Joseph Serwach

“the meaning of Christmas is that God is invading the territory held by the Prince of Darkness. The definitive closure of this cosmic invasion, the V-Day to its D-Day, will be the final Day of God. 190 On that last day there will be only one Ruler, only one Lord. Scripture is quite clear and unambiguous about that. The Judge of all the cosmos will not be Satan. Radical evil will have no status in the day of judgment, or the day of final reconciliation, as Volf calls it. 191 “Death shall have no more dominion” (cf. Rom. 6: 9). If evil is the absence of good, then the victory of our Lord and of his Christ will be the absence of evil, “for ever and ever.”
― Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ

“Theologian Bruce L. McCormack puts it well: God will not allow anything to stand in the way of his love. The holiness of the divine love is its irresistibility. God’s will to love the creature will not be stopped by the will of the creature to resist that love. God’s love will reach its goal, even if the path to that end lies through condemning, excluding, and annihilating all resistance to it. God’s love turns to wrath when it is resisted, but not for a minute does it cease to be love even when it expresses itself as wrath.”
― Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ

“Our philosophies have tended to split the world in two: “science” deals only with “hard facts,” while the “arts” are imagined to deal in nebulous questions of inner meanings. Equally, in popular culture, inner feelings and motivations (“ discovering who you really are” or “going with your heart”) are regularly invoked as the true personal reality over against mere outward “identities.”
― N.T. Wright, Paul: A Study of the Apostle Paul's Life and Legacy

“BIOGRAPHY, AS WE said before, involves thinking into the minds of people who did not think the same way we do. And history often involves trying to think into the minds of various individuals and groups who, though living at the same time, thought in very different ways from one another as well as from ourselves. Trying to keep track of the swirling currents of thought and action in Paul’s world is that kind of exercise.”
― N.T. Wright, Paul: A Study of the Apostle Paul's Life and Legacy