Michael C Champlin

“I’m often asked if I have hope for Christianity. These days, I say, “My hope for Christianity depends on my hope for humanity, and we humans are not trending well.” And in that realization, I find a compelling reason to stay Christian.”
― Brian D. McLaren, Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned

“Finally, in their mature love for Jesus, the Moravians’ highest stated motive for evangelism was so that the “Lamb would receive the full reward of his suffering.” They were deeply convinced that we were the joy Christ anticipated when he endured the Cross! What does that say about the value he has placed on us? And on how much he deserves to receive that joy? Is there any greater gift that we could give him than to present him with the pearls of great price for which gave his life?”
― Bradley Jersak, Her Gates Will Never Be Shut: Hope, Hell, and the New Jerusalem

“We have also seen that it is easy to mistake literary representation (the use of vivid imagery to denote space-time reality and connote its theological significance) for metaphysical representation (whereby a ‘spiritual’ or ‘transcendent’ being is the heavenly counterpart of an earthly reality); and that in this confusion it is all too easy to imagine that language which, in a culture other than our own, would be recognized as highly figurative, is flatly literal.”
― N.T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God

“as a futurist in my college days, the pretense of consistent literalism was challenged by Revelation’s wild imagery. In any given verse, we might pivot from literal to figurative interpretations and back again. Using the Church in Revelation again as our example, it was easy to discern that the collective billions who constitute the Bride of Christ are not one literal female colossus in a humongous wedding dress waiting to consummate union with Jesus in actual lovemaking. We knew this was symbolic. Yet in the very same verse, we stumbled over our literalism into the New Jerusalem. Some of the popular futurist commentaries of the day quibbled over the Holy City’s dimensions—whether it will be a pyramid or a cube and what the rooms, streets, and transportation will be like.4 I tried to picture a city that was fifteen hundred miles tall and wondered what that would do to the earth’s rotation. I also wondered what kind of oysters could produce pearls large enough to become the city’s twelve gates (Rev 21:21).”
― Bradley Jersak, Her Gates Will Never Be Shut: Hope, Hell, and the New Jerusalem