Oden God Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. Human freedom is created by God with a capacity for responsiveness to God.

Thomas C. Oden

#4. To meditate on Scripture is to allow the truth of God's Word to move from head to heart. It is to so dwell upon a truth that it becomes part of our being.

Greg Oden

#5. 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

#6. Human personality is created with the restless yearning for communion with the unseen but present personal God (Augustine, Conf. 1.1).

Thomas C. Oden

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. The incarnation is God's own act of identification with the broken, the poor, with sinful humanity.

Thomas C. Oden

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. Rightly known, God illumines all reality, all human experience, all revelation, and all religion

Thomas C. Oden

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. The good news is that the seeds of God's good news are planted already in every dying culture.

Thomas C. Oden

#25. 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

#26. No human wisdom is more reliable than the actual history in which God is omnipresent.

Thomas C. Oden

#27. Human love is created with some capacity, however distorted, to love God and to love creatures through God.

Thomas C. Oden

#28. 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

#29. You cannot conclude that God, because Father, is therefore male.

Thomas C. Oden

#30. Human reasoning is created by God with a capacity for reaching toward God by thinking, choosing, and speaking.

Thomas C. Oden

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. Christianity does not limit revelation to Christ, but through Christ sees God's revelation as occurring elsewhere and finally, echoing everywhere.

Thomas C. Oden