Eugene Peterson
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Dr. Eugene H. Peterson, (1932-2018,) was a pastor, scholar, author, and poet. He has written nearly thirty books, but is best known for The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language, a contemporary paraphrase of the Bible. He was a "‘shepherd’s shepherd’—a pastoral writer who aimed to keep Christian leaders grounded in robust biblical theology amid the din of shallow preaching aimed at self-improvement and megachurch marketing campaigns to ‘do more.’”
1962, Peterson was a founding pastor of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church (PCUSA) in Bel Air, Maryland, where he served for 29 years before retiring in 1991. He was the James M. Houston Professor of Spiritual Theology at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, from 1992 to 1998 |
Quotes
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“It is not difficult in such a world to get a person interested in the message of the gospel; it is terrifically difficult to sustain the interest. In our kind of culture anything, even news about God can be sold if it is packaged freshly; but when it loses its novelty, it goes on the garbage heap. There is a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for the long apprenticeship in what earlier generations called holiness.
-Eugene Peterson Source: “Long Obedience in the Same Direction” “What is hazardous in my life is my work as a Christian. Every day I put faith on the line. I have never seen God. In a world where nearly everything can be weighed, explained, quantified, subjected to psychological analysis and scientific control I persist in making the center of my life a God whom no eye hath seen, nor ear heard, whose will no one can probe. That’s a risk.” -Eugene Peterson “The enormous entertainment industry in our land is a sign of the depletion of joy in our culture. Society is a bored, gluttonous king employing a court jester to divert it after and overindulgent meal. But that kind of joy never penetrates our lives, never changes our basic constitution. The effects are extremely temporary-a few minutes, a few hours, a few days at most. When we run out of money, the joy trickles away. A common but futile strategy for achieving joy is trying to eliminate things that hurt: get rid of pain by numbing the nerve ends, get rid of insecurity by eliminating risks, get rid of disappointments by depersonalizing your relationships. We cannot make ourselves joyful. Joy cannot be commanded, purchased or arranged. Joy is a product of abundance; it is the overflow of vitality. We can decide to live in response to the abundance of God, and not under the dictatorship of our own poor needs. We can decide to live in the environment of a living God and not our own dying selves. We can decide to center ourselves in the God who generously gives and not in our own egos which greedily grab.” -Eugene Peterson “Repentance is the No we say to the world’s lies and the Yes we say to God’s Truth. It is the first word in Christian immigration, sets us on the way to traveling in the light. It is a rejection that is also an acceptance, a leaving that develops into an arriving, a No to the world that is a Yes to God.” -Eugene Peterson "There are no easy tasks in the Christian way; there are only tasks which can be done faithfully or erratically, with joy or resentment. And there is no room for any of us, pastors or grocers, accountants or engineers, typists or gardeners, to speak in tones of self-pity of the terrible burdens of our work.” -Eugene Peterson “Busyness is the enemy of spirituality. It is essentially laziness. It is doing the easy thing instead of the hard thing. It is filling our time with our own actions instead of paying attention to God’s actions. It is taking charge.” -Eugene Peterson Prayers are tools that God uses to work his will in our bodies and souls. Prayers are tools that we use to collaborate in his work with us” -Eugene Peterson “Prayer means that we deal first with God and then with the world first not as a problem to be solved but as a reality in which God is acting.” -Eugene Peterson “Our lives are not puzzles to be figured out. Rather we come to God who knows us and reveals to us the truth of our lives…my identity does not begin when I begin to understand myself. There is something previous to what I think about myself, and it is what God thinks of me.” -Eugene Peterson “Prayer is an act in which I bring myself to attention before God; reading scriptures is an act of attending to God in his speech and action across two millennia in Israel and Christ; spiritual direction is an act of giving attention to what God is doing in the person who happens to be before me at any given moment” -Eugene Peterson Source: Working the Angles “Waiting does not diminish us, any more than waiting diminishes a pregnant mother. We are enlarged in the waiting. We, of course, don’t see what is enlarging us. But the longer we wait, the larger we become, and the more joyful our expectancy.” -Eugene Peterson, The Message, Romans 8:24-25. “Pain isn’t the worst thing. Being hated isn’t the worst thing. Being separated from the one you love isn’t the worst thing. Death isn’t the worst thing. The worst thing is failing to deal with reality and becoming disconnected from what is true.” -Eugene Peterson “What I do with my grief affects the way you handle your grief; together we form a community that deals with death and other loss in the context of God’s sovereignty, which is expressed finally in resurrection. We don’t become mature human beings by getting lucky or cleverly circumventing loss, and certainly not by avoidance and distraction. Learn to lament. We’re mortals, after all. We and everyone around are scheduled for death (mortis). Get used to it. Take up your cross. It prepares us and those around us for resurrection.” -Eugene Peterson Source: Leap over a wall “I was entering into the lived quality of theology and scripture, that involves taking the immediate conditions of life—family, work, place, feelings, weather—into the scripture and gospel story and making a home there. Entering into, reimagining and repraying scripture into the details of daily living, personally and relationally, in place, right here, right now.” -Eugene Peterson Source: The Pastor “There was no sharp line of demarcation that marked my exit from the badlands, but at some point—it had been about six years—I realized that something was different. It didn’t happen all at once. The effects were cumulative. I found myself more at home with myself, more put together. Previously unconnected parts of my life were connected, integrated, fused. I emerged with a lighter step. I had survived. It had been a time in the refining fire, a time of chastening, a purging of ego, the Spirit moving over and through my life and vocation, making a cosmos of it. It was in the badlands that all the parts of m identity connected, fused, coordinated—like adolescent making the transition into adulthood. What so much of the time had seemed like an endless overcast day of drizzle began to open up with breaks of sunshine and starlight: glimpses of badlands beauty.” -Eugene Peterson Source: The Pastor “We don’t grow and mature in our Christian life by sitting in a classroom and library, listening to lectures and reading books, or going to church and singing hymns and listening to sermons. We do it by taking the stuff of our ordinary lives, our parents and children, our spouses and friends, or workplaces and fellow workers, our dreams and fantasies, our attachments, our easily accessible gratifications, our depersonalizing of intimate relations, our commodification of living truths into idolatries, taking all this and placing it on the altar of refining fire—our God is a consuming fire—and finding it all stuff redeemed for a life of holiness. A life that is not reserved for nuns and monks but accessible to every Dick and Jane in every ordinary congregation.” -Eugene Peterson Source: The Pastor “Early on in my reading I came across this sentence: “The essential thing in heaven and earth’ is…that there should be a long obedience in the same direction; there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something that has made life worth living.” That struck me as a text that I could live with. I saw myself assigned to give witness to the sheer livability of the Christian life, that everything in Scripture and Jesus was here to be lived. In the mess of work and sin, of families and neighborhoods, my task was to pray and give direction and encourage that lived quality of the gospel—patiently, locally, and personally. Patiently: I would stay with these people; there are no quick or easy ways to do this. Locally: I would embrace the conditions of this place—economics, weather, culture, schools, whatever—so that there would be nothing abstract or piously idealized about what I was doing. Personally: I would know them, know their names, know their homes, know their families, know their work—but I would not pry, I would not treat them as a cause or a project, I would treat them with dignity. Preaching, of course, is part of it, teaching is part of it, administering a congregation as a community of faith is part of it. But the overall context of my particular assignment in the pastoral vocation, as much as I am able to do it, is to see to it that these men and women in my congregation become aware of the possibilities and the promise of living out in personal and local detail what is involved in following Jesus, and be a companion to them as we do it together.” -Eugene Peterson Source: The Pastor “The pastoral vocation in America is always in danger of becoming flabby with consumer religion and lazy with clichés.” -Eugene Peterson Source: The Pastor “In caring for souls there is a need for a cultivated awareness that God has already seized the initiative. The traditional doctrine for this is prevenience: God everywhere and always seizing the initiative. He gets things going. He had and continues to have the first word. Prevenience is the conviction that God has been working diligently, redemptively, and strategically before I appeared on the scene, before I was aware there was something to do…We learn to be attentive to the divine action already in process so that the previously unheard word of God is heard, the previously unattended act of God is noticed. We learn to ask the questions: What has God been doing here? What traces of grace can I discern in this life? What history of love can I read in this group? What has God set in motion that I can get in on?” -Eugene Peterson Source: The Contemplative Pastor “If we stay at home by ourselves and read the Bible, we are going to miss a lot, for our reading will be unconsciously conditioned by our culture, limited by our ignorance, distorted by our unnoticed prejudices. In worship we are part of the “large congregation” where all the writers of Scriptures address us, where hymn writers use music to express truths which touch us not only in our heads but in our hearts, where the preacher who has just lived through six days of doubt, hurt, faith, and blessing with the worshippers, speaks the truth of Scripture in a language of the congregation’s present experience. We want to hear what God says and what he says to us: worship is the place where out attention is centered on these personal and decisive words of God.” -Eugene Peterson Source: A Long Obedience in the Same Direction “The intimacy, of being part of everyone’s story and having them be pat of our. That daily blending of ordinary and salvation life, the conversations that so often develop into prayers. This incredible company of friends following Jesus. Creating forms of worship and hospitality that unobtrusively subvert the secularity and individualism of the culture.” -Eugene Peterson “Following Jesus is a unique way of life. It is like nothing else. There is nothing and no one to compare. Following Jesus gets us little or nothing of what we commonly think we need or want or hope for. Following Jesus accomplishes nothing on the world’s agenda. Following Jesus takes us right out of this world’s assumptions and goals to a place where a lever can be inserted that turns the world upside down and inside out. Following Jesus has everything to do with this world, but almost nothing in common with this world” -Eugene Peters Source: The Jesus Way “The ways employed in our North American culture are conspicuously impersonal: programs, organizations, techniques, general guidelines, information detached from place. In matter of ways and means, the vocabulary of numbers is preferred over names, ideologies crowd our ideas, the gray fog of abstraction absorbs the sharp particularities of the recognizable face and the familiar street. My concern is provoked by the observation that so many who understand themselves to be followers of Jesus, without hesitation, and apparently without thinking, embrace the ways and means of the culture as they go about their daily living “in Jesus name.” ….Jesus is an alternative to the dominant ways of the world, not a supplement to them. We cannot use impersonal means to do or say a personal thing—and the gospel is personal or it is nothing.” -Eugene Peterson Source: The Jesus Way “I want to inspire Christianity today to remove the disciplines from the category of historical curiosities and place them at the center of the new life in Christ. Only when we do this, can Christ’s community take its stand at this present point in history.” -Eugene Peterson, Source: The Message “The two most difficult things to get straight in life are love and God. More often than not the mess people make of their lives can be traced to failure or stupidity or meanness in one or both of these areas. The basic biblical Christian conviction is that the two subjects are intricately related. If we want to deal with God the right way, we have to learn to love the right way. If we want to love the right way, we have to deal with God the right way. God and love can't be separated. Jesus provides the full and true understanding of God: Jesus shows us the mature working-out of love. In Jesus, God and love are linked accurately, intricately, indissolubly.” -Eugene Peterson Source: ‘Introduction to 1, 2, & 3 John The Message’ “Many of us fondle a romanticized spirituality in our imaginations The “God’s in his heaven/all is right with the world” sort of thing.” -Eugene Peterson Source: ‘Introduction to the book of Numbers—The Message’ “I find that cultivating a sense of place as the exclusive and irreplaceable setting for following Jesus is even more difficult than persuading men and women of the truth of the message of Jesus. God’s great love and purposes for us are worked out in the messes in our kitchens and backyards, in storms and sins, blue skies, daily work, working with us as we are and not as we should be, and where we are… and not where we would like to be.” –Eugene H. Peterson “Worship... is not something a person experiences, it is something we do, regardless of how we feel about it.” -Eugene Peterson “Worship is the strategy by which we interrupt our preoccupation with ourselves and attend to the presence of God.” -Eugene Peterson “In the long history of Christian spirituality, community prayer is more important, then individual prayer.” -Eugene Peterson "But here's the thing: prayer is personal language or it is nothing. God is personal, emphatically personal: three-personed personal. When we use impersonal language in this most personal of all relations, the language doesn't work". Think about it. The Psalms is a collection of personal prayers, sometimes so deeply personal these prayers make us squirm or wonder if they should be said aloud. But isn't that the whole point of prayer? Impersonal prayer is prayer shaped to say the right thing to the ears who are listening in the congregation; personal prayer opens the heart to God.” -Eugene Peterson “The way of Jesus cannot be imposed or mapped — it requires an active participation in following Jesus as he leads us through sometimes strange and unfamiliar territory, in circumstances that become clear only in the hesitations and questionings, in the pauses and reflections where we engage in prayerful conversation with one another and with him.” -Eugene H. Peterson, Source: The Jesus Way: A Conversation on the Ways That Jesus Is the Way “Christian discipleship is a decision to walk in Jesus’ ways, steadily and firmly, and then finding that the way integrates all our interests, passions, and gifts, our human needs and eternal aspirations. It is the way of life we were created for.” -Eugene H. Peterson ‘We live in a narrative, we live in a story. We have a beginning and an end, we have a plot, we have character.’ Story is the language of the heart. Our souls speak not in the naked facts of mathematics or the abstract propositions of systematic theology; they speak the images and emotions of story.” -Eugene Peterson “Spiritual theology is simply theology lived. A great deal of theology has to do with doctrine, with getting it right. Spiritual theology aims to bring that together within a lived life. The conviction behind spiritual theology is that the Bible—and all of Christian belief—is livable. It’s not just something to be held in your head or performed through your actions and ethics, but actually embodied.” -Eugene Peterson “Christians don't simply learn or study or use Scripture; we assimilate it, take it into our lives in such a way that it gets metabolized into acts of love, cups of cold water, missions into all the world, healing and evangelism and justice in Jesus' name, hands raised in adoration of the Father, feet washed in company with the Son.” -Eugene Peterson Source: Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading “The core message of the gospel is that God invades us with new life, but the setting for this is most often in the ordinariness of our lives. The new life takes place in the place and person of our present. It is not a means by which God solves problems. God creates new life. He is not a problem solver but a person creator.” -Eugene Peterson Source: As Kingfishers Catch Fire: A Conversation on the Ways of God Formed by the Words of God “Sabbath is that uncluttered time and space in which we can distance ourselves from our own activities enough to see what God is doing.” -Eugene Peterson I am busy because I am vain. I want to appear important. What better way than to be busy! The incredible hours, the crowded schedule, and the heavy demands of my time are proof to myself and to all who will notice— that I am important. If I go into a doctor’s office and find there is no one waiting, and I see through a half-open door the doctor reading a book, I wonder if he’s any good. Such experiences affect me. I live in a society in which crowded schedules and harassed conditions are evidence of importance, so I develop a crowded schedule and harassed conditions. When others notice, they acknowledge my significance, and my vanity is fed. I am busy because I am lazy. I let others decide what I will do instead of resolutely deciding myself. It was a favorite theme of C.S. Lewis that only lazy people work hard. By lazily abdicating the essential work of deciding and directing, establishing values and setting goals, other people do it for us -Eugene Peterson Source: The Contemplative Pastor As a pastor I was charged with, among other things, teaching people to pray, helping them to give voice to the entire experience of being human, and to do it both honestly and thoroughly. I found that it was not as easy as I expected.… ‘Help’ and ‘Thanks!’ are our basic prayers. But honesty and thoroughness don’t come quite as spontaneously. Untutored we tend to think that prayer is what good people do when they are doing their best. It is not….It is the means by which we get everything in our lives out in the open before God. And so in my pastoral work of teaching people to pray, I started paraphrasing the Psalms into the rhythms and idiom of contemporary English. -Eugene Peterson Source: The Message What I want to insist on is that prayer is not something added on to the Christian life (or any life for that matter). It is the language in which that life is lived out, nurtured, developed, revealed, informed; the language in which it believes, loves, explores, seeks, and finds. There are no shortcuts or detours. Prayer is the cradle language among those who are “born anew” and then the intimate, familiar, developing language of growing up to follow the way of Jesus. -Eugene Peterson Source: The Jesus Way But because in our secularized society prayer is often associated with what people of “spiritual” interests pursue or with formal acts conducted by professional leaders, it is necessary from time to time to call attention to the fact that prayer is the street language that we use with Jesus, who walks the streets with us. We can’t put off prayer until we “get good at it.” It is the only language available to us as we bring our unique and particular selves, “just as we are,” into the daily, hourly speaking and listening to God who comes “just as he is” in Jesus. -Eugene Peterson Source: The Jesus Way “If we are willfully ignorant of the Psalms, we are not thereby excluded from praying, but we will have to hack our way through formidable country by trial and error and with inferior tools. If we dismiss the Psalms, preferring a more up-to-date and less demanding school of prayer, we will not be without grace, but we will miss the center where Christ worked in his praying. Christ prayed the Psalms—the Christian community was early convinced that he continues praying them through us as we pray them: "we recite this prayer of the Psalm in Him, and He recites it in us." -Eugene Peterson Source: quoting Augustine “Christians don't simply learn or study or use Scripture; we assimilate it, take it into our lives in such a way that it gets metabolized into acts of love, cups of cold water, missions into all the world, healing and evangelism and justice in Jesus' name, hands raised in adoration of the Father, feet washed in company with the Son.” -Eugene Peterson “One way to define spiritual life is getting so tired and fed up with yourself, that you go on to something better, which is following Jesus.” -Eugene Peterson "That "He sticks with us" is the reason Christians can look back over a long life crisscrossed with cruelties, unannounced tragedies, unexpected setbacks, sufferings, disappointments, depressions - look back across all that and see it as a road of blessing." -Eugene Peterson Source: A Long Obedience in the Same Direction “[Jesus] said “Follow me” and ended up with a lot of losers. And these losers ended up, through no virtue or talent of their own, becoming saints. Jesus wasn’t after the best but the worst.” -Eugene Peterson Source: The Jesus Way: A Conversation in following Jesus “We are fond of saying that the Bible has all the answers. And that is certainly correct. The text of the Bible sets us in a reality that is congruent with who we are as created beings in God's image and what we are destined for in the purposes of Christ. But the Bible also has all the questions, many of them that we would just as soon were never asked of us, and some of which we will spend the rest of our lives doing our best to dodge. The Bible is a most comforting book; it is also a most discomfiting book.” -Eugene Peterson Source: Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading “All the persons of faith I know are sinners, doubters, uneven performers. We are secure not because we are sure of ourselves but because we trust that God is sure of us.” - -Eugene Peterson Source: A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society “How can I lead people into the quiet place beside the still waters if I am in perpetual motion? How can I persuade a person to live by faith and not by works if I have to juggle my schedule constantly to make everything fit into place?” -Eugene Peterson Source: The Contemplative Pastor: Returning to the Art of Spiritual Direction “Obedience is the thing, living in active response to the living God. The most important question we ask of this text is not, 'What does this mean?' but 'What can I obey?' A simple act of obedience will open up our lives to this text far more quickly than any number of Bible studies and dictionaries and concordances.” -Eugene Peterson Source: Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading “Stories are verbal acts of hospitality.” -Eugene Peterson. Source: Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology “No life of faith can be lived privately. There must be overflow into the lives of others.” -Eugene Peterson Source: Living the Message: Daily Reflections with Eugene H. Peterson “If we do not regularly quit work for one day a week, we take ourselves far too seriously. The moral sweat pouring off our brows blinds our eyes to the action of God in and around us.” -Eugene Peterson Source: Working the Angles We live in what one writer has called “the age of sensation.” We think that if we don’t feel something there can be no authenticity in doing it. But the wisdom of God says something different: that we can act ourselves into a new way of feeling much quicker than we can feel ourselves into a new way of acting. Worship is an act that develops feelings for God, not a feeling for God that is expressed in an act of worship. When we obey the command to praise God in worship, our deep, essential need, essential need to be in relationship with God is nurtured. -Eugene Peterson. Source. A Long Obedience in the Same Direction 57 Prayers I repent, Lord. I repent. I have been wrong in supposing that I could manage my own life and be my own god; I have been wrong. in thinking I had, or could get, the strength, education and training to make it on my own;I trust that God in Jesus Christ is telling me the truth. I lean into the realization that what you want from me and what I want from you are not going to be achieved by doing the same old things, thinking the same old thoughts. I turn again and still to follow you, my Lord Jesus Christ, and be your pilgrim in the path of peace. Prayer by Eugene Peterson . |
