Frederick W. Schmidt Jr. > Quotes

“The title we announced for this talk is “How Complicated a God Do You Want?” The answer I have tried to suggest here is: a God no less complicated than the whole of reality, surely much more complicated than the God that the biblical writers succeeded in committing to the page, or, if somehow simple, simple in a way that can account for all this complexity, including everything that limits and constricts my own attempt to raise the question or to cry out, as somehow, in the spirit, I still do: Holy, Holy, Holy. FOR”
― Frederick W. Schmidt Jr., The Changing Face of God

“I soon realized that in large part their resistance to any new information rested on the structure of their faith. Convinced that this or that assumption about the Bible was true, they believed that faith in God was also viable. In other words, they entertained faith in an ultimate authority because they had faith in proximate authorities. However gently you challenged their assumptions about the Bible, you effectively challenged their ability to believe in God at all. Now imagine asking anyone more directly to grapple with their understanding of God—the changing face of God. The level of resistance is predictable. Finally,”
― Frederick W. Schmidt Jr., The Changing Face of God

“Ibn al-Arabi said we have a religious duty to create imaginative theophanies, revelations of God, for ourselves. His teaching was that every one of us is a unique incarnation of one of God’s hidden attributes; all of us are epiphanies. For that reason, we know only the God who has spoken in the depths of our own being. So my God will be different from yours, because God has entrusted a personal revelation to each of us.”
― Frederick W. Schmidt Jr., The Changing Face of God

“Though St. Paul can be quoted to almost any purpose, he did say in the most celebrated sentences he ever wrote that faith that could “move mountains” was nothing without love, while—or so he strongly implied—love without faith was clearly much more than nothing. Similarly, the great vision of the last judgment in Matthew 25 is one in which the saved have no knowledge of the Lord. The lesson of the vision is that love, even love unaided, love alone, can save. “Lord, when did we see thee hungry?” the redeemed ask, and the Lord answers: “Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you. . . . Whatever you did for the least of my brethren, you did for me.” I”
― Frederick W. Schmidt Jr., The Changing Face of God

“We can talk about God’s justice and love from now to the end of time. But until our theological discourse engages white supremacy in a way that empowers poor people to fight the monster, then our theology is not worth the paper it is written on. In”
― Frederick W. Schmidt Jr., The Changing Face of God

“As the German theologian Hans Küng has observed, however, “New models of theological interpretation do not simply come into existence because individual theologians tackle heated issues or sit down at their desks to construct new models, but because the traditional interpretive model has failed, because the ‘problem solvers’ of normal theology, in the face of a changed historical horizon, can find no satisfying answers for new major questions, and ‘paradigm testers’ set in motion a ‘extra-ordinary theology’ alongside the normal variety.”14”
― Frederick W. Schmidt Jr., The Changing Face of God

“Denys said, “God does not exist. Don’t be afraid when I say that. It’s simply that our concept of existence, our experience of existence, is so limited that it cannot possibly be applied to God.” “God,” says St. Denys, “is not one of the things that ‘are.’ God is not one of the things that exist like this podium, or this Cathedral, or the atom. God is not something you can discover or prove.” This”
― Frederick W. Schmidt Jr., The Changing Face of God