John Stackhouse Famous Quotes & Sayings

If you're looking for a way to break the contract, I do not know. You'd need a demon or a barrister to answer that. — T. Kingfisher

Jesus treats patriarchy the way he treats much else of the law and custom of his time: ambiguously, suggestively, and sometimes subversively, but never immediately revolutionarily outside the central matter of his own mission and person ... The main scandal of Jesus' career is properly JESUS - not Jesus and feminism, or Jesus and the abolition of slavery, or Jesus and Jewish emancipation, or Jesus and anything else. Those other causes are good, and they are implicit in Jesus' ministry. But they are incipient at best, and Jesus' accommodation to these various social distinctions needs to be acknowledged and then accounted for in one's paradigm regarding gender. — John G. Stackhouse Jr.

If we were motivated by money, we would have sold the company a long time ago and ended up on a beach. — Larry Page

I don't think I'd like Manhattan anymore. My mother-in-law lives there, and you go there. But I like looking at it from a distance. It's a fantastic sight - every time, it awes me. — Martin Amis

When society was patriarchal, as it was in the New Testament context and as it has been everywhere in the world except in modern society in our day, the church avoided scandal by going along with it - fundamentally evil as patriarchy was and is. Now, however, that modern society is at least officially egalitarian, the scandal is that the church is NOT going along with society, not rejoicing in the unprecedented freedom to let women and men serve according to gift and call without an arbitrary gender line. This scandal impedes both the evangelism of others and the edification - the retention and development of faith - of those already converted. — John G. Stackhouse Jr.

I have trouble getting approvals from my heath insurance company for basic antidepressants. And I have the best plan my agency has. I can't get high off this stuff! I'm not going to sell it! Getting my medication is critical. It's me saying, "I just want to live." And their response seems to be, "We agree that it's a matter of life and death; that's why we're declining it." Every time I get a cold, I have Tylenol with codeine coming out the wazoo. But the medication I need to live? Nah. — Jenny Lawson

Among those ways and thoughts of God, then, is the principle of accommodation. God works within human limitations - both individual and corporate - to transform the world according to his good purposes. To be blunt, God works with what he's got and with what we've got. He does not create a whole new situation but instead graciously pursues shalom in the glory and the mess we have made. The living water of the Holy Spirit pours over the extant topography of the social landscape and rarely sweeps all before it. The Spirit usually conforms himself to the contours he encounters. But as he does so, like an irresistible flow of water, he shapes them by and by, eventually making the crooked ways straight and the rough places a plain (Isa. 40:3-4). — John G. Stackhouse Jr.

Everything. Everywhere. Every moment. That is the scope of God's call on our lives, and that is the dignity our lives enjoy. — John G. Stackhouse Jr.

I always think that the exceptional people are those who remain outsiders but still communicate on a grand scale. I think I want everyone to feel more free, and so I feel really claustrophobic on behalf of lots of people. — Bat For Lashes

My recommendation instead, however, is that we do not surrender questions of value, whether absolute matters of truth, goodness, and beauty or relative judgment of more or less truth, goodness, and beauty. With those questions to the fore, in fact, we can interrogate various other traditions and truly learn something that can improve our own. Perhaps the Presbyterians really do know more than we do about due process in church government. Perhaps the Orthodox really do know some things we do not about iconography. Perhaps the Mennonites really can teach us the meaning of 'enough.' Perhaps the Pentecostals can help liberate us from dull and disembodied worship. Baptists who have learned to improve their procedures from Presbyterians, their art from the Orthodox, their finances from the Mennonites, and their worship from the Pentecostals do not therefore become worse Baptists but better ones. And so around the ecumenical circle, no? — John G. Stackhouse Jr.