D. Stephen Long

"Beginning with the flesh of Jesus and its presence in the church, theology alone can give due order to other social formations—family, market, and state. The goodness of God is discovered not in abstract speculation but in a life oriented toward God that creates particular practices that require the privileging of certain social institutions over others. The goodness of God can be discovered only when the church is the social institution rendering intelligible our lives. ... For a Christian account of this good, the church is the social formation that orders all others. If the church is not the church, the state, the family, and the market will not know their own true nature."

"Theology is like rowing a boat. You can only move forward when you are looking backwards."

"God cannot be placed within any category larger than God in order to understand God."

"Theology can only be done in cultural form."

"Only because our being and truth already belong to God can we avoid the nominalist temptation, where God arbitrarily and unexpectedly appears as a sheer act of will reversing creaturely being and commandeering our language miraculously from the outside such that nothing identifiably human remains of it."