The believer’s cross must be, like his Lord’s, the price of his social nonconformity. … It is not … an inward wrestling of the sensitive soul with self and sin; it is the social reality of representing in an unwilling world the Order to come. (quoting John Yoder, p.83)

Faith is not belief in spite of evidence but a life in scorn of the consequences. (quoting Clarence Jordan, p.83)

… the cross proclaims that we need no longer die as a consequence of our sins, and yet we must die, or be willing to do so, because of the world’s sins. (p.83)

“The world” schools us in self-preservation, self-maximization, and self-realization; “the world” trains us to live and die, to kill and wage war for the “American way of life.” But imagine the radical implications of a community that refuses to bend the knee to such systemic training in self-preservation. (pp.121-22)

All extant Christian writings prior to the fourth century reject the practice of Christians killing in warfare. … They rejected killing in warfare, in short, because it violated the way and teaching of Christ. (p.134)

This is a great irony of American Christianity: exalting the nation that affords us “freedom of religion,” we set aside the way of Christ in order to preserve the religion we supposedly are free to practice. We kill our alleged enemies in order to “worship” the God who teaches us to love our enemies. The most important question about our pledge of allegiance is not whether we pledge allegiance to a flag under “one God,” but to what god we are pledging our allegiance. Perhaps it is, after all, not the God revealed in Jesus Christ we are worshiping, but the god of the nation-state, the god of power and might and wealth. (p.140)