Ken Wilson Quotes

• “If we have a hair trigger on the exclusion gun, shouldn't it be aimed at those who are using their power to abuse someone who is in a weaker, more vulnerable position?”

  Ken Wilson

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• “The demands of acceptance require us to maintain a relationship of honor and respect with those with whom we may ardently disagree. We accept the fact that our convictions on this matter differ, and those with whom we differ hold their convictions, as we do, unto the Lord. Inasmuch as this is not easy for us to do, we commit ourselves to bearing it as part of the disciple's cross. We don't agree to disagree by diminishing the importance of the question or by insisting that people care less about the issue.”

  Ken Wilson

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• “We so want to be right and so trust that our desire to be right is something that God would surely bless. Yet the desire to be right comes with a price: the fear of being wrong. And so, in a counter-intuitive way, this focus on being right seems to be the porridge we settle for when we exchange our birthright because we're famished and fear that father won't feed us.”

  Ken Wilson

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• “This informal “pre-exclusion” is probably the more powerful and widely exerted form in many churches. It is in my denomination. As the divorced and remarried don’t seek communion at a Roman Catholic parish, gays and lesbians don’t seek to participate in most evangelical churches.”

  Ken Wilson

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• “We are supposed to listen to the voice within us that says, “Gosh, this just doesn’t sound loving, even though it sounds correct!” Of course, there’s much sorting to be done: what does love really call for in a given situation? Nevertheless, the warning in Scripture is there for a reason.”

  Ken Wilson

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• “The conscience is a communal organ—a way of knowing that we do with others formed always in reference to others.”

  Ken Wilson

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• “But Jesus also had a way of reading Scripture that was surprising, unconventional, and paradoxical. This is part of what first fascinated me about Jesus in the gospels. His reading of Scripture got him into trouble. Getting into trouble is not a goal in our reading of Scripture (with whom and for what?) but we cannot rule it out as a possible consequence at times. Perhaps for this reason I’ve always been attracted to movements (the Jesus movement, the charismatic renewal movement, and the Vineyard) that began, for their time and context, with non-traditional readings of Scripture. This has left me open (one might say vulnerable) to considering such readings.”

  Ken Wilson

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• “In other words, the biblical writers were speaking to those who shared a rich cultural context, which shaped the way they communicated. I grew up in Detroit and share a rich cultural context with other Detroiters. When I say words like lions, tigers, and wings, I don’t have to specify that I mean the professional football, baseball, and hockey teams. Fellow Detroiters get it because we share a rich cultural context.”

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• “But sometimes the quest for the right answer keeps us from testing a variety of good ones. In search of the right answer, we assume every answer other than the one we've settled on must be wrong. Forgetting that some things have more than one good answer. I'd like to think for example, that the question, "How can I love Ken?" might have many good answers, rather than one right one.”

  Ken Wilson

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• “in A Moral Vision of the New Testament. Hays says, “This means that for the foreseeable future we must find ways to live within the church in a situation of serious moral disagreement while still respecting one another as brother and sisters in Christ. If the church is going to start practicing the discipline of exclusion from the community, there are other issues far more important than homosexuality where we should begin to draw a line in the dirt: violence and materialism, for example.” [117] I am convinced that how the biblical prohibitions apply to monogamous gay relationships is indeed a disputable matter and that the teaching of Romans 14-15 should guide our response.”

  Ken Wilson

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• “There remains an experience of incomparable value. We have for once learnt to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled—in short, from the perspective of those who suffer.”

  Ken Wilson

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• “The words of an old hymn come to mind: But we make His love too narrow By false limits of our own; And we magnify His strictness With a zeal He will not own. For the love of God is broader Than the measure of the mind; And the heart of the Eternal Is most wonderfully kind. --—Frederick William Faber 1814-1863”

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• “When she asked me directly about her status as a woman in a same-sex relationship, I said something to this effect: “I’ve been wrestling with this question for some time now. When the Scripture addresses same-sex issues, the texts are uniformly negative. I’ve concluded that one of two things is the case. One, there is a reasonable case to be made that what the texts are addressing is something other than today’s monogamous relationships between two people committed to each other for life. Another possibility is that the traditional reading is correct. Even then, we accept people who violate other biblical standards, like remarriage after divorce. We make accommodations because it seems like the right thing to do, all things considered. At the end of the day, these seem to me like debatable issues. We can agree to disagree. We are ultimately accountable to God for our actions. We can accept each other without approving each other’s moral standing on this or that issue. God does, or we couldn’t be saved. That’s the gospel, isn’t it?”

  Ken Wilson

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• “we have to be thoughtful about the burdens we insist that other people carry, especially when we don’t have to carry those same burdens ourselves.”

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• “Unbelievably, Augustine claims God makes Christians desire the salvation of those whom he has damned (Corrept.15, 47). Rist adeptly identifies this as "the most pathetic passage”

  Ken Wilson

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• “RELIGION IS NO ESCAPE FROM THE MESSY BUSINESS OF HUMANITY.”

  Ken Wilson

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• “Get ready for some more mind-numbing detail that doesn’t make for snappy, easy-to-digest sermons.”

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• “In 399 CE he writes against Faustus the Manichaean. When discussing Romans 9, Augustine says God's determinations are secret, he still judges justly by punishing those who refuse him; and, humanity retains a free will, not a will that can only sin (Faust.21.2–3). Furthermore, he accuses the Manichaean god of baiting the damned with an impossible dilemma. He again exposes the Manichaean ploy of justifying their unjust determinism through a mere semblance or facade of personal choice in free will. Augustine vehemently argues that the Manichaeans create a shockingly cruel and criminal God who condemns persons to eternal punishment by something necessarily intrinsic to them. Here the Manichaean god is shockingly unjust: And for this reason it remains for you to say that those souls destined to be condemned with eternal bonds in the horrible sphere emerged as enemies of the holy light not by their own will but by necessity, and it remains for you to make your god the sort of a judge before whom nothing could help those whose case you defend, once you have demonstrated the necessity of their action, and the sort of king from whom you are not able to obtain forgiveness for your brothers, his [own] sons and members whose enmities against you and against him you say emerged not by will but by necessity. O monstrous cruelty! (Faust.22.22)”

  Ken Wilson

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• “They see the church making accommodations for the divorced and remarried, and for many other things condemned in Scripture, while enforcing exclusionary policies against gay people.”

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• “In the deepest, most central place of our being, we don't want to cross God and our not wanting to is the beginning of wisdom.”

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• “We can land on the "right" side of a controversy and keep that personified mystery of evil, called the devil, happy. So long as we cede the territory he is trying to occupy: that this moral concern deserves our attention more than all others, that one's position on this question determines one's belonging to or leaving a faith community. When we do this—and it is standard practice in many churches today—we stigmatize an entire group of people. We're not just singling "the issue" out. We are singling people out. This pleases the hater of humanity and grieves humanity's lover.”

  Ken Wilson

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• “Over four decades of pastoral ministry—I got started early—you make mistakes. But the mistakes you most regret are the ones that obscure the gospel and hurt the people you love, by saying in effect, "You do not belong," to those for whom Christ died to provide a place of belonging.”

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• “For too long, our controversies seem to boil down to conservatives and liberals (or, if you prefer, traditionalists and progressives) talking past each other for the benefit of stirring up their loyalists, as partisans do in the primary campaigns of electoral politics. The rest of us are expected to line up with our team just as soon as they show their colors.”

  Ken Wilson

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• “Too many congregations look to their pastors for simple answers to problems that their pastors see as anything but simple. And too many pastors don't trust their congregations enough to say, "It's not that simple from my point of view and here’s why.”

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• “I've been working for years in my local congregation to undermine the idea that the conservative-liberal divide is reliable shorthand for "faithful to God" vs. "unfaithful to God.”

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