D. Stephen Long > Quotes

“God cannot be placed within any category larger than God in order to understand God.”
― D. Stephen Long, Theology and Culture: A Guide to the Discussion

“Theology is like rowing a boat. You can only move forward when you are looking backwards.”
― D. Stephen Long, Theology and Culture: A Guide to the Discussion

“Only because our being and truth already belong to God can we avoid the nominalist temptation, where God arbitrarily and unexpectedly appears as a sheer act of will reversing creaturely being and commandeering our language miraculously from the outside such that nothing identifiably human remains of it.”
― D. Stephen Long, Saving Karl Barth: Hans Urs von Balthasar's Preoccupation

“You were not able to find yourself in my persistent traveling on the theological one-way street. Who knows whether you might not have already been close to those monks of the nitrischen desert? I in turn am able neither to join nor be inclined to your high altitude flight in a beyond of philosophy and theology. I understand you as a Catholic Tillich (and as such much more interesting and full). It goes without saying that I will henceforth accompany you and your work—in a bewildering participation or rather in a participating bewilderment—and look forward to every contact with you.”
― D. Stephen Long, Saving Karl Barth: Hans Urs von Balthasar's Preoccupation

“Theology can only be done in cultural form.”
― D. Stephen Long, Theology and Culture: A Guide to the Discussion