Balthasar on the Resurrection

“[Liberal Protestant Theology] renders innocuous the kenotic figure of revelation in the Cross and Resurrection, turing it into a mere ‘teaching’, or even a ‘metaphor’, instead of interpreting the form in all seriousness as the dramatic manifestation of the triune love of God and as God’s battle of love for mankind. It is not the harmlessness of a verbal teaching that snatches the rotting corpse of the sinner out of the sealed three-day-old tomb and revives the flagging courage of the disciples, sending them into the world as witnesses to the Resurrection.”

Hans Urs von Balthasar, Love Alone 148-49

Charnock on God's Goodness

"He is not first God, and then afterwards good; but he is good as he is God, his essence, being one and the same, is formally and equally God and good."

Stephen Charnock, quoted in A Puritan Theology pg 78

Wiman on Religion

"...when I hear people say that they have no religious impulse whatsoever, or when I hear believers, or would-be believers, express a sadness and frustration that they have never been absolutely overpowered by God.  I always want to respond: Really?  You have never felt overwhelmed by, and in some way inadequate to, an experience in your life, have never felt something in yourself staking a claim beyond your self, some wordless mystery straining through words to reach you?  Never?  Religion is not made of these moments; religion is the means of making these moments part of your life rather than merely radical intrusions so foreign and perhaps even fearsome that you can't even acknowledge their existence afterward."

Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditations of a Modern Believer (2013) 70.

McCormack on Names

"I have long been fascinated by the fact that names of God's elect are written in his "book of life" (Rev. 20:15).  It has to be one of the most special evidences of the dignity that God bestows upon human beings that the names which we give to our children are the names he himself has inscribed into his "book."  The role God gives to parents is that significant.  But even more significantly for our purposes here, these are the names by which God knew us and called us from eternity."

-Bruce McCormack, "What's at Stake in the Current Debates Over Justification?: The Crisis of Protestantism in the West" in Justification: What's at Stake in the Current Debates? ed by Husbands and Treier, pg 114.