“Ensnared by stunted imaginations and unfettered appetites, we still routinely confuse having a plethora of choices with being free.”
-Barry Harvey, Can These Bones Live?: A Catholic Baptist Engagement with Ecclesiology, Hermeneutics, and Social Theory, p. 17
“Theology means struggle. It may begin as Bonhoeffer said in silence, but when the silence is broken, a battle begins. This seems regrettable; in matters of great moment, the human heart yearns ceaselessly for secure truth, and it is easy for us to believe that unchallenged beliefs are self-evident truths. A little reflection, however, will show that this is not so; in fact we very often have believed without doubt or contradiction what turn out to be mere falsehoods. (It is small enough comfort to know that other people do the same.) Thus when we set out upon Christian theology or ethics we must be reconciled to the fact that here as elsewhere hard truth is not available without hard struggles.”
-James Wm. McClendon, Jr., Ethics: Systematic Theology, Volume 1 (2nd ed.), 17.
“Christian eschatology in the language of promise will then be an essential key to the unlocking of Christian truth. For the loss of eschatology – not merely as an appendix to dogmatics, but as the medium of theological thinking as such – has always been the condition that makes possible the adaptation of Christianity to its environment and, as a result of this, the self-surrender of faith.”
-Jurgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope, p. 41