“The Church must sound strange to the world if it is not to be dull” – Karl Barth
“God may speak to us through Russian communism, a flute concerto, a blossoming shrub or a dead dog. We do well to listen to Him if He really does. . . . God may speak to us through a pagan or an atheist, and thus give us to understand that the boundary between the Church and the secular world can take at any time a different course from that which we think we discern [CD, I.1, 55].” – Karl Barth
“… the church judges the world; but it also hears God’s judgment on itself passed upon it by the world” – Rowan Williams
“Serious dialogue indeed requires openness to change, . . . it also demands a sense of
how significant changing one’s faith would be.” – William Placher
“Being truly liberal means thinking and speaking in responsibility and openness on all sides, backwards and forwards, toward both past and future, and with what I might call total personal modesty. To be modest is not to be skeptical; it is to see what one thinks and says also has limits.
This does not hinder me from saying very definitely what I think I see and know. But I can do this only in the awareness that there has been and are other people before and alongside me, and that still others will come after me. This awareness gives me an inner peace, so that I do not
think I always have to be right even though I say definitely what I say and think. Knowing that a limit is set for me, too, I can move cheerfully within it as a free man.” – Karl Barth
“there is only a limited number of exchanges any guest can take part in, and nobody needs to know what is going on in every conversation.” – David Ford
“There is something which is at the moment of uttering being done by the person uttering.” – J. L. Austin