The Gospel makes men free of history. However it makes free of history within history.

The problem is not changing people’s consciousnesses—or what’s in their heads—but the political, economic, institutional regime of the production of truth.

All of these traditions [i.e., biblical traditions, heretical traditions, mainstream denominational traditions, non-Christian Near Eastern and Greco-Roman traditions, and critical post-Christian traditions] are sexist. All provide intimations of alternatives, equivalence and mutuality between men and women, between classes and races, between humanity and nature.

When you talk about God you are talking about two ‘impossible’ options… the ‘void’ [and] the ‘open’.

Putting it crudely, it [i.e., church history] is to stop you going mad. Those who have no history are always on the verge of insanity. When individual people lose their memory, they find it a very distressing experience; (…) When a nation forgets its history, or worse still, invents a history to take the place of the facts, the consequences are tragic.

The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us. (…) Here is the decisive difference between Christianity and all religions. Man’s religiosity makes him look in his distress to the power of God in the world: God is the deus ex machina. The Bible directs man to God’s powerlessness and suffering; only the suffering God can help.

There is no such thing as ‘theology’; there is only contextual theology.

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.

For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, ‘(...) When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’ The King will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.’

Now it is your task to be Christian theologians in your new, different and special situation. You truly do not need to become “Europoean, Western men,” not to mention “Barthians,” in order to be good Christians and theologians. You may feel free to be South East Asian Christians.

ἀκούσας δὲ ὁ βασιλεὺς Ἡρῴδης ἐταράχθη καὶ πᾶσα Ἱεροσόλυμα μετ’ αὐτοῦ
(When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him)

The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we continually stand. Before God and with God we live without God.

Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.

Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are.