“First, any term applied to God is only ana analogy; when this is forgotten, any God-defining term is sacrilegious.”

“Wright's point was that the God of the Israelites is not the God who speaks, if speaking is a means of conveying a word that can be dissociated from acts, and thereby "dissociated from history and dealt with as an abstraction" for theological contemplation.”

“Whether it is Paul defending Judaism, Augustine pursing philosophical learnedness, Luther attempting complete ritual self-abasement, each finally realized he had given himself to secular forms of self-salvation and to a world filled with human achievement but empty of God.”

“By normal standards, Jesus' modus operandi was virtually an atheistic modus operandi, so that he could live through the irony of atheism, first divesting himself of a standard theism, then undergoing an ironic reversal toward a new theism.”

“The book which you read from a sense of duty, or because for any reason you must, does not commonly make friends with you.”

“Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in a chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it.”

“True force makes no terms with any right, not even with that of God;”