Ellen F. Davis Quotes

#1. From a biblical perspective, salvation is a subcategory of revelation - or better, salvation is a consequence of revelation fully received.

Ellen F. Davis

#2. Blessing is essentially the transformative experience of knowing and honoring God as the Giver; it means valuing the steady flow that sustains the world even above the gift of life that each of us receives and is in time constrained to relinquish.

Ellen F. Davis

#3. ...Job rails against God, not as a skeptic, not as a stranger to God's justice, but precisely as a believer. It is the very depth of Job's commitment to God's ethical vision that makes his rage so fierce, and that will finally compel an answer from God. (pg. 133)

Ellen F. Davis

#4. Yet accurate speech about anything, and especially about God, is in fact a rhythm of silence and speech, speaking and listening.

Ellen F. Davis

#5. ...consider how [the Proverbs] define success: the establishment of righteousness, justice and equity. (pg. 95)

Ellen F. Davis

#6. Thus, while not all Scripture is generically narrative, it can reasonably be claimed that the story Scripture tells, from creation to new creation, is the unifying element that holds literature of other genres together with narrative in an intelligible whole.

Ellen F. Davis

#7. What gives a liturgy its plot? A liturgy is always a sort of drama, that is, an intentional sequence of events, however simple or simply done, that has a plot.

Ellen F. Davis

#8. Whenever we pick up the Bible, read it, put it down, and say, "That's just what I thought," we are probably in trouble.

Ellen F. Davis

#9. The resurrection produces a "conversion of the imagination" that causes us to understand everything else differently.

Ellen F. Davis

#10. Worship is a vigorous act of reordering our desires in the light of God's burning desire for the wellness of all creation. (pg. 152)

Ellen F. Davis

#11. the impression that many seminarians seem to take from their introductory Bible course, that a given text is a puzzle with only one solution - an impression that often makes biblical study oppressive rather than exhilarating.

Ellen F. Davis

#12. Proclaiming resurrection turns the world upside down (cf. Acts 17:1-9) and holds out to the poor and lowly the hope of being vindicated while posing a worrisome prospect to those who have already received their consolation in the present life (cf. Luke 6:24).322

Ellen F. Davis

#13. Bonhoeffer's permanent legacy as a theologian has been to show that in the modern world, as in Josiah's and Huldah's Jerusalem, fostering the discomfiting yet life-giving practice of reading the Bible against ourselves is a major public responsibility of the Christian teacher and theologian.

Ellen F. Davis

#14. Careful practical work is the best expression of our freedom and safeguard of our sanity. In a healthy society, such work is the means most consistently available for people to practice holiness of life, to imitate God's enabling and sustaining care for the world.

Ellen F. Davis

#15. The sufferer who keeps looking for God has, in the end, privileged knowledge. ... She passes through a door that only pain will open, and is thus qualified to speak of God in a way that others, whom we generally call more fortunate, cannot speak. (pg. 122)

Ellen F. Davis

#16. The land's fruitfulness is the "natural" consequence of covenant faithfulness enacted on both sides, Israel's and God's. A productive land is a gift something like a child to a healthy marriage; in each case, thriving results from and witnesses to long-sustained faithfulness between two partners.

Ellen F. Davis

#17. The Song [of Solomon] captures the ecstatic aspect of love that is the main subject of the whole Bible. (pg. 67)

Ellen F. Davis

#18. If God has a best friend (and why not?), then surely it is Moses. (pg. 46)

Ellen F. Davis

#19. The fourth-century Greek theologian St. John Chrysostom said that Job's greatest trial was that his wife was not taken. (pg. 125)

Ellen F. Davis

#20. The danger of Christians reading the Bible confessionally is that we run the risk of reading alone.

Ellen F. Davis

#21. bad biblical interpretation proceeds not just from ignorance but from sin.36 Therefore, part of the hermeneutical challenge to contemporary Christians is to repent of our millennia-long hardness of heart.

Ellen F. Davis

#22. The very idea of wisdom, as the Bible understands it, challenges the mind-set of our society and the view of knowledge that all of us have to some extent internalized. (pg. 94)

Ellen F. Davis

#23. God accommodates [Moses'] complaints and makes in-course corrections. God does not take a human being so fully into the divine confidence--you might say, God does not depend on a human being so fully--until Mary conceives by the Holy Spirit. (pg. 16)

Ellen F. Davis

#24. Time, as we see it framing biblical narrative, is neither linear nor cyclical but perhaps more like a helix, and what it spirals around is the risen Christ.

Ellen F. Davis

#25. Contrition means finding the courage to let your heart break over sin. Willfully letting your heart break and then offering the pieces to God is a radically counter cultural idea in our society (pg. 168)

Ellen F. Davis

#26. The great question that God's speech out of the whirlwind poses for Job and every other person of integrity is this: Can you love what you do not control?

Ellen F. Davis

#27. Appreciation and enjoyment of the creatures are the hallmark of God's dominion and therefore the standard by which our own attempt to exercise dominion must be judged.

Ellen F. Davis