Quotes from Gerhard Forde

Current religiosity and ethics, especially those that replace the story of the cross with demands for social reform, have produced many a theology of glory. It still flourishes along with its attendant despair. There is no cure through the law. It will take some dying. So we are already on the way to the cross.

Bitterest pills for modern man to swallow: the problem of divine sovereignty as it is expressed particularly in the doctrine of predestination.

Who knows whether we are right in saying that the sufferings of the divine-human Jesus have the "infinite worth" demanded by the scheme? All such speculations are really quite beyond the limits of our knowing. They are at best conjecture, which for many people, as history shows too plainly, only calls the gospel into question.

In things that are "below him," man has freedom in Luther's view to act as he sees fit. In things "above," however, the matter is different; there we encounter the problem of God's predestination.

Everyone, it seems, wants to do God the favor of making him less objectionable. Some say he is not absolute or omnipotent yet but is perhaps in the process of becoming so. Some say he is not infinite, but finite. Some even say he has obliged us all by dying!

A sacrament is an action in which the Word of God does something to us through the earthly sign. It is an action in which God gets through to us in a concrete way.

Theology is the happy science concerned with the task of pointing to him whose yoke is easy, whose burden is light. Theology is not in the business of absolutizing itself, but rather of pointing beyond itself to the one who gives