Quotes about Doctrine

Conservatives have said that Jesus was bodily raised, while liberals have denied it, but neither group has seen the bodily resurrection as the launching of God's new creation within the present world order.

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

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

Anyone who supposes that, because a church has officially renounced some doctrine, nobody thereafter will hold to it, has little experience of real church life.

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

If anywhere in the whole New Testament teaches an explicit doctrine of "penal substitution," this is it—but it falls within the narrative not of a "works contract," not of an angry God determined to punish someone, not of "going to heaven," but of God's vocational covenant with Israel and through Israel, the vocation that focused on the Messiah himself and then opened out at last into a genuinely human existence:

True, the doctrine of purgatory was not so popular outside Roman circles in the nineteenth century. But "penal substitution," which had been emphasized partly in order to ward off that idea, then found a new home in the Western piety that focused not on God's kingdom coming on earth as in heaven, but on my sin, my heavenly (that is, nonworldly) salvation, and of course my Savior.

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.

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.

Like every alternative to Christianity, the mechanistic worldview was essentially a substitute religion, a mental idol.