Quotes from Searching for God Knows What

Taking a page from a fellow prof's blog, I'm going to retype quotes that hit me in particular from the books I read, so I have a record of them for later and I think about them as I type them. So here are the quotes I'd like to keep from Don Miller's book:

p.108 "... the most selfless thing God could do, that is, the most selfless thing a perfect Being who is perfectly loving could do, would be to create other beings to enjoy Himself."

p. 160 "When the church began to doubt its own integrity after the Darwinian attack on Genesis 1 and 2, we began to answer science, not by appealing to something greater, the realm of beauty and to spirituality, but by attempting to translate spiritual realities through scientific equations, thus justifying ourselves to culture, as if culture had some kind of authority to redeem us in the first place. Terms such as 'absolute truth' and 'inherency' [sic., which is ironic in itself! BJM] (a term only used to describe Scripture in the last hundred years or so) became a battle cry, even though the laws of absolute truth must, by their nature, exclude ideas such as Jesus is the Word, He is both God and man, the Trinity is both three and One, we are united with Him in His death, because these are mysterious ideas, not scientific ideas."

[I really like this paragraph, but I have to say something at some point that redeems the idea of translation! Some translation is necessary.]

p. 190/1: "If we are preaching morality without Christ, and using war rhetoric to communicate a battle mentality, we are fighting on Satan's side. The battle we are in is a battle against the principalities of darkness, not against people who are different from us. In war you shoot the enemy, not the hostage."

[Combining Galatians and Ephesians in one vivid quote. Nice!]

p. 204: "Lately I have been thinking about the verse in Scripture that says to work out your salvation in fear and trembling (see Phil. 2:12): I take this to mean salvation isn't something you go around feeling sure of, they way you might if you had completed a to-do list. I take this to mean working out your salvation involves a very careful searching of the heart, asking time and time again what we really mean by attending church, what we really mean by reading the Bible, what we really mean when we worship God."