Ellen F. Davis > Quotes

“The sufferer who keeps looking for God has, in the end, privileged knowledge. ... She passes through a door that only pain will open, and is thus qualified to speak of God in a way that others, whom we generally call more fortunate, cannot speak.”
― Ellen F. Davis, Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament

“Scriptural interpretation is properly an ecclesial activity whose goal is to participate in the reality of which the text speaks by bending the knee to worship the God revealed in Jesus Christ. Through Scripture the church receives the good news of the inbreaking kingdom of God and, in turn, proclaims the message of reconciliation. Scripture is like a musical score that must be played or sung in order to be understood; therefore, the church interprets Scripture by forming communities of prayer, service, and faithful witness.”
― Ellen F. Davis, The Art of Reading Scripture

“Appreciation and enjoyment of the creatures are the hallmark of God's dominion and therefore the standard by which our own attempt to exercise dominion must be judged.”
― Ellen F. Davis

“Agrarians are committed to preserving both communities and the material means of life, to cultivating practices that ensure that the essential means of life suffice for all members of the present generation and are not diminished for those who come after. Agrarianism in this sense is, and has nearly always been, a marginal culture existing at the edge or under the domination of a larger culture whose ideology, social system, and economy are fundamentally different. So agrarian writers, both ancient and modern, always speak with a vivid awareness of the threat posed by the culture of the powerful.”
― Ellen F. Davis

“For us the true measure of our wisdom will never be the grade point average we covet, a degree or rank, the right job, the book accepted by a prestigious press. No, we will be wise when we desire with heart, soul, mind, and strength only the things that God also desires for us--and nothing else compels us, or ever catches our wandering eye.”
― Ellen F. Davis, Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament

“...our role as comforters is not to solve the problem of pain; even less is it to stick up for God. Trying to vindicate God to a person in agonizing pain is like explaining to a crying infant that Mommy is really a well-intentioned person. ... While [Job's friends] remain mired in their convictions, Job is moving.”
― Ellen F. Davis, Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament

“Contrition means finding the courage to let your heart break over sin. Willfully letting your heart break and then offering the pieces to God is a radically counter cultural idea in our society.”
― Ellen F. Davis, Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament

“Worship is a vigorous act of reordering our desires in the light of God's burning desire for the wellness of all creation.”
― Ellen F. Davis, Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament

“Bonhoeffer’s permanent legacy as a theologian has been to show that in the modern world, as in Josiah’s and Huldah’s Jerusalem, fostering the discomfiting yet life-giving practice of reading the Bible against ourselves is a major public responsibility of the Christian teacher and theologian.”
― Ellen F. Davis, Biblical Prophecy: Perspectives for Christian Theology, Discipleship, and Ministry

“Whenever we pick up the Bible, read it, put it down, and say, “That’s just what I thought,” we are probably in trouble.”
― Ellen F. Davis, The Art of Reading Scripture

“As Christians, we are all engaged in the business of discerning and obeying God’s call, and this usually means that soon enough we find ourselves out beyond our own competence, frightened at what God demands and feeling cosmically abandoned, left in the lurch with a job for which our own resources are completely inadequate…Sooner or later, the panic touches each one of us who accepts God’s call and heads, eyes wide open, straight into some difficult and mysterious work—like pastoring a church, teaching a class, going back to school, learning a language, creating a work of art. The panic descends on everyone who accepts God’s call to do something that engages our heart and wracks our soul—like making a marriage proper through better and worse, raising a child and letting her go into adulthood, enduring a terrible illness, growing up, growing old. In fact, being called out far beyond our own competence is part of our regular experience with God.”
― Ellen F. Davis, Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament

“The resurrection produces a “conversion of the imagination” that causes us to understand everything else differently.”
― Ellen F. Davis, The Art of Reading Scripture

“That the Old Testament represents God chiefly as angry Judge and vicious Warrior is a false stereotype. While these images are not absent, they are more than balanced by striking portrayals of God as Lover or Husband, infatuated with Israel beyond all reason or deserving. God is not too proud to grieve terribly over Israel's unfaithfulness, nor to be giddy over her return home. ... [This covenant's] primary quality is love at the highest pitch of intensity.”
― Ellen F. Davis, Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament

“Proclaiming resurrection turns the world upside down (cf. Acts 17:1-9) and holds out to the poor and lowly the hope of being vindicated while posing a worrisome prospect to those who have already received their consolation in the present life (cf. Luke 6:24).”
― Ellen F. Davis, Art of Reading Scripture

“The Garden of Eden was the place where the first human creatures might have acquired wisdom: Eden was the place for total intimacy with God, and that is the sole condition fur becoming wise. Day by day they might have grown in wisdom and stature, taking those strolls with God in 'the breezy time of day (Genesis 3:8). But they could not wait to get smart, so they chose the quick and dirty method...”
― Ellen F. Davis, Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament

“The fourth-century Greek theologian St. John Chrysostom said that Job's greatest trial was that his wife was not taken.”
― Ellen F. Davis, Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament

“Thus, while not all Scripture is generically narrative, it can reasonably be claimed that the story Scripture tells, from creation to new creation, is the unifying element that holds literature of other genres together with narrative in an intelligible whole.”
― Ellen F. Davis, The Art of Reading Scripture

“The Song [of Solomon] captures the ecstatic aspect of love that is the main subject of the whole Bible.”
― Ellen F. Davis, Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament

“The very idea of wisdom, as the Bible understands it, challenges the mind-set of our society and the view of knowledge that all of us have to some extent internalized.”
― Ellen F. Davis, Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament

“The problem was acutely described in 1909 in a penetrating essay by Adolf Schlatter: According to the sceptical position, it is true that the historian explains; he observes the New Testament neutrally. But in reality this is to begin at once with a determined struggle against it. The word with which the New Testament confronts us intends to be believed, and so rules out once and for all any sort of neutral treatment. As soon as the historian sets aside or brackets the question of faith, he is making his concern with the New Testament and his presentation of it into a radical and total polemic against it.... If he claims to be an observer, concerned solely with his object, then he is concealing what is really happening. As a matter of fact, he is always in possession of certain convictions, and these determine him not simply in the sense that his judgments derive from them, but also in that his perception and observation is molded by them.”
― Ellen F. Davis, Art of Reading Scripture

“But 'true wisdom is such that no evil use can ever be made of it.' That is worth our pondering because we, more than any previous generation, are witnessing the evil effects of perverted knowledge, knowledge not essentially connected to goodness. ... No other generation has been so successful at using its technological knowledge in order to manipulate the world and satisfy its own appetites.”
― Ellen F. Davis, Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament

“Careful practical work is the best expression of our freedom and safeguard of our sanity. In a healthy society, such work is the means most consistently available for people to practice holiness of life, to imitate God's enabling and sustaining care for the world.”
― Ellen F. Davis

“The most positive outcome I know to such a friendship is the recognition that we do not have to figure out which one of us is wrong; indeed, that concept may not even apply. By ordinary logic, if two people or groups disagree, then one is wrong — or it is all relative and does not much matter anyway. But the basis for both disagreement and friendship is something that is neither strictly logical nor entirely relative. Rather, the basis for theological friendship between Christians and Jews is a mystery — the word Paul rightly uses (Rom 11:25; cf. 11:33) as he struggles with this most painful new fact of salvation history, the separation of Jews and Gentiles within the household of Israel’s faith. The mystery has only deepened over time, as the two communities have over a period of two thousand years sustained an allegiance to the God to whom Israel’s Scriptures bear witness, and likewise have experienced the faithfulness of that God to them. This prolonged duality is something neither Paul nor anyone else in the first century anticipated. At the very least, it should caution us all to modesty in our theological assertions.”
― Ellen F. Davis, The Art of Reading Scripture

“Holiness is the character of a community observing a comprehensive pattern of life that is healthful... the Priestly vision of holiness emphatically includes the land, the covenanted community of creatures who prosper along with a people living in accordance with the design of the creation -- or, alternatively, who suffer when the intended pattern is violated.”
― Ellen F. Davis

“...consider how [the Proverbs] define success: the establishment of righteousness, justice and equity.”
― Ellen F. Davis, Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament

“Blessing is essentially the transformative experience of knowing and honoring God as the Giver; it means valuing the steady flow that sustains the world even above the gift of life that each of us receives and is in time constrained to relinquish.”
― Ellen F. Davis

“Scripture is not merely a record of divine-human history but a proclaiming of it, not merely an account of God’s life with us to date but a voice in that life. When we read Scripture in the church, someone addresses us. And by the unanimous tradition of the church, this voice is the Word of God, the Logos, the second identity of the Trinity.”
― Ellen F. Davis, The Art of Reading Scripture

“If for some reason academics outside the church choose to study any or all of the pieces into which Scripture falls in their hands, they are of course at liberty to do so. They are even at liberty to take the whole canon, as this odd collection the Christians once put together, and investigate why the church might have done that, what arbitrary sense she might have been imposing on the collected bits. And the church may happily receive any and all insights such investigations stumble across or information they make available. But such activity is not and cannot be exegesis of texts from the volume we call the Bible.”
― Ellen F. Davis, The Art of Reading Scripture

“What justifies specifically churchly exegesis of Scripture? Can church doctrine guide our reading? Why should it? Why should we interpret the story of Abraham and Isaac by the passion of Jesus? The answer is bluntly simple: What justifies churchly reading of Scripture is that there is no other way to read it, since “it” dissolves under other regimes. Thus a hermeneutical exhortation from this first perspective. Be entirely blatant and unabashed in reading Scripture for the church’s purposes and within the context of Christian faith and practice. Indeed, guide your reading by church doctrine. For if, say, the doctrine of Trinity and Matthew’s construal of the passion do not fit each other, then the church lost its diachronic self in the early fourth century at the latest, and the whole enterprise of Bible reading is moot. The question, after all, is not whether churchly reading of Scripture is justified; the question is, what could possibly justify any other?”
― Ellen F. Davis, The Art of Reading Scripture

“God accommodates [Moses'] complaints and makes in-course corrections. God does not take a human being so fully into the divine confidence--you might say, God does not depend on a human being so fully--until Mary conceives by the Holy Spirit.”
― Ellen F. Davis, Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament