1.
"The "Christ Mystery" is much bigger than Christianity as an organized religion. If we don't understand this, Christians will have little ability to make friends with, build bridges to, understand, or respect other religions or the planet. Jesus did not come to create a country club or a tribe of people who could say, "We're in and you're out. We've got the truth and you don't." Jesus came to reveal something that was true everywhere, for everyone, and all the time." ~ Father Richard Rohr
"from a progressive Christian perspective, Jesus is “the way, the truth, and the life,” and all who follow Jesus’ way, teachings, and example — the way of unconditional love, of radical hospitality, of loving-kindness, of compassion, of mercy, of prophetic speaking truth to power, the way of forgiveness, of reconciliation, and the pursuit of restorative justice – by whatever name, and even if they’ve never even heard of Jesus, are fellow brothers & sisters in Christ and his Way.
To the extent that other world religions are about instilling, fostering, and nurturing those universal values – we see Christ in them." ~ Roger Wolsey
2.
If you want to know who God is, look at Jesus. If you want to know what it means to be human, look at Jesus. If you want to know what grief is, look at Jesus. And go on looking until you are not just a spectator, but you're actually part of the drama which has him as the central character. - NT Wright
3.
To follow Jesus is to conspire in love against every system that crushes the poor and silences the weak. It is to stand up, speak out, and resist all injustice and oppression. - Kurt Struckmeyer
4.
Every time the Body of Christ prays, "thy kingdom, thy will be done on earth as it is heaven", we are verbally complicit in the subversive agenda of Jesus. - Ben Bergren
5.
Discipleship is not a destination but a journey of learning to love as Jesus loved, every day in every way. - Kurt Struckmeyer.
Finally, a quotation from Rev. Dr. Mark Sandlin:
"I try to follow the teachings of Jesus not the teachings of the men who formed a religion around him."
Readers of this blog or my Facebook page (see above) will understand that I consider Don Cupitt to be correct: God was a human construct, and human beliefs were human creations. It follows from this that the bible is not the infallible word of God, literally, symbolically or metaphorically. Marcus Borg emphasises the bible is of human creation. It is valuable insofar as it sets out the teaching attributed to Jesus as that time. But, it is not fixed in the time it was written, it is for us to determine our understanding of the teaching in and for our own time. The teaching is not a set of rigid, fixed, unchangeable rules, rather it sets out broad, general principles capable of adaptation to changing cirumstances. The teaching is not some musty, old, dead document rotting away in the mire of irrelevance, no, it is a living document assisting us to show the basic concept of love by our actions.
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