyone, whether they be Foxconn workers or Syrian asylum seekers–or friends who are suffering.”
― Tony Jones, Cancer & Theology

“Jesus, uniquely at one with God, taught that the ultimate rule is love and that any other religious rule that did not extend God’s reign of love needed to be reconsidered. Jesus hinted that this rule of love was even to be extended to non-Jews, and this became a major theme of Paul’s ministry and writing a couple of decades later.”
― Tony Jones, Did God Kill Jesus?: Searching for Love in History's Most Famous Execution – Essential Biblical Theology on Atonement and Grace