Wink on prayer

Biblical prayer is impertinent, persistent, shameless, indecorous. It is more like haggling in an outdoor bazaar that the polite monologues of the church.

Walter Wink - original source unknown, but it's quoted in a number of books, such as Philip Yancey's Prayer: does it make any difference? 

 

Love your enemies

Loving our enemies has become, in our time, the criterion of true Christian faith.  It may seem impossible, yet it can be done.  At no point is the inrush of divine grace so immediately and concretely perceptible as in those moments when we let go our hatred and relax into God's love.  No miracle is so awesome, so necessary, and so frequent.

Walter Wink
Engaging the Powers

Enjoying affluence

Those of us who now enjoy affluence and freedom a well as power are predisposed to believe that benign forces shape our destiny. But to the extent that our blessings are incidental by-products of our citizenship in nations that currently enjoy domination status over others, our well-being may be more a result of flagrant injustice than divine providence.

Walter Wink
Engaging the Powers

Powers that be

The irony would be delicious if it were not so bitter: earnest theologians have been earnestly persuading Christians for sixteen centuries that their gospel supports violence, while massive outpourings of citizens in one officially atheist country after another [during the peaceful overturning of the Soviet regime and its allies at the end of the Cold War] recently have demonstrated the effectiveness of Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence as a means of liberation.

- Walter Wink, from his book The Powers That Be