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“Believers should acknowledge and wrestle with doubts... It is no longer sufficient to hold beliefs just because you inherited them.”
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“Jesus was not revolutionary because he said we should love God and each other. Moses said that first. So did Buddha, Confucius, and countless other religious leaders we've never heard of. Madonna, Oprah, Dr. Phil, the Dali Lama, and probably a lot of Christian leaders will tell us that the point of religion is to get us to love each other. "God loves you" doesn't stir the world's opposition. However, start talking about God's absolute authority, holiness, ... Christ's substitutionary atonement, justification apart from works, the necessity of new birth, repentance, baptism, Communion, and the future judgment, and the mood in the room changes considerably.”
― Christless Christianity: The Alternative Gospel of the American Church
― Christless Christianity: The Alternative Gospel of the American Church
“The point of the resurrection…is that the present bodily life is not valueless just because it will die…What you do with your body in the present matters because God has a great future in store for it…What you do in the present—by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself—will last into God's future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether (as the hymn so mistakenly puts it…). They are part of what we may call building for God's kingdom.”
― 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
“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
“Optimism hopes for the best without any guarantee of its arriving and is often no more than whistling in the dark. Christian hope, by contrast, is faith looking ahead to the fulfillment of the promises of God, as when the Anglican burial service inters the corpse 'in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ.' Optimism is a wish without warrant; Christian hope is a certainty, guaranteed by God himself. Optimism reflects ignorance as to whether good things will ever actually come. Christian hope expresses knowledge that every day of his life, and every moment beyond it, the believer can say with truth, on the basis of God's own commitment, that the best is yet to come.”
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Tom’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Tom’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
1,112 books
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177 friends
845 books
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41 friends
600 books
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256 friends
1,118 books
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43 friends
527 books
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102 friends
1,118 books
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83 friends
435 books
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29 friends
78 books
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47 friends
More friends…
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