Quotes about Theology

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.

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

The inescapable fact that we are personal beings constitutes evidence that our origin is a personal Being.