The Cross is mirabile commercium—a wondrous exchange. Christ takes what is ours, and gives us what is his. Pope St. Leo the Great and St. Ambrose contemplated this theological theme at length; Luther and Calvin too, in the later Latin rendering, mirifica commutatio. At the table.

Pope John Paul II opens his 1998 encyclical Fides et Ratio with the much-quoted line: “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.” We find the same theme in Anselm, Aquinas, and Newman. It is a continual tension we must.

The Old Testament God is the New Testament Christ. Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?”.— John 14:9, NRSV-CE. “…the fullness of the Father’s.

“The Psalms contain in themselves all the Old and New Testaments, the whole Mystery of Christ. In singing the Psalms each day, the Church is therefore singing the wedding hymn of her union with God in Christ.”.—Thomas Merton, Praying the Psalms.

Sin made theology an impossibility. Without Jesus Christ, there is no theology—only myth. “So perverted, and forgetting that it was made in the image of the good God, the soul no longer perceived through its own power God the Word, in whose form it had been created, but turning.

“We have a cross, and then we have a crucifix, as far as Christian imagery goes. They both have their place. But a cross is an abstract symbol. A crucifix is telling a story. You look at a crucifix and you go: ‘Something’s going on here.’”.—@BrianZahnd, The Wood Between the.

“Only when grace is recognised to be incomprehensible is it grace.”.—Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans.

“We cannot cleanse ourselves; God must work in us with power. That is why the Holy Spirit is fire. We must go back into the oven when God chooses to make us new.”.—John Calvin, In the Power of the Spirit. Get in the oven 🔥.

Theology becomes mythology when we assume a chorismos—a vast separation—between God and the world within our epistemology, that is, our theory of knowledge, the preconceptions that shape how we come to know. Then it follows that our thinking of God becomes epinoetic: speculative,.

If we are scandalised by the sins of men, it is made plain we are not yet scandalised by the grace of God.

The Eucharist is Emmanuel.

Creation—logoi—speaks of God only because Jesus Christ is its Logos. “…the one Logos is many logoi and the many are One.”.—St. Maximos the Confessor, Ambiguum 7.20.

“By yielding to our enraged will, Jesus the Mediator of Creation became both the great exodus—the Lamb lifting away the crushing weight of our catastrophic idolatry—and heaven’s gate, the true Temple where the life of the Triune God takes up and holds the fallen human race and.

“If the cosmos noētos (intelligible, immaterial world) and the cosmos aisthētos (perceptible, material world) are disjoined from one another, then theology in the strict and proper sense is impossible, and there can be only mythology.”.—T. F. Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation.

Every hymn, every song of praise, carries within it a theology. A hymn is, in a real sense, a creed sung. Such work calls for the same care, the same rigour, that we would bring to any theological writing.

“The definitive response of God to humanity’s accumulating fall is the sinless ‘fall’ of God himself, through the incarnation and human death of the Word.”.—Khaled Anatolios, Athanasius.

“The Jesus Prayer gives you so much sweetness, so much joy. It’s short, but it’s got so much power—so much that you say: ‘Even if I go to hell, I’m not afraid; I’ll just say the Prayer there as well.’”.—St. Ephraim of Katounakia.

“The psalms are theology. That means that they place us in direct contact with God, through the assent of faith to His Revelation. It is because of this theological and dynamic effect that the psalms are steps to contemplation.”.—Thomas Merton, Bread in the Wilderness.

All theology is shaped by a philosophy. We may begin our theologising with the historical and biblical Christ—and rightly so—but the moment we form our interpretations of Him, we do so through a pre-theological philosophical lens: either one we have chosen with care, or one,.