James Wheeler

“The memory of the wrong suffered is also a source of my own non-redemption. As long as it is remembered, the past is not just the past; it remains an aspect of the present. A remembered wound is an experienced wound. Deep wounds from the past can so much pain our present that, as Toni Morrison puts it in Beloved, the future becomes“a matter of keeping the past at bay” (Morrison 1991, 52).22 “All things and all manner of things” cannot be well with me today, if they are not well in my memory of yesterday. Even remaking the whole world and removing all sources of suffering will not bring redemption if it does not stop incursions of the unredeemed past into the redeemed present through the door of memory. Since memories shape present identities, neither I nor the other can be redeemed without the redemption of our remembered past. “To redeem the past… that alone do I call redemption,”
― Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation

“Since God did not create out of necessity, God's relationship to creation is not held together through a master-slave relationship in which bondage and necessity are the central features. Instead... the creature's existence is a gift. It is the product of the sovereignty or freedom of God. It is just this freedom that the human being images as the mirror of the very Being, which is the very act, of freedom that brought it forth.”
― J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account

“The abundance of the gifts of the Spirit . . . does not mean that the believer will be transferred from a struggling faith to a purely triumphant faith but that the believer will become a participant, by the Spirit, in the glorification of Christ,” a glorification, we recall, that entails a Cross.”
― Frederick Dale Bruner, The Gospel of John: A Commentary

“Have you ever sat with someone unlike you, being grace and truth to them? Have you ever listened, trying to understand what it is like to be them rather than trying to correct them and make them like you? So often we listen just long enough to convince another to be more like us or to instruct them about how to “get over” whatever has happened. It is an egocentric approach. Jesus’s presence with us was not and is not like that. He listened and responded to the individual. Have you ever been struck by the fact that he healed all blind people in unique ways? Let us watch Jesus and see who he was with others who were utterly unlike him. Let us watch and see who he was with “them.”
― Diane Langberg, Redeeming Power: Understanding Authority and Abuse in the Church