Top 59 Thomas C. Oden Quotes
#1. 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
#2. The moment of confession is not merely when one hears another pronounce the words: God forgives you, or 'in God's name I absolve you.' Rather it is that point at which the sinner unfeignedly experiences himself as truly judged and pardoned by God.
Thomas C. Oden
#3. Modern ecumenism rightly began in mission, but then lapsed into a merger mentality, then defensive bureaucracy, and finally into unrepresentative forms of extreme politicization.
Thomas C. Oden
#4. Sins that have been completely absolved on one occasion sometimes on other occasions cannot be completely forgotten or set aside. They may continue to have a ripple effect. But it is comforting to realize that they are no longer remembered by God, even if traces remain in human memory.
Thomas C. Oden
#5. The Christ event did not in that sense CHANGE the will of God, but rather it more clearly expressed God's eternal will toward the whole of history.
Thomas C. Oden
#6. 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
#7. Soon I reveled in the very premises I had set aside and rationalized away: the preexistent Logos, the triune mystery, the radical depth of sin passing through the generations, the risen Lord and the grace of baptism.
Thomas C. Oden
#8. The confessor can nullify the exquisitely seasonable moment of confession by talking instead of listening. When he sees pedagogy and advice as more important than simple listening, he diverts the stream of confession.
Thomas C. Oden
#9. Questions about God's existence, self disclosure, saving action and almighty power reminded me of my inadequacies. For me the theo in theology had become little more than a question mark. I could confidently discuss philosophy, psychology and social change, but God made me uneasy.
Thomas C. Oden
#10. The good news is that the seeds of God's good news are planted already in every dying culture.
Thomas C. Oden
#11. God's holiness is not an unloving holiness, and God's love is not an unholy love. It is only by keeping these two primary moral qualities of the divine being closely related that we may rightly behold the character of God. (p. 98)
Thomas C. Oden
#12. Sins of ignorance or infirmity are to be admonished in a different way than intentional sins of malice of intention. The assurance of forgiveness is not to be offered carelessly by those whose conscience is seared, but to penitents who come contritely to the table of the Lord.
Thomas C. Oden
#13. No human wisdom is more reliable than the actual history in which God is omnipresent.
Thomas C. Oden
#14. Human love is created with some capacity, however distorted, to love God and to love creatures through God.
Thomas C. Oden
#15. Scriptures are not to be pitted against the Spirit. Scripture can be understood only through the same Spirit whereby it is given.31 The Scriptures, inspired by the Spirit, form the written rule by which the Spirit thereafter leads us into all truth.32
Thomas C. Oden
#16. 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 their mirroring is always imprecise (Irenaeus, Ag. Her. 5.16).
Thomas C. Oden
#17. You cannot conclude that God, because Father, is therefore male.
Thomas C. Oden
#18. You will remain theologically uneducated until you study carefully Athanasius, Augustine and Aquinas.
Thomas C. Oden
#19. Revelation is for human salvation, the mending of human brokenness (Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word 3).
Thomas C. Oden
#20. Human reasoning is created by God with a capacity for reaching toward God by thinking, choosing, and speaking.
Thomas C. Oden
#21. Humanity is God's constant preoccupation throughout the Bible. The Christian study of God cannot neglect God's own prevailing interest - the redemption of humanity. No Christian theology can speak only of God and never of human beings.
Thomas C. Oden
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. All of that happened while I was reading, just reading. I was being guided by the Spirit toward an integral sense of Scripture based on the consensus of the early Christian interpreters of sacred Scripture.
Thomas C. Oden
#25. 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
#26. The most urgent and demanding question for Christian believers is not whether "a supreme being of some kind" exists, but rather whether this incomparably good and powerful and compassionate source and end of all things truly is as revealed in Scripture
Thomas C. Oden
#27. Faith itself is an act of human willing enabled and disciplined by grace.
Thomas C. Oden
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. Christianity does not limit revelation to Christ, but through Christ sees God's revelation as occurring elsewhere and finally, echoing everywhere.
Thomas C. Oden
#31. Just as God stepped out of his nature to become a partaker of our humanity, so we are called to step out of our nature to become partakers of his divinity (Hilary of Arles, Intro. Comm. on 2 Pet. 1.4).
Thomas C. Oden
#32. One trains the eye of confession most closely on what is hurting. If sin is present it will be aching. Confession begins where the raw anguish of conscience is rubbing against the primordial awareness of God's holiness.
Thomas C. Oden
#33. Until the end of the 1960's I do not recall ever seriously exchanging ideas with an articulate conservative. They were there, but not on my scope. I systematically avoided any contact with those who would have challenged my ideology.
Thomas C. Oden
#34. Human freedom is created by God with a capacity for responsiveness to God.
Thomas C. Oden
#35. 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 governs all things.
Thomas C. Oden
#36. Human personality is created with the restless yearning for communion with the unseen but present personal God (Augustine, Conf. 1.1).
Thomas C. Oden
#37. 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
#38. Christ is the unparalleled and unrepeatable Revealer through whom other revelations are best understood
Thomas C. Oden
#39. The church that weds itself to modernity is already a widow within postmodernity.
Thomas C. Oden
#40. 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
#41. While the memory of guilt is far from pleasant (like 'wormwood and gall'), it has the curative intent of restoring us into an awareness of the constancy of God's love, new every morning. God's mercy is not spent even with our worst misdeeds.
Thomas C. Oden
#42. A delicate balance is required: keep the penitent tautly close to the point of recognizing sin, and then allow the relief of that pressure to flow through forgiveness. Confession increases this tautness, only to clear the path for release.
Thomas C. Oden
#43. The early Christian historical memory was formed on three land masses -Asia, Africa and Europe. In this respect it does not differ
from textually recorded human history, which formed in the conjunction between these three great spaces. Only three, not seven.
Thomas C. Oden
#44. Christ is the singular embodiment of truth, infinitely plural in meaning. Christ is the sum and hidden interior meaning of all other genuine revelations of God
Thomas C. Oden
#45. 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
#46. The deeper irony is that the evidence of sin that are always found in and around the body of Christ may become indirect intimations of its holiness. It could not be a holy church if it had clean hands, as if severed from its task of saving sinners and healing human hurt.
Thomas C. Oden
#48. 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
#49. The theater in which God has chosen to meet rational creatures quietly is the inward realm of conscience, moral reasoning, prayer, and study, especially study of the revealed Word.
Thomas C. Oden
#50. 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
#51. The incarnation is God's own act of identification with the broken, the poor, with sinful humanity.
Thomas C. Oden
#52. Rightly understood, it is an all-embracing, intrusive question, and for this reason many prefer to dodge it or to proceed as if it were an abstract, theoretical question.
Thomas C. Oden
#53. 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
#54. Eternal God, the refuge of all your children, in our weakness you are our strength, in our darkness our light, in our sorrow our comfort and peace. May we always live in your presence, and serve you in our daily lives; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Boniface
FURTHER
Thomas C. Oden
#55. In the Godhead all historical inequalities are finally transcended.
Thomas C. Oden
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. Rightly known, God illumines all reality, all human experience, all revelation, and all religion
Thomas C. Oden
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