The lives of the saints are the hermeneutical key to Scripture.

Consider the problem of taking showers with Christians. They are, after all, constantly going on about the business of witnessing in the hopes of making converts to their God and church. Would you want to shower with such people? You never know when they might try to baptize you.

Another hallmark of Christianity is that salvation is not individualistic-it's not something one person receives for himself or herself. Salvation is the reign of God. It is a political alternative to the way the world is constituted. That's a very important part of the story that has been lost to accounts of salvation that are centered in the individual. But without an understanding that salvation is the reign of God, the need for the church to mediate salvation makes no sense at all.

Whenever a people are bound together in loyalty to a story that includes something as strange as the Sermon on the Mount, we are put at odds with the world.

Gentleness is given to those who have learned that God will not have his kingdom triumph through the violence of the world, for such a triumph came through the meekness of a cross.

The movement that Jesus begins is constituted by people who believe that they have all the time in the world, made possible by God’s patience, to challenge the world’s impatient violence by cross and resurrection.

In the Crusades, getting the Holy Land back was the goal, and any means could be used to achieve it. World War II was a crusade. The firebombing of Tokyo by Doolittle and the carpet bombing in Germany, especially by the British, showed that.