“The messianic future proper to Christian faith does not just confirm and reinforce our preconceived bourgeois future. It does not prolong it, add anything to it, elevate it, or transfigure it. It disrupts it. ‘The first shall be last, and the last shall be first.’ The meaning of love cuts across the meaning of having. ‘Those who possess their life will lose it, and those who despise it will win it.’ This form of disruption, which breaks in from above to shatter the self-complacency of our present time, has a more familiar biblical name: ‘conversion,’ change of heart, metanoia. The direction of this turning, the path it takes, is also marked out in advance for Christians. Its name is discipleship.”
–Johann Baptist Metz, The Emergent Church (New York: Crossroad, 1986), 2.
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