Quotes About Theology

if creation was a work of love, it must have involved the creation of something other than God. That same love then allows creation to be itself, sustaining it in providence and wisdom but not overpowering it. Logic cannot comprehend love; so much the worse for logic.

What has been lost is the paganized vision of an angry God looming over the world and bent upon blood.

The Messiah died for our sins in accordance with the Bible" and its own great narrative. We are not at liberty to replace this with narratives of our own.

This is where the Platonizing of our eschatology has led not only to bad atonement-theology but to the twin dangers of rationalism (imagining that being Christian is a matter of figuring out and then believing a true set of ideas) and romanticism (supposing that being a Christian is about people [122] having their hearts strangely warmed).

Who is the "me" here? The "I" and "me" of Romans 7 is a literary device through which Paul is telling the life story of Israel under the Torah.

Theories of atonement do not need to be superimposed on an abstract narrative about Jesus, as has so often been attempted. They grow out of the real-life Jesus stories we already have. It is astonishing that the four gospels have been so underused in "atonement theology.

so far as I can tell, most people simply don't know what orthodox Christian belief is.

Suppose a cannibal eats a Christian, and suppose the cannibal is then himself converted. The Christian's body has become part of the cannibal's body; who will have which bits at the resurrection?

From Plato to Hegel and beyond, some of the greatest philosophers have declared that what you think about death, and life beyond it, is the key to thinking seriously about everything else – and, indeed, that it provides one of the main reasons for thinking seriously about anything at all. This is something a Christian theologian should heartily endorse. So, without further delay, we plunge into

Luther's strong point was what Jesus said at the Last Supper: 'This is my body'. He wrote the Latin in beer-froth on the table: Hoc est corpus meus.

The much-discussed contemporary phenomenon of cultural and theological relativism is itself in this sense simply the dark side of positivism.

I am, of course, aware that for over two hundred years scholars have laboured to keep history and theology, or history and faith, at arm's length from one another. There is a good intention behind this move: each of these disciplines has its own proper shape and logic, and cannot simply be turned into a branch of the other.

The passage has regularly been read as the vital move in the wrong story— the story, once again, of a "works contract" in which, to put it crudely, humans sin, God punishes Jesus, and humans are let off. This omits elements that were vital for Paul

Sanders argued, basically, that the normal Christian, and especially Protestant, readings of Paul were seriously flawed, because they attributed to first-century Judaism theological views which belonged rather to medieval Catholicism. Once we described Judaism accurately, Sanders argued, we were forced to rethink Paul's critique of it, and his whole positive theology in its turn.

Paul is the classic example of the early Christian who has woven resurrection so thoroughly into his thinking and practice that if you take it away the whole thing unravels in your hands.

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

But in scripture itself God's purpose is not just to save human beings, but to renew the whole world. This is the unfinished story in which readers of scripture are invited to become actors in their own right. "The authority of scripture" is thus a sub-branch of several other theological topics: the mission of the church, the work of the Spirit

The aim, as in all theological and biblical exploration, is not to replace love with knowledge. Rather, it is to keep love focused upon its true object.

As Schaeffer once wrote, there is nothing uglier than theological orthodoxy without understanding or compassion.

The Rosetta Stone of Christian social thought is the Trinity.

Only a God of love is fully personal. Thus the Trinity is crucial for maintaining a fully personal concept of God. As theologian Robert Letham writes, "Only a God who is triune can be personal.… A solitary monad cannot love and, since it cannot love, neither can it be a person." Therefore it "has no way to explain or even to maintain human personhood.

Liberation theology often ends up as little more than theological frosting on a Marxist cake.

And the reason is that they thought matter was eternal.

We've limited Christianity to salvation and sanctification," he said. But "Christianity is the truth about everything.