‘The name of Christ should not be misused as a “carrot and stick” to motivate people to do what ordinary self-interest and a few altruistic genes can accomplish just as well … The business of the church is to be faithful to the word and wisdom of the revealed God (deus revelatus), one who does not meet us anonymously within the ambiguities of the world process. The church is not called to minister in [sic] behalf of some anonymous Christ, or some unfleshed deity immanently directing the course of history incognito. The biblical line of promise is a thin line, and the church must learn once again to walk it faithfully, rather than take the easy road of popular trends and fashionable movements’. – Carl E. Braaten, ‘The Mission of the Gospel to the Nations’, Dialog 30, no. 2 (1991), 129.
[Image: ‘Channel Markers’, by Melbourne photographer Andrew Sanigorski]
‘… we have been given a perennially valid paradigm for theology in our Christ-centered trinitarian confession of faith, expressed in the classic ecumenical creeds of Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus and Chalcedon. When things seem to be falling apart in theology and church practice, then I would propose that we reclaim once again the strong name of the Trinity, because there we find a continuing framework of Christian identity, transcending the discontinuities and oscillations of history and culture’. – Carl E. Braaten, ‘The Cultural Captivity of Theology: An Evangelical Catholic Perspective’ (a paper presented at The Inaugural Margaret McKinnon Memorial Lecture on Christianity and Culture, Nepean Presbytery of the Uniting Church in Australia, Melbourne, 1997), 20.
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