Christ the Key Quotes

“Grace knocks us flat, preventing any form of self-congratulation. All the good we achieve is to be attributed to God rather than to ourselves. What makes our lives good is not anything we are ourselves but the presence within us of what we are not, a divine presence never ours by right because never ours by nature. All the glory for the good we exhibit in our lives should therefore be reserved for God.”
― Kathryn Tanner, Christ the Key

“In virtue of our sin, we are, in short, like perfectly well-formed creatures living in an environment that is not good for us. The oxygen-rich environment, in which we were made to live, has now been transformed by our sin into a high altitude one that asphyxiates and enervates us.”
― T. Tanner, Christ the Key

“Sin has no power to break God's faithfulness to God's own original intentions for us; we are still in God's eyes at least the creatures God created us to be.”
― Kathryn Tanner, Christ the Key

“We are good not in virtue of what we are but in virtue of what we are not, like darkness lit up by a light that enters into it from without. We are not light in ourselves but in virtue of having within us what is light in itself.”
― Kathryn Tanner, Christ the Key

“Grace knocks us flat, preventing any form of self-congratulation.”
― T. Tanner, Christ the Key

“Earthenware or pure gold, what goes into them for certain purposes establishes what they are; whatever their fundamental constitution as vessels, when full of shit (for example) they can only be shit pots.108”
― Tanner, Christ the Key

“Through the power of the Spirit humans are to be joined to the second person of the trinity in Christ, and on virtue of that attachment human lives are to be given a shape that images the first person of the trinity in something like the way the second person of the trinity images it.”
― Kathryn Tanner, Christ the Key

“...if one thinks about the relationship between nature and grace in terms of natural human desires in an Aristotelian sense and what would fulfill them, human states become the focus for discussion in ways that hamstring efforts to show the gratuity of grace.”
― Kathryn Tanner, Christ the Key

“More important than any difference between faith and love is the difference between what we do and what God does. Focusing controversy on the relative merits of different sorts of human acts, such as faith and love...is therefore likely to prove unproductive, by distracting attention from the real matter for concern.”
― Kathryn Tanner, Christ the Key

“From prideful wisdom one falls into simple stupidity”
― Kathryn Tanner, Christ the Key