5 Quotes by James W. Fowler

. . . absoluteness is a quality of the transcendent that comes to expression in revelation, but not necessarily of the symbols, myths, propositions or doctrines formulated to represent or communicate it. . . . the most precious thing we have to offer each other in interfaith encounters is our honest, unexaggerated and nonpossessive sharing of what we take to be the moments of absoluteness in the particuilar faith traditions in which we live as committed participants.

Faith, in its forming of images of the ultimate environment, never finds analogues that fully or with complete accuracy bring out and express its knowing.

The limitations of literalness and an excessive reliance upon reciprocity as a principle for constructing an ultimate environment can result either in an overcontrolling, stilted perfectionism or "works righteousness" or in their opposite, an abasing sense of badness embraced because of mistreatment, neglect or the apparent disfavor of significant others.

When we are grasped by the vision of a center of value and power more luminous, more inclusive and more true than that to which we are devoted, we initially experience the new as the enemy or the slayer - that which destroys our "god." Alfred North Whitehead wrote, "Religion is the transition from God the Void to God the Enemy, and from God the Enemy to God the Companion." Only with death of our previous image can a new and more adequate one arise.

Frequently I remember something H. Richard Niebuhr wrote after having spent a number years trying to formulate a comprehensive perspective on faith. He likens faith to a cube. From any one angle of vision, he points out, the observer can see and describe at least three sides of the cube. But the cube has back sides, a bottom and insides as well. Several angles of vision have to be coordinated simultaneously to do any real justice in a characterization of faith