More quotes from Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places

History is the mechanism in which God works salvation, just as paint and canvas is the medium by which Rembrandt made works of art. We cannot get closer to God by distancing ourselves from the mess of history. (132)

We do violence to the biblical revelation when we “use” it for what we can get out of it or what we think will provide color and spice to our otherwise bland lives. That results in a kind of boutique spirituality—God as decoration, God as enhancement. (140)

Suffering and death, the worst that life can hand us, is the very stuff out of which salvation is fashioned. (143)

The story in which God does his saving work arises among a people whose primary experience of God is his absence. (153)

A sense of the absence of God is part of the story, and that is neither exceptional nor preventable nor a judgment on the way we are living our lives. (153)

Christian spirituality makes bold to claim that there is only one game on the field of history and that is salvation (161).

Salvation is not the spiritual diagnosis of souls, one here and one there; it is the story of a people, a community with a past, with ancestors, with common experience. (171)

Song is one of two ways (silence is the other) of giving witness to the transcendent. (176)

Any approach to salvation that does not eventually becomes worship, and the sooner the better, distorts and reduces salvation to a concept or a program or a technique that you can master and control. (177)

In a salvation-defined history, sin is not diminished—if anything we are even more aware of it—but it is no longer definitive. Salvation is definitive. (178)