Lovers are the ones who know most about God; the theologian must listen to them.

Only the Christian religion, which in its essence is communicated by the eternal child of God, keeps alive in its believers the lifelong awareness of their being children, and therefore of having to ask and give thanks for things.

Thus it is necessary to commence from an inescapable duality: the finite is not the infinite.

The work with which we embark on this first volume of a series of theological studies is a work with which the philosophical person does not begin, but rather concludes.

Wonder — the enthusiastic ardor for the sublimity of being, for its worthiness to be an object of knowledge — promises to become the point of departure for genuine insight only where it has reached the stage in which the subject, overwhelmed by the object, has, as it were, fused into a single point or into nothing.

Above all we must not wish to cling to our suffering. Suffering surely deepens us and enhances our person, but we must not desire to become a deeper self than God wills. To suffer no longer can be a beautiful, perhaps the ultimate sacrifice.

When you say Yes to God unconditionally, you have no idea how far this Yes is going to take you. Certainly farther than you can guess and calculate beforehand... but just how far and in what form? At the same time, this Yes is the sole, non-negotiable prerequisite of all Christian understanding, of all theology and ecclesial wisdom.