Top Ten Theology Quotes

The Fall

“To us things are normal when they are going well.  Health, affluence, peace—these are normal, so convinced we are of our own righteousness, of what is our due.  But Scripture teaches the very opposite. Unfortunately, what is normal now that man is separated from God is war and murder, famine and pollution, accident and disruption.  When there is a momentary break in the course of these disasters, when abundance is known, when peace timidly establishes itself, when justice reigns for a span, then it is fitting, unless we are men of too little faith, that we should marvel and give thanks for so great a miracle, realizing that no less than the love and faithfulness of the Lord has been needed in order that there might be this privileged instant.  We should tremble with joy as before the new and fragile life of a little child. We should press on with all our force along the way that God has opened up for us. We should see in this “normal” state of life the same thing as the declaration of Jesus Christ, the blind seeing again, the deaf hearing, lepers cleansed. A return to what we regard as normal! But we have no understanding of anything if we think this is normal, that we have achieved it ourselves, that we deserve it.  From this very moment we are engaged in destroying this peace and justice and affluence. From this very moment everything is compromised, and our only option, when things go well, is to see therein the loving grace of the Lord, the sign which is given us and which also claims us, the sign of grace.” – Jacques Ellul^[1]The Politics of God and the Politics of Man, translated and edited by Geoffrey W. Bromily. (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1972), page 178.

The Incarnation

“God loves human beings.  God loves the world. Not an ideal human, but human beings as they are; not an ideal world, but the real world.  What we find repulsive in their opposition to God, what we shrink back from with pain and hostility, namely, real human beings, the real world, this is for God the ground of unfathomable love.  God establishes a most intimate unity with this. God becomes human, a real human being.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer^[2]Ethics, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol. 6. Translated by Reinhard Krauss, Charles C. West, and Douglas W. Stott. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2005), page 84.

The Cross

“He has sworn fidelity to His threatened creature.  In creating it He has covenanted and identified Himself with it.  He Himself has assumed the burden and trouble of confrontation with nothingness.  He would rather be unblessed with His creature than be the blessed God of an unblessed creature.  He would rather let Himself be injured and humiliated in making the assault and repulse of nothingness His own concern than leave His creature alone in this affliction.  He deploys all His majesty in the work of His deepest condescension. He intervenes in the struggle between nothingness and the creature as if He were not God but Himself a weak and threatened and vulnerable creature.  “As if” – but is that all? No, for in the decisive action in the history of His covenant with the creature, in Jesus Christ, He actually becomes a creature, and thus makes the cause of the creature His own in the most concrete reality and not just in appearance, really taking its place.  This is how God Himself comes on the scene.” – Karl Barth^[3]Church Dogmatics.III.50.4. (New York: T&T Clark, 2009), Page 358.

The Resurrection

“The resurrection, in the full Jewish and early Christian sense, is the ultimate affirmation that creation matters, that embodied human beings matter.  That is why the resurrection has always had an inescapable political meaning; that is why the Sadducees in the first century and the Enlightenment, in our day, have opposed it so strongly.  No tyrant is threatened by Jesus going to heaven, leaving his body in a tomb. No governments face the authentic Christian challenge when the church’s social preaching tries to base itself on Jesus’ teaching, detached from the central and energizing fact of his resurrection (or when, for that matter, the resurrection is affirmed simply as an example of a supernatural “happy ending” which guarantees post-mortem bliss). . . The resurrection constitutes Jesus as the world’s true sovereign, the ‘son of God’ who claims absolute allegiance from everyone and everything within creation.  He is the start of the creator’s new world: its pilot project, indeed its pilot.” – N.T. Wright^[4]The Resurrection of the Son of God. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003), Pages 730-31.

Salvation

“God raised Jesus on the third day, forever changing the way things are.  No longer is it necessary to live as if there is no alternative to the powers that feed on our fears, our lusts, our hopelessness.  There is an alternative kingdom to that rule of darkness—it is called forgiveness. To be forgiven is not to be told that no matter what we may have done or did not do, it is all right with God.  No, to be forgiven is to be made part of a community, a history that would not, could not exist if Jesus were not God’s Christ, raised from the dead. To be forgiven means that we are now, through our baptism, given names, names that make it possible for Jesus to call us to recognition.” – Stanley Hauerwas^[5]Sanctify them in the Truth: Holiness Exemplified (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016), Pages 275-76.

Faith and Conversion

“Being a Christian does not mean being religious in a certain way, making oneself into something or other (a sinner, penitent, or saint) according to some method or other.  Instead it means being human, not a certain type of human being, but the human being Christ creates in us. It is not a religious act that makes someone a Christian, but rather sharing in God’s suffering in the worldly life.  That is [repentance], not thinking first of one’s own needs, questions, sins, and fears, but allowing oneself to be pulled into walking the path that Jesus walks,into the messianic event, in which Isa. 53 is now being fulfilled.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer^[6]Letters and Paper from Prison (Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 8. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010), Page 480.

The Lord’s Supper

“Breaking the bread and sharing the cup in Jesus’s name declares his victory to the principalities and powers.  It states the new, authorized Fact about the world.  It confronts the shadowy forces that usurp control over God’s good creation and over human lives with the news of their defeat.  It shames the dark powers that stand in the wings, waiting for people to give them even a small bit of worship so that they can use that power, sucking it out of the humans who ought to have been exercising it themselves, to enslave people and render them powerless to resist the temptations that the powers have in their repertoire.  The bread-breaking meal, the Jesus feast, announces to all the forces of evil like a public decree read out by a herald in the market place that Jesus is Lord, that he has faced the powers of sin and death and beaten them, and that he has been raised again to launch the new world in which death itself will have no authority.” – N.T. Wright^[7]The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus’s Crucifixion. (San Francisco: HarperONe, 2016), Page 380.

The Church and Evangelism

“From a Christian point of view, the world needs the church, not to help the world run more smoothly or to make the world a better and safer place for Christians to live.  Rather, the world needs the church because, without the church, the world does not know who it is. The only way for the world to know it is being redeemed is for the church to point to the Redeemer by being a redeemed people.  The only way for the world to know that it needs redeeming, that it is broken and fallen, is for the church to enable the world to strike hard against something which is an alternative to what the world offers.” – Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon^[8]Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2014), Page 94.

Power

“It isn’t the case that power as we know it in the “real” world is the “norm” and the Christian subversion of it is a kind of bizarre twist that might just work even though we don’t see how.  The gospel of Jesus summons us to believe that the power of self-giving love unveiled on the cross is the real thing, the power that made the world in the first place and is now in the business of remaking it; and that the other forms of “power,” the corrupt and self-serving ways in which the world is so often run, from global empires and multimillion businesses down to classrooms, families, and gangs, are the distortion.” – N.T. Wright^[9]The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus’s Crucifixion. (San Francisco: HarperONe, 2016), Page 399.

Prayer and Ethics

“Constantly pray for others; for there is still hope that they may repent so as to attain to God.  And so, allow them to learn from you, at least by your deeds. In response to their anger, show meekness; to their boasting, be humble; to their blasphemies, offer up prayers; to their wandering in error, be firmly rooted in faith; to their savage behavior, act civilized.  Do not be eager to imitate their example. Through gentleness we should be their brothers. And we should be seen to be eager to imitate the Lord. Who was mistreated more than he? Or defrauded? Or rejected? Do this, so that no weed planted by the Devil may be found in you and you may abide in Jesus Christ, both in the flesh and in the spirit, with all holiness and self-control.” – St. Ignatius of Antioch^[10]“To the Ephesians” 10 (Loeb Classical Library 24: The Apostolic Fathers I. Edited and Translated by Bart D. Ehrman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2003), Pages 229-30.