Quotes About Theology

The cross stands at the heart of John's kingdom theology, which in this stunning passage is revealed as the heart of John's redemption theology, the vision of the love of God revealed in saving action in the death of his Son, the Lamb, the Messiah.

Theology, after all, was made for the sake of the church, not the church for theology. I

And the Christian who knows what he or she is about will constantly reflect that the most natural modes of God-talk are adoration, thanksgiving, confession, supplication and proclamation, not theorization.

only when we see Jesus's death in its proper connection to this entire narrative, can we begin to resolve the questions we want to ask about what the early Christians actually meant.

is simply a reminder of what the greatest systematic theologians have always known and recognized – that theology is a matter of loving God with our minds and that loving does not mean merely admiring or 'being intellectually interested in'.

But for him the incarnate Son is also Israel's Messiah.

Evil then consists not in being created but in the rebellious idolatry by which humans worship and honor elements of the natural world rather than the God who made them.

The 'popular Paul' has all too often been addressing sixteenth-century questions in a nineteenth-century tone of voice

Israel's hopes were not for the demise of the space-time universe, but for the earth to be full of God's glory. It

It is time, and long past time, to reread the gospels as what we can only call political theology—not because they are not after all about God and spirituality and new birth and holiness and all the rest, but precisely because they are.

Instead of "thinking God's thoughts after him," science was now studying the world as though God didn't exist.

For far too long now Christians have told the story of Jesus as if it hooked up not with the story of Israel, but simply with the story of human sin as in Genesis 3, skipping over the story of Israel

This is why too for every theologian who puzzles over abstract definitions of "atonement," there are thousands who will say, with Paul, "The son of God loved me and gave himself for me"—and who will then get on with the job of radiating that same love out into the world.

In Christian theology it is God who deals with evil, and he does this on the cross.

Even when theologians and preachers have seen this danger and have insisted that what was achieved on the cross was the direct result of the Father's love, when the goal is Platonized ("going to heaven") and the human role is moralized ("good and bad behavior"), the structure of the implicit story will still run in the wrong direction.

This might be, after all, a way of smuggling in 'works' by the back door, into Paul's soteriology (something we Paulinists are trained to watch out for, like sniffer dogs at an airport ready to detect the slightest whiff of hard drugs).

The gospels offer us not so much a different kind of human, but a different kind of God: a God who, having made humans in his own image, will most naturally express himself in and as that image-bearing creature;

Here again the creeds leave an ominous gap. They don't mention Israel at all.

Many devout Christians accepted that unbiblical cosmology, opting for a detached spirituality (a heavenly-mindedness with a questionable earthly use) and an escapist eschatology (leaving the world and going to heaven).

Other ideas, particularly the popular image of "God punishing Jesus," envisaged as a separate, noncovenantal abstract transaction, have come in to take the place of that all-important theme. Many distortions have resulted not only through that teaching but also, ironically, through teachings that, in reaction against the distorted view, have themselves proposed equally unsatisfactory alternatives.

the church has unhesitatingly privileged the creed and let the canon fend for itself—

God's creative love, precisely by being love, creates new space for there to be things that are genuinely other than God.

The alternative teaching of the Gnostics had proposed that one should replace the very Jewish message of God's kingdom on earth as in heaven by a very non-Jewish message about a "kingdom" that turned out to be a new form of self-help spirituality. The

I suspect, though, that part at least of the anti-Sanders backlash has come from those who are engaged, in their institutions, in the kind of 'theology versus religious studies' sniping which is part of the long-term fallout from the Enlightenment's split worldview.