What it’s about is Jesus Himself

Herbert McCabe

Jesus did not offer a new social theory, or a new religion, he did not offer even a full analysis of the contradictions of his society, he did not provide an ideal for a new kind of human community. He offered himself.

Austin Farrer

God does not give us explanations; we do not comprehend the world, and we are not going to. It is, and it remains for us, a confused mystery of bright and dark. God does not give us explanations; he gives up a Son.

Ephraim Radner

Jesus’s response to the sacrificial calling of the law is to present his own body: “Lo, I have come to do thy will,” something accomplished “through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.”

David Yeago, unpublished notes

for Luther and other early Lutherans, it is not quite adequate to say that Christ lived, suffered and died long ago so that we might be saved now. It would be more precise to say that Christ lived, suffered, died, and rose again so that fellowship with him might be salvation. What he has done and suffered renders him the present saving person, or salvation in person.

Bruck McCormack, personal lecture notes

The theme of the Bible is not a doctrine but a person.

Telford Work

the bedrock of our tradition is not some mystical experience, archetypical figure, or compelling idea, but simply the apostles’ testimony to Jesus’ death and resurrection and the powerful outpouring of his Holy Spirit.

The body of Christ is the instrument God has chosen to rescue his reputation in the world.

Gregory Clark, The Nature of Confession (1996), 217

Worldview philosophy brings its practitioners out of fideism and naiveté, while Scripture points us to One who can bring us out of death, darkness, unbelief and falsity.

Deborah Hunsinger, Pray without Ceasing (2006), 51, quoting Andrew Purves, Reconstructing Pastoral Theology (2004), xviii.

All ministry is Christ’s ministry, in which the church is privileged to participate. As Andrew Purves explains, “Pastoral theology is understood properly first of all as a theology of the care of God for us in, through, and as Jesus Christ. …Only secondarily, derivatively, and above all, participatively…is pastoral theology an account of the pastoral work of the church.”