Colin Gunton Quotes

United Kingdom, Theologian
January 19, 1941 – May, 6, 2003.

Colin Ewart Gunton was an English Reformed systematic theologian. He made contributions to the doctrine of creation and the doctrine of the trinity. He was Professor of Christian Doctrine at King's College, London, from 1984 and co-founder with Christoph Schwoebel of the Research Institute for Systematic Theology in 1988. Gunton was actively involved in the United Reformed Church in the United Kingdom where he had been a minister since 1972.

In our desire to impose form on the world and our lives we have lost the capacity to see the form that is already there; and in that lies not liberation but alienation, the cutting off from things as they really are.

Colin Gunton
- Lost
- Form
- Capacity
[W]e, being who and what we are, cannot know unless we are taught by that which is other than we, and that means by the Spirit of God, albeit in diverse mediations. Though nature is relatively passive under our enquiry… it remains true that knowledge of her comes as fit, and is therefore a species of revelation…. If there is revelation of the truth of the world, it is because the Spirit of truth enables it to take place. To put it another way, the creator Spirit brings it about that human rationality is able, within the limits set to it, to encompass the truth of creation. We therefore neither control nor create our knowledge, even though the concepts by which we express it are in part the free creations of our minds. Does it not then follow that all knowledge depends on disclosure or revelation?

Colin Gunton

To image the being of God towards the world, to be the priest of creation, is to behave towards the world in all its aspects, of work, and of play, in such a way that it may come to be what it was created to be, that which praises its maker by becoming perfect in its own way. In all this, there is room for both usefulness and beauty to take their due place, but differently according to differences of activity and object.

Colin Gunton
- God
- Way
- Image
For theologians groaning under the oppression of demands to justify their discipline before the bar of what is supposed to be universally valid scientific method the appeal of non-foundationalism is immense. It liberates a celebration of the rights of particularity. It enables the theologian to say that theological method must be different from other methods because it shapes its approach from the distinctive content with which it has to do - just as, indeed, other disciplines shape their approaches in the light of their distinctive content. Non-foundationalism, that is to say, is a way of advocating the autonomy of distinct intellectual disciplines.

Colin Gunton
- Discipline
- Shape
- Method
Everything important seems already to have happened.

Colin Gunton
- Important
- Happened
From all those created in the image of God there is something to be received, and to them something to be given.

Colin Gunton
- God
- Image
- To Be