from Act and Being (I assume the title is a nod to Bonhoeffer? ;-D):
"It is too easy to assume that we know what is 'our idea of God', so that the essentially problematic nature of what the tradition has bequeathed us is concealed. Most of the detailed problems derive from that, and the tangled web of interrelations between the Hellenic and Hebrew traditions consequent upon it...
We have already seen that, as with much of our theology, there are in this case especially two sources for what has been developed in the history of Christian thought, classical philosophy on the one hand and the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments on the other... the former tradition - for good reasons - tends to stress the impersonal and metaphysical attributes, the latter the personal...
But it cannot be the use of philosophical terminology in itself that is at fault. Christianity is a philosophical faith, at least in the respect that in its main streams it has never renounced the conceptual task: the task of making clear in what manner the gospel is true, and true in the same sense that other things are true... That is to say, it must seek to give an account of the way things really are...
[T]hat involves answering enquires about what it means for our understanding of the being of our God that he is described as a rock and a fortress and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. For that matter, the meanings of such words as love, freedom, and spirit are not self-evident. Love takes many forms and some freedoms are not what they claim to be, while many conceptions of spirit, especially some of those fashionable today, are not necessarily those of scripture."
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