Joe Graves

“I tried to explain what I thought I was seeing: that the four gospels had, as it were, fallen off the front of the canon of the New Testament as far as many Christians were concerned. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were used to support points you might get out of Paul, but their actual message had not been glimpsed, let alone integrated into the larger biblical theology in which they claimed to belong. This, I remember saying, was heavily ironic in a tradition (to which he and I both belonged) that prided itself on being “biblical.” As far as I could see, that word was being used, in an entire Christian tradition, to mean “Pauline.” And even there I had questioned whether Paul was really being allowed to speak. That’s another story.”
― N.T. Wright, How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels

“particularly through the Methodist movement led by John and Charles Wesley and George Whitefield. Their theology and their understanding of the gospels are quite different topics upon which I am not qualified to speak. But I suspect that the Wesleyan emphasis on Christian experience, both the “spiritual” experience of knowing the love of God in one’s own heart and life and the “practical” experience of living a holy life for oneself and of working for God’s justice in the world, might well be cited as evidence of a movement in which parts of the church did actually integrate several elements in the gospels, a synthesis that the majority of Western Christians have allowed to fall apart.”
― N.T. Wright, How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels

“The gospels offer us not so much a different kind of human, but a different kind of God: a God who, having made humans in his own image, will most naturally express himself in and as that image-bearing creature;”
― N.T. Wright, How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels

“C. S. Lewis offered one of my favorite definitions of humility: “[God] wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another.”
― Kevin Watson, The Class Meeting: Reclaiming a Forgotten (and Essential) Small Group Experience