“...left to ourselves we lapse into a kind of collusion with entrophy, acquiescing in the general belief that things may be getting worse but that there's nothing much we can do about them. And we are wrong. Our task in the present...is to live as resurrection people in between Easter and the final day, with our Christian life, corporate and individual, in both worship and mission, as a sign of the first and a foretaste of the second.”
― Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church
― Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church
“When 'biblical' theologies ignore the gospels, something is clearly very wrong." (on atonement theories)”
― How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels
― How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels
“Don’t misunderstand me. The terrorist actions of Al-Qaeda were and are unmitigatedly evil. But the astonishing naivety which decreed that America as a whole was a pure, innocent victim, so that the world could be neatly divided up into evil people (particularly Arabs) and good people (particularly Americans and Israelis), and that the latter had a responsibility now to punish the former, is a large-scale example of what I’m talking about - just as it is immature and naive to suggest the mirror image of this view, namely that the western world is guilty in all respects and that all protestors and terrorists are therefore completely justified in what they do. In the same way, to suggest that all who possess guns should be locked up, or (the American mirror-image of this view) that everyone should carry guns so that good people can shoot bad ones before they can get up to their tricks, is simply a failure to think into the depths of what’s going on.”
― Evil and the Justice of God
― Evil and the Justice of God
“Jesus's resurrection is the beginning of God's new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. That, after all, is what the Lord's Prayer is about.”
― Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church
― Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church
“Our task as image-bearing, God-loving, Christ-shaped, Spirit-filled Christians, following Christ and shaping our world, is to announce redemption to a world that has discovered its fallenness, to announce healing to a world that has discovered its brokenness, to proclaim love and trust to a world that knows only exploitation, fear and suspicion...The gospel of Jesus points us and indeed urges us to be at the leading edge of the whole culture, articulating in story and music and art and philosophy and education and poetry and politics and theology and even--heaven help us--Biblical studies, a worldview that will mount the historically-rooted Christian challenge to both modernity and postmodernity, leading the way...with joy and humor and gentleness and good judgment and true wisdom. I believe if we face the question, "if not now, then when?" if we are grasped by this vision we may also hear the question, "if not us, then who?" And if the gospel of Jesus is not the key to this task, then what is?”
― The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was & Is
― The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was & Is
Bruce’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Bruce’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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