Classic Christianity Quotes

“Experiential sanctification is an ongoing process of daily rededication, reconsecration, mortification, and vivification of the whole person to God. It calls for believers to live out their baptism in time so as to allow new challenges and circumstances to draw them further on toward the fuller reception of grace and the deepening of purity of heart”
― Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology

“Contemporary cultures present no tougher challenges to Christianity than did the fall of Rome, the collapse of the medieval synthesis, the breakup of the unity of Christendom in the sixteenth century, or the French Enlightenment. Christian teaching today must be pursued amid a similar collapse of modern assumptions.”
― Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology

“Christian faith has gained confidence that God will not reveal himself in a way contrary to the way he has revealed himself in Jesus Christ”
― Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology

“In prayer humans speak and God listens. In revelation God speaks to human hearers. In this way scripture and prayer feed the dialogue between humanity and God.”
― Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology

“BECAUSE OF PIETY’S PENCHANT for taking itself too seriously, theology does well to nurture a modest, unguarded sense of comedy. Some droll sensibility is required to keep in due proportion the pompous pretensions of the study of divinity. I invite the kind of laughter that wells up not from cynicism about reflection on God but from the ironic contradictions accompanying such reflection. Theology is intrinsically funny. This comes from glimpsing the incongruity of humans thinking about God. I have often laughed at myself as these sentences went through their tortuous stages of formation. I invite you to look for the comic dimension of divinity that stalks every page.”
― Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology

“God’s holiness without God’s love would be unbearable. God’s love without God’s holiness would be unjust. God’s wisdom found a way to bring them congruently together. It involved a cross”
― Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology

“the unmistakable miracle: there is a consensus.”
― Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology

“Neither male nor female language adequately grasps the fullness of the divine reality (Gregory Nazianzus, Orat. 27; John of Damascus, OF 1.4–8).”
― Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology

“The study of God requires intellectual effort, historical imagination, empathic energy, and participation in a vital community of prayer (Augustine, Answer to Skeptics).”
― Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology

“Faith does not cease being active as it undertakes the process of rigorous thinking. One need not disavow the gifts of intellect in giving thought to their Giver”
― Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology

“From beginning to end, the biblical story is the story of the creation of humanity, the fall of humanity, and the redemption of humanity.”
― Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology

“If ten believers got together and wrote a definition of God and then approved it by a seven-to-three vote, this would not make it normative for Christian teaching. It becomes true for Christian teaching not by changing styles of popular consensus but by resonance with the consensus of apostolic teaching and ancient ecumenical clarification confirmed by all subsequent centuries of faithful consent (Irenaeus, Ag. Her. 3.1–4; Vincent of Lérins, Comm. 2).”
― Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology

“early modern Christianity is often portrayed as an essentially European religion. This is regrettable because classic Christianity has its pre-European roots in cultures that are far distant from Europe and that preceded the development of early modern European identity, and some of its some of its greatest minds have been African.”
― Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology

“God permits sin to come into human life, but only on behalf of a greater good—namely, freedom—and God overrules sin wherever it appears to threaten God’s greater purpose”
― Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology

“The great variety of moral qualities attributed to God by Scripture revolves particularly around two—holiness and love. These may be said in summary form to constitute the moral character of God”
― Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology

“God foreknows the use of free will, yet this foreknowledge does not determine events. Rather, what God foreknows is determined by what happens, part of which is affected by free will.”
― Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology

“There is no Christian theology without the Bible. There is no Bible without an inspirited community to write, remember, and translate it, to guard it and pass it on, study it, live by it, and invite others to live by it.”
― Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology

“God has left a trail of language behind a stormy path of historical activities. That language is primarily the evidence with which theology has to deal—first with Scripture, then with a long history of interpretation of Scripture called church history and tradition, and finally with the special language that emerges out of each one’s own personal experience of meeting the living God”
― Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology

“There reigns in the broken human heart a feeling of discord, a lack of congruence between what is and what ought to be (Augustine, Conf. 5).”
― Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology

“Nor can you conclude that “Deity is feminine from the gender of the word, and the Spirit neuter,” since the designation “has nothing to do with generation.”
― Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology

“You cannot conclude that God, because Father, is therefore male.”
― Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology

“Gregory of Nazianzus was amused by any who would insistently hold “God to be a male” which he regarded as a misplaced analogy.”
― Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology

“In the Godhead all historical inequalities are finally transcended.”
― Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology

“By this paradox, the usual logic of equality is turned upside down.”
― Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology

“God the Son, by being truly human without ceasing to be truly God, is both equal to the Father and less than the Father—equal by nature and less by volition to service. By this paradox, the usual logic of equality is turned upside down.”
― Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology

“The incarnation is God’s own act of identification with the broken, the poor, with sinful humanity.”
― Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology

“Here is the essential movement. The reality of the church emerges out of the saving action of God in Christ through the Spirit; the church is the providential means and sphere through which persons are enabled to participate in eternal life. The birth of the church of Jesus Christ is engendered by the regenerating power of the Spirit. The nurture of the church occurs by grace through Word and Sacraments. The present church shares in the communion of saints in time and eternity. In this way, the flowing sequence of classic Christian teaching draws all post-Ascension topics of theology into coherent order (John of Damascus, OF 3.1, 6, 19).”
― Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology

“Faith’s premises are felt to be so valuable that they deserve the best intellectual reflection possible to confirm argumentatively what faith already knows inwardly”
― Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology

“A critical, probing faith is a necessary and useful stage toward an assured and confirmed faith (Job 3:1–26; Clement of Alex., Stromata 8.9; Luther, Letters of Spiritual Counsel).”
― Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology

“The worshiping community confesses and intercedes on the basis of, not the theory of God’s existence, but the experience of a multigenerational community of witnesses.”
― Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology