In college I lost the capacity for heartfelt, extemporized prayer. I would have considered it gauche to pray spontaneously aloud with other college sophomores. I had also left behind my love the churc...
I went into the ministry to use the church to elicit political change according to a soft Marxist vision of wealth distribution and proletarian empowerment. Edrita [his wife] could sense that I was on...
God is the uncreated source and end of all things; one; incomparably alive; insurmountable in presence, knowledge, and power; personal, eternal spirit, who in holy love freely creates, sustains, and g...
I now understand that I would never have been able to become a plausible critic of the absurdities of modern consciousness until I myself had experienced them. I did not become an orthodox believer or...
Human freedom is created by God with a capacity for responsiveness to God.
After some pondering, I made a decision that would affect all of my future work and writing in more ways than I could ever have anticipated. It was a decision between seminary and college teaching. Mo...
The faithful are called through grace to be partakers of God’s holiness (Heb. 12), restored to their primordial capacity to reflect, like a mirror, the radical holiness and purity of God, even though...
I was a Marxist Utopian dreamer for a decade before I learned the vulnerabilities of Marxist theories. As I looked back it was full of deeply flawed arguments, but they were central to my thoughts in...
Gregory of Nazianzus was amused by any who would insistently hold God to be a male which he regarded as a misplaced analogy.
Yet to decide that this One exists is not quite like deciding that anything else exists. For this decision assumes a wider implication that the decider shall order his or her life around the existence...
God’s way of being alive is distinguishable from other forms of life. Plants, animals, and humans enjoy life at different scales of consciousness, movement, and self-determination. But in all plants,...
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).
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
Christ is the unparalleled and unrepeatable Revealer through whom other revelations are best understood
Human personality is created with the restless yearning for communion with the unseen but present personal God (Augustine, Conf. 1.1).
Human love is created with some capacity, however distorted, to love God and to love creatures through God.
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 logi...
Christianity does not limit revelation to Christ, but through Christ sees God’s revelation as occurring elsewhere and finally, echoing everywhere.
Revelation is for human salvation, the mending of human brokenness (Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word 3).
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