“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.”

“Each one of us must suffer long to himself before he can learn that he is but one in a great community of wretchedness which has been pitilessly repeating itself from the foundation of the world.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Self-sufficiency is the enemy of salvation. If you are self-sufficient, you have no need of God. If you have no need of God, you do not seek Him. If you do not seek Him, you will not find Him.”

“The world each person creates for himself is a distinctive world, not the same world others occupy.”