Kim Fabricius' theological doodlings are joy to read and often very funny. You can read them all here, but here's a selection of the shortest, and four doodlings on Douglas Campbell's The Deliverance of God.
If there were cameras at Calvary, Christianity would be a cliché.
Sermons are like basketball games: everything is won or lost in the last five minutes.
Jesus said, “Where two are three are gathered together in my name, there is the C of E in 50 years.”
To all ministers troubled by a sense of failure – and your point is?
What is heaven like? A lot like jail: no rich people.
People often talk of church planting when they mean church cloning.
The best sermon I’ve ever preached is probably the worst sermon they’ve ever heard.
So you’re a minister. Do you have an office? If you do, you’re not a minister. A CEO has an office, a minister has a study.
A woman once asked me why I never preach on taking Jesus as your personal Lord and Saviour. “Because, ma’am, I preach on the Bible.”
Any preacher who brandishes a book and declares “God says …!” can only be waving the Qur’an, not the Bible.
Sermons are like apples. They come in sharp and sweet, crisp and soft, dry and juicy, and they ripen at different times of the year. And no one likes the core.
The difference between a Barth and a Piper is that the former glorifies God, the latter deifies Glory.
For some complementarians, it’s wasn’t Adam and Eve, it was Adam and Jeeves.
A Methodist friend of mine asked me if I would help him with a talk he was preparing on Arminianism. I said, “Only if it’s a eulogy.”
For a quintessential oxymoron, “successful church” ranks right up there with “smartphone”.
God invented the church to give atheists a fighting chance.
Contemporary translation of Mark 14:26b: “On the way, Jesus paused to check his Facebook page. It said: ‘You have 0 friends’.”
“Cognitive Therapy”? You mean “preaching”?
Creationists do not disbelieve in science. On the contrary, creationists believe only in science – crap science.
A proposal for the translation of ekklesia: “kindergarten”.
Prosperity Gospel Jesus: “I am the Alpha and the Romeo.”
Finally finishing Douglas Campbell’s massive The Deliverance of God is rather like completing a marathon: you’re deliriously glad you did it – and fucking relieved it’s over.
Douglas Campbell’s The Deliverance of God is a Pauline game-changer. There are only three excuses for not reading it: (1) you have underdeveloped biceps (as you will be unable to elevate the book to make ocular contact); (2) you have manual osteoarthritis (as you will be unable to flip from the text to the endnotes without risk of irreversible damage to the articular cartilage); (3) you have less than six months to live.
If Paul didn’t say what Douglas Campbell says he said, one hopes that the apostle would have the good grace to stand corrected.
I just woke up. I’d been dreaming I was re-reading Douglas Campbell’s The Deliverance of God. It was the best year’s sleep I’ve ever had. In an interview, Campbell now admits that his book “is possibly a little too long.” No worries: Paul, on reflection, said the same thing about his letter to the Romans: “In the future, Tertius, remind me: postcards only.”
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