"The story of everything is the story of God and not-God, and there is nothing else. There is no wider story that encompasses that story. It is the one story within which all other stories can be told. ... human beings don't need comprehensive stories to oppress other human beings." page 82

"Wherever God's light could possibly shine, there the Christians were to be."

"In short, the early Christians attempted to live out the story that gave them their humanity-the shape of the lives in which they discovered who the human truly was. It set them free to proclaim the gospel anywhere and everywhere, to disobey the Roman demand to worship, to risk death in a plague, to care for each other in costly ways, to raise children who were not their own, to build hospitals, to establish places of rest for the indigent and homes for orphans, to take time to educate themselves in the reading of scripture, and to do all these things and many, many more-without any obvious earthly reward."

"Freedom for [the early Christians] was freedom from self- obsession and self-protection and for obedience and service to Christ in every corner of the earth. And it was freedom to hope in and to anticipate God's good work everywhere even in the face of demise and death. The resurrection of Jesus established a future beyond death to which the Christians looked forward and which reached back into the midst of the present. Their vision was for eternity, and that gave them remarkable freedom and power in the present. They believed that life would win even when death struck its mortal blow. And they thus trained not to fear death in a world full of its obvious power. And that meant that no matter what came the Christians were completely free to surprise the world. They had good news, and they were going to share it. High and low, near and their way, far, the gospel went to work."

"the story of the autonomous individual says that the "I" is self-sovereign, emerges into without any prior obligations that have been placed on it, and chooses the laws it has for itself. ...imagine an isolated individual, unconnected by any necessity to anything else at all and able to make for itself the life it chooses to make. The will of this individual is inherently free and chooses from an original position of freedom what sort of attachments and commitments it will have. Nothing can be forced upon the autonomous self from with- out that it does not agree to from within. When someone or something— a person, other people, various groups, governments, and so forth-tries to force the "I" to accept something it does not will to accept, the "I" is violated. The border between the "I" and the world of self-chosen obligations has been broken, and the invaders have entered territory that is not theirs. The territory of the "I" is mine alone-inviolable, sovereign, free." -p85