16 Quotes by Vitor Westhelle

Indeed, it is amazing that a religion was founded on the experience of utter shame, of a god that dies the death of a condemned criminal.

Jesus suffered because he named the cause of suffering, the law that kills

... the justice of Christ breaks in and fragments the systems of the world, its philosophy, ecclesial structures legal rules–in short, the earthly economies and regimes.

... in the Greek wording of the Nicene Creed ... we confess God to be literally the "poet of heaven and earth" (poieten ouranou kai ges).

The kingdom is nearby, adjacent to our own reality, present, yet veiled in the boundaries we avoid, and in the margins we protect ourselves from. So there is no riddle. The eschatological reality is here, yet we feel the urge to evade it, and the lure to ignore it.

… the kingdom of God is so close and nearby that we might have overstepped it in our amusement in the playgrounds of promise.

Can God be so powerful as to surrender all power? And the answer was yes!

The symbol [of the cross] often swallows the historic scandal that gave it birth and appeases the appalling experience with which the first generation of Christians had to come to terms.

[The cross] is a way of life that we live out. It is a practice that involves risk. It is a story that, if truly told, courts danger but moves also into hopeful solidarity, the solidarity of those who are moved by the pain of God in the midst of this world, or by the pain of the world in the midst of God.