God is not only greater than our mind, he is also greater than our heart, and just as we have to avoid the temptation of adapting God to our small concept we also have to avoid adapting him to our small feelings.

There is no such thing as ‘theology’; there is only contextual theology.

Because of his measureless love, He became what we are in order to enable us to become what He is.

The Gospel makes men free of history. However it makes free of history within history.

“Curiouser and curiouser!”

Man cannot receive an answer to a question he has not asked.

The problem is not changing people’s consciousnesses—or what’s in their heads—but the political, economic, institutional regime of the production of truth.

Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.

הן־אמת חפצת בטחות ובסתם חכמה תודיעני
(Behold, you desire truth; in the dark and hidden things, teach me wisdom.)

Keep love in your heart. A life without love is like a sunless garden where flowers are dead.

Putting it crudely, it [i.e., church history] is to stop you going mad. Those who have no history are always on the verge of insanity. When individual people lose their memory, they find it a very distressing experience; (…) When a nation forgets its history, or worse still, invents a history to take the place of the facts, the consequences are tragic.

Christianity is final only in so far as it has the power of criticizing and transforming each of its historical manifestations; and just this power is the Protestant principle.

The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us. (…) Here is the decisive difference between Christianity and all religions. Man’s religiosity makes him look in his distress to the power of God in the world: God is the deus ex machina. The Bible directs man to God’s powerlessness and suffering; only the suffering God can help.