"Rescue the perishing; don't hesitate to step in and help. If you say, 'Hey, that's none of my business,' will that get you off the hook? Someone is watching you closely, you know---someone not impressed with weak excuses."

-----Proverbs 24:11-12 (The Message translation)

"If I speak with the tongues of Reformers and of professional theologians, and I have not personal faith in Christ, my theology is nothing but the noisy beating of a snare drum. And if I have analytic powers and the gift of creating coherent conceptual systems of theology, so as to remove liberal objections, and have not personal hope in God, I am nothing. And if I give myself to resolving the debate between supra and infralapsarianism, and to defending inerrancy, and to learning the Westminister Catechism, yea, even the larger one, so as to recite it by heart backwards and forwards, and have not love, I have gained nothing."

-----Kevin J. Vanhoozer, from "First Theology: God, Scripture & Hermeneutics"

"Three quarters of Americans believe the Bible teaches that 'God helps those who help themselves.' That is, three out of four Americans believe that this uber-American idea, a notion at the core of our current individualist politics and culture, which was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin, actually appears in Holy Scripture. The thing is, not only is Franklin's wisdom not biblical; it's counter-biblical. Few ideas could be further from the gospel message, with its radical summons to love of neighbor."

-----Bill McKibben, in his Harper's magazine essay, "The Christian Paradox"