14 Quotes by William H. Willimon

Jesus didn't die as a frustrated failed revolutionary. His death was the revolution.

So there are no nontheologians; there is just good theology and bad theology.

To be a Christian means gradually, Sunday after Sunday, to be subsumed into another story, a different account of where we have come from and where we are going, a story that is called “gospel.” You are properly called a “Christian” when it’s obvious that the story told in Scripture is your story, above all other stories that the world tries to impose on you, and that the God who is rendered in Scripture is the God who has got you.

On one occasion Walter Brueggemann said, “If you are a coward by nature, don’t worry. We can still use you. You can get down behind the biblical text. You can peek out from behind the text, saying, ‘I don’t know if I would say this, but I do think the text does.’ ” I like that image – the preacher hunkered down, taking cover behind the biblical text, speaking a word not of the preacher’s devising.

The charge of blasphemy, if it is ever made, is treated as a quaint anachronism; but the charge of treason, of placing another loyalty above that to the nation state, is treated as the unforgivable crime.

The most important decision in Christian theology is to decide whether you will speak of God as a person or as a concept, as a name or as an idea. Talk about God as, to use Paul Tillich’s term, “ultimate reality,” and you will get a safe, dead abstraction that you can utilize in whatever salvation project you happen now to be working. Name God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and God will enlist you in God’s move upon the world.

For Barth, and for us, Nazi Germany was the supreme test for modern theology. There we experienced the “modern world,” which we had so labored to understand and to become credible to, as the world, not only of the Copernican world view, computers, and the dynamo, but also of the Nazis.

When there is a racial tragedy, the inclination of white Americans is to grieve, to brush ourselves off, and to get back to being the “real America.” But white supremacy is the “real America.” As Christians, we need to see that these tragic, cruciform moments can be opportunities to hear God’s word in a fresh, new way. God doesn’t bring the tragedy upon us, but we know from scripture that God is relentlessly redemptive, eager to transform our evil into God’s good.

It was a short step from the liberal Christ-the-highest-in-humanity to the Nazi Superman.