Caleb Smith

“The doctrine of the divine authority of Holy Scripture constitutes an important component in the words of God that Jesus preached, and if he was mistaken on this point he was wrong at a point that is most closely tied in with the religious life and he can no longer be recognized as our highest prophet. We cannot take Jesus seriously as a teacher and reject his own teaching concerning Holy Scripture.”
― Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics

“What seem our worst prayers may really be, in God's eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling. For these may come from a deeper level than feeling. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when he catches us, as it were, off our guard.”
― C.S. Lewis

“But the overwhelming historical impression from the gospels as a whole is of a human being doing what Israel’s God had said he would do, of a human being embodying, incarnating what Israel’s God had said he would be across page after page in Israel’s scriptures. The new Passover happened because the pillar of cloud and fire—though now in a strange and haunting form, the likeness of a battered and crushed human being—had come back to deliver the people. The covenant was renewed because of the blood that symbolized the utter commitment of God to his people, the lifeblood that spoke of divine protection, of God’s self-giving love.”
― N.T. Wright, The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus's Crucifixion

“You might suppose that if Christian theologians were going to trace the meaning of Jesus’s death, they would begin with Jesus himself. Mostly, they do not. I possess many books on the “atonement.” Few give much attention to the gospels. None, as far as I recall, starts with Jesus himself. They may sooner or later highlight one famous saying, Mark 10:45 (“The son of man . . . came to be the servant, to give his life ‘as a ransom for many’”), but they do not normally go much beyond that. They seldom if ever link the meaning of Jesus’s death with Jesus’s announcement of God’s kingdom coming “on earth as in heaven.”
― N.T. Wright, The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus's Crucifixion