Ian

“We are committed to the past as we need and want it to be; we are no longer interested in the past as it was.”
― Iain W. Provan, Convenient Myths: The Axial Age, Dark Green Religion, and the World that Never Was

“I simply argue that the cross be raised again,
at the centre of the marketplace
as well as on the steeple of the church.
I am recovering the claim that
Jesus was not crucified
in a cathedral between two candles
but on a cross between two thieves;
on a town garbage heap;
at a crossroad of politics so cosmopolitan
that they had to write His title
in Hebrew and in Latin and in Greek …
and at the kind of place
where cynics talk smut,
and thieves curse, and soldiers gamble.
Because that is where He died,
And that is what He died about.
And that is where Christ’s own ought to be,
And that is what church people ought to be about.”
― George MacLeod

“And godless though I am, the fact of being human, the fact of possessing the gift of study, and thus being remarkable among all the matter floating through the cosmos, still awes me.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“The notion that we read the New Testament exactly as the early Christians did, without any weight of tradition coloring our interpretation, is an illusion. It is also a dangerous illusion, for it tends to absolutize our interpretation, confusing it with the Word of God.”
― Justo L. González, The Story of Christianity: Volume 1: The Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation