Walter Wink Quotes

#1. Loving confrontation can free both the oppressed from docility and the oppressor from sin.

Walter Wink

#2. Neutrality in a situation of oppression always supports the status quo.

Walter Wink

#3. I think people get excited about their perspective on sexuality because it gives them the feeling that, their failures notwithstanding, if they take a hard stand on what they consider to be godly, maybe God will be more merciful to them.

Walter Wink

#4. To worship is to remember Who owns the house.

Walter Wink

#5. Never adopt a strategy that you would not want your opponents to use against you

Walter Wink

#6. Jesus abhors both passivity and violence as responses to evil.

Walter Wink

#7. Violent revolution fails because it is not revolutionary enough. It changes the rulers but not the rules, the ends but not the means. Most of the old androcratic values and delusional assumptions remain intact.

Walter Wink

#8. History belongs to the intercessors - those who believe and pray the future into being.

Walter Wink

#9. The greatest obstacle is simply this: the belief that we cannot change because we are dependent on what is wrong. That is the addict's excuse.

Walter Wink

#10. The tragedy is not that nonviolence did not work against the Nazis, but that it was so seldom utilized ... The churches as a whole were too docile or anti-semitic, and too ignorant of the nonviolent message of the Gospel, to act effectively to resist the Nazis or act in solidarity with the Jews.

Walter Wink

#11. Evil can be opposed without being mirrored. Oppressors can be resisted without being emulated. Enemies can be neutralized without being destroyed.

Walter Wink

#12. Killing Jesus was like trying to destroy a dandelion seed-head by blowing on it

Walter Wink

#13. So many people, if the truth were known, live their lives on two levels. The principles they fight about are often at odds with the complicated and often frustrated lives they live. This is why there is so much intensity.

Walter Wink

#14. No war today could be called just, given the inevitable level of casualties and atrocities.

Walter Wink

#15. The failure of churches to continue Jesus' struggle to overcome domination is one of the most damning apostasies in its history. With some thrilling exceptions, the churches of the world have never yet decided that domination is wrong.

Walter Wink

#16. The 'peace' the gospel brings is never the absence of conflict, but an ineffable divine reassurance within the heart of conflict; a peace that surpasses understanding.

Walter Wink

#17. Prayer infuses the air of a time yet to be into the suffocating atmosphere of the present.

Walter Wink