"As a philosopher Stout is quite difficult to situate. His relation to English Idealism is complicated. We know that he advanced a position that Metz describes as ‘a “meeting” of pragmatist, realist and idealist motives’. Metz goes on to label Stout either an ‘old realist’ or a ‘new realist’ but definitely not an idealist. Passmore, more accurately, describes Stout as ‘pre-eminently … a philosopher of the middle way’. It is in this way that Stout is usually painted by much of the literature – a philosopher who was interested in reconciliation and compromise. This I think is true of his philosophy after about 1900."

"Our culture is very interested in life after death, but the w:New Testament is much more interested in ...life after life after death..."

"At no point do the resurrection narratives in the four Gospels say, "Jesus has been raised, therefore we are all going to heaven." It says that Christ is coming here, to join together the heavens and the Earth in an act of new creation."

"The point of following Jesus isn't simply so that we can be sure of going to a better place than than this after we die. Our future beyond death is enormously important, but the nature of the Christian hope is such that it plays back into the present life. We're called, here and now, to be instruments of God's new creation, the world-put-to-rights which has already been launched by Jesus and of which Jesus's followers are supposed to be not simply beneficiaries but also agents."

"[Arguments about God are] like pointing a flashlight toward the sky to see if the sun is shining."

"Our task as image-bearing, God-loving, Christ-shaped, Spirit-filled Christians, following Christ and shaping our world, is to announce redemption to a world that has discovered its fallenness, to announce healing to a world that has discovered its brokenness, to proclaim love and trust to a world that knows only exploitation, fear and suspicion...The gospel of Jesus points us and indeed urges us to be at the leading edge of the whole culture, articulating in story and music and art and philosophy and education and poetry and politics and theology and even--heaven help us--Biblical studies, a worldview that will mount the historically-rooted Christian challenge to both modernity and postmodernity, leading the way...with joy and humor and gentleness and good judgment and true wisdom. I believe if we face the question, "if not now, then when?" if we are grasped by this vision we may also hear the question, "if not us, then who?" And if the gospel of Jesus is not the key to this task, then what is?"

"It must be confessed that the new quantum mechanics is far from satisfying the requirements of the layman who seeks to clothe his conceptions in figurative language. Indeed, its originators probably hold that such symbolic representation is inherently impossible. It is earnestly to be hoped that this is not their last word on the subject, and that they may yet be successful in expressing the quantum postulate in picturesque form."