All Quotes

... many younger evangelicals are reacting against the propositionalism and intellectualism of their forebears.13 They have found some of the theological handbooks from which they learned their theology to be dry and lifeless. Theology, younger evangelicals rightly sense, must be about more than just providing true propositional statements about God and our relationship with him. More importantly, many of today's evangelicals sense that these theological handbooks wrongly give the impression that we can fully and adequately grasp the truth to which our theological statements refer. Therefore, there is a growing sense that we need a healthy dose of mystery to counter sterile intellectualism. And to the degree that younger evangelicals sense the hubris of a good deal of modern theologizing, I can only echo their sentiments. But, of course, a return to mystery may take on different forms. Some of our younger evangelicals, it seems to me, run the danger of confusing postmodern skepticism with mystery. As we attempt to recover mystery in theology, it is critical that we recognize that the premodern notion of mystery owed nothing to skepticism or relativism. It had everything to do with acknowledging that the mystery of God's being had suffused the created world. Theology's genuine humility has less to do with skepticism than it does with mysticism.

— Hans Boersma (Book: Heavenly Participation: The weaving of a sacramental tapestry.)

Contemplation and action are not separate strategies, nor is the latter a corrective to the former. They are part of a single complex process: accurate perception leading to metanoia*, and that in turn leading to more reflective behaviour. *On metanoia. True contemplation can be achieved only by those who accept metanoia, a profound change of mind – what English speakers call (somewhat inadequately) “repentance” – “as a path and way of life”.

— Ellen F. Davis (Book: Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture : An Agrarian Reading of the Bible)

Feminist thinking, however, has tended to widen the arc, so that we are not looking for linear patterns of causality between two mutually exclusive poles of religious teaching and social development. Instead we find ourselves gazing at a firmament of constellations of interrelated causality between ideational realities and social conditions, between articulated language and unarticulated assumptions, between the subjugation of women and the exploitation of nature, between patriarchy and other structures of power. The perennial problem of the relation between ideas and their expression, on the one hand, and concrete social structures and power relationships, on the other hand, remains unresolved. But it is held within this broader conceptual network of mutual and interacting causality.

— Joseph E Bush (Journal article: New Cosmology and Old Questions: Reflections on Fifty Years of Thinking about Christianity and Ecology)

Gregory of Nyssa: "I also ask: Who has known his own mind? Those who think themselves capable of grasping the nature of God would do well to consider whether they have looked into themselves .... " For Gregory, not only is the nature of God himself a mystery to us, but as human beings created in God's image, we also remain a mystery to ourselves. My concern with much modern theology is precisely that it has lost a great deal of this sense of mystery. Modern theology's problem is its rational confidence - and thus, ultimately, its pride.

— Hans Boersma (Book: Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry)

Real learning always involves risk, it’s like love. It’s not love if there is no risk involved.

— Jason Goroncy (: Lecture 1 – Beginning Theological Studies Unit 2018)

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— Author Name (Book: Source Title)

It is a wondrous and beneficial thing that the Holy Spirit organised the Holy Scriptures so as to satisfy hunger by means of its plainer passages, and remove boredom by means of its obscurer ones … If you cannot yet understand [a passage of Scripture], you should leave the matter for the consideration of those who can; and since Scripture does not abandon you in your infirmity, but with a mother’s love accompanies your slower steps, you will make progress. Holy Scripture, indeed, speaks in such a way as to mock the proud readers with its heights, terrify the attentive with its depths, feed great souls with its truth and nourish little ones with sweetness

— St Augustine (: )

To preserve our places and to be at home in them, it is necessary to fill them with imagination, To imagine as well as see what is in them. Not to fill them with the junk of fantasy and unconsciousness, for that is no more than the industrial economy would do, but to see them first clearly with the eyes, and then to see them with the imagination in their sanctity, as belonging to the creation.

— Wendell Berry (: Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture : An Agrarian Reading of the Bible)

[Justification] has regularly been made to do duty for the entire picture of God’s reconciling action towards the human race, covering everything from God’s free love and grace, through the sending of the son to die and rise again for sinners, through the preaching of the gospel, the work of the spirit, the arousal of faith in human hearts and minds, the development of Christian character and conduct, the assurance of ultimate salvation, and the safe passage through final judgment to that destination.

— N.T. Wright (Book: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision)