Gunton on feminist theology: 'This will not satisfy radical feminist critiques - what will? - yet it remains the case that the interesting feature of New Testament Christology is not its stress on maleness - which is not there - but the way in which at times the centrality of the risen Jesus to the New Testament Church enabled stereotypes to be overcome' (Epilogue to Second Edition, Yesterday and Today, 1997, 215)
Gunton on charismatic Christianity: 'One does not have to look further than the repeated outbreaks of pentecostal enthusiasm in the history of Western Christianity to realise that there is something deeply amiss with the way in which the doctrine of the third person of the Trinity has been understood, taught and lived' (Theology Through the Theologians, 1996, 189)
Gunton on modern liberal democracy: 'The danger of modern liberal democracy is that it will deceive us into believing that we are freer than we are. Here we must not forget the positive side of modern institutions. One cannot, without indulging in reactionary nostalgia, deny that we are freer in certain respects than in many alternative forms of organising society. But we live in a fool's paradise if we evade the pressures to homogenisation or the abolition of the personal differences that make us unique and loveable for ourselves' (The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 2nd ed., 1997, 164)
Gunton on tolerance: 'Much modern tolerance is, to be sure, little more than a means of the repression of uncomfortable opinion, encapsulated in forms of political correctess and illustrated by the experience of a colleague who was once told: 'You can't say that; we are tolerant here.' What needs to be reiterated is that all positions, including relativism, are positions, and thus far exclusive and intolerant of those positions which are logically incompatible with them; and all ideologies and theologies take some institutional or communal form' (Intellect and Action, 2000, 64)
Gunton on capitalism: 'For all its apparent pluralism, the world of the market that so dominates our lives is actually working to make us all identical: all to drink coca-cola and to eat at McDonald's, those symbols of the homogenizing forces of modernity, all to wear the same only superficially different designer clothes ...' (Father, Son & Spirit, 2003, 15)
Gunton on the modern world: '... on spectre at the banquet of the modern world was homogeneity, symbolized by the idea of a Coca-Cola advertisement in every village of the world. The pressures for homogeneity are various: philosophical, political, social but above all perhaps commercial. Homogenizing pressures take away our individuality and particularity, and make us all alike' (The One, the Three and the Many, 1993, 180)
Gunton on Christian responses the modern world: '... it is scarely suprising that Christian responses to the modern world vary from puzzled perplexity, through frenetic and overpowering religiosity to an activism which tends to equate the gospel with the most worthy political causes' (The Actuality of Atonement, 1988, 176-7)
Gunton on Enlightenment thinking: 'It is not only individualistic, but aims to see the individual after the image of God: or rather the powerful, lonely, solitary God of so much Western theological thinking' (Enlightenment and Alienation, 1985, 84)
Gunton on Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology: 'The ecclesiological note is a recurring one in this book, the weaknesses of the treatments being the almost complete lack of those twin motors of a truly radical orthodoxy, eschatology and the doctrine of the Spirit' (Editorial, International Journal of Systematic Theology, Vol 1:2, 1999, 1-4)
Gunton on foundationalism: 'What, then, is wrong with foundationalism? It is not that it seeks a common basis for rationality, but that it seeks to the wrong one and in the wrong way. It seeks the wrong basis, because it seeks one that is merely secular: something inherent within human reason and experience. It thus expects human reason to ground itself. It seeks it in the wrong way, because it believes that it can find what it wants apart from revelation (A Brief Theology of Revelation, 1995, 50)
Gunton on non-foundationalism: '... the anti-foundationalist song is the voice of a siren. The allusion to fideism indicates the perennial weakness of non-foundationalist epistemologies ... Theologically speaking, they evade the intellectual challenge involved in the use of the word God. If that words refers in part to the universal source of being, meaning and truth, then those who would use it must be prepared to take some responsibility for intellectual enterprises which impinge upon theirs from 'outside' (The One, the Three and the Many, 1993, 134)
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