Kathryn Tanner > Quotes

“Grace knocks us flat, preventing any form of self-congratulation. All the good we achieve is to be attributed to God rather than to ourselves. What makes our lives good is not anything we are ourselves but the presence within us of what we are not, a divine presence never ours by right because never ours by nature. All the glory for the good we exhibit in our lives should therefore be reserved for God.”
― Kathryn Tanner, Christ the Key

“We are good not in virtue of what we are but in virtue of what we are not, like darkness lit up by a light that enters into it from without. We are not light in ourselves but in virtue of having within us what is light in itself.”
― Kathryn Tanner, Christ the Key

“Sin has no power to break God's faithfulness to God's own original intentions for us; we are still in God's eyes at least the creatures God created us to be.”
― Kathryn Tanner, Christ the Key

“The moral transformation of individuals engaged in economic transactions tend to become, for example, the answer to economic problems: if only our greedy CEOs were saints!”
― Kathryn Tanner, Economy of Grace

“Diversity is the product of the effort to be a Christian in different cultural contexts. What it means to be a Christian should not look the same from one cultural context to another-say, from pagan ancient Rome to contemporary Catholic Spain. One lives a Christian life differently depending on the cultural materials with which one has to work and the challenges to the Christian faith specific to that context.”
― Kathryn Tanner, Theories of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology

“...if one thinks about the relationship between nature and grace in terms of natural human desires in an Aristotelian sense and what would fulfill them, human states become the focus for discussion in ways that hamstring efforts to show the gratuity of grace.”
― Kathryn Tanner, Christ the Key

“From prideful wisdom one falls into simple stupidity”
― Kathryn Tanner, Christ the Key

“What I, as a Christian theologian, attempt to do here is provide a Protestant anti-work ethic, by coming up with what I believe are good religious reasons for (1) breaking the link between a right to well-being and work, (2) breaking one's identification with the "productive" self; and (3) breaking the time continuity, time collapse, that constrains imaginative possibility under the current configuration of capitalism.”
― Kathryn Tanner, Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism

“More important than any difference between faith and love is the difference between what we do and what God does. Focusing controversy on the relative merits of different sorts of human acts, such as faith and love...is therefore likely to prove unproductive, by distracting attention from the real matter for concern.”
― Kathryn Tanner, Christ the Key

“Through the power of the Spirit humans are to be joined to the second person of the trinity in Christ, and on virtue of that attachment human lives are to be given a shape that images the first person of the trinity in something like the way the second person of the trinity images it.”
― Kathryn Tanner, Christ the Key