Drew

“We could summarize all of this background to Bonhoeffer’s christology in one sentence, albeit a complex one: The cross was a stumbling block to the Romans; the cross was a stumbling block to the Nazis; the cross was a stumbling block to moderns; and—unless we are humbled and brought low beneath the cross to see its power and beauty—the cross can be a stumbling block to us.”
― Stephen J. Nichols, Bonhoeffer on the Christian Life: From the Cross, for the World

“The church is the real thing when it is not consumed with the assertion of power in culture, but it is driven by service to others. The word ministry translates the Greek word diakonia, which means service. The church must be about serving others. When a church can lay claim to all three criteria, namely, preaching of the Word, being true to its confession, and focusing on serving, then it’s a church worth going to. And then it’s a church full of sermons worth listening to.”
― Stephen J. Nichols, Bonhoeffer on the Christian Life: From the Cross, for the World

“it is not an overstatement to say, as Paul sees things, that at the core of their being, in the deepest recesses of who they are—in other words, in “the inner self”—believers will never be more resurrected than they already are. God has done a work in each believer, a work of nothing less than resurrection proportions, that will not be undone.”
― Richard B. Jr. Gaffin, By Faith, Not by Sight: Paul and the Order of Salvation

“For him it does not go far enough to say, as it is often put, that Christ’s resurrection is the guarantee of our resurrection, in the sense of being certain because of God’s eternal purpose or his word of promise to the church, although both are certainly true for Paul. Rather, Christ’s resurrection is a guarantee in the sense that it is nothing less than the actual and, as such, representative beginning of the “general epochal event.” In Paul’s view, the general resurrection, as it includes believers, begins with Christ’s resurrection.51”
― Richard B. Jr. Gaffin, By Faith, Not by Sight: Paul and the Order of Salvation