Quotes about Theology

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

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.

Romans 7:4 then summarizes and reemphasizes the point at the start of the next stage of the argument. When the Messiah died, "you"—anyone who belongs to the Messiah, anyone who is a member of his "body"—died at the same time.

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.

For John, the cross reveals God's glory; for Paul, God's "righteousness"; for both, God's love.

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;

An over-authoritarian church, paying no attention to experience, solves the problem by paving the garden with concrete. An over-experiential church solves the (real or imagined) problem of concrete (rigid and "judgmental" forms of faith) by letting anything and everything grow unchecked, sometimes labeling concrete as "law" and so celebrating any and every weed as "grace.

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