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 of things as they really are.

Colin E. Gunton
About This Quote

Meaningless, unfulfilling and boring to most people. When we try to impose form on the world and our lives we forget that form and reality are one and the same. To say we have to change the world does not make it so; we cannot make it what we want it to be. There is a world outside of our wants and desires waiting to become what we want.

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More Quotes By Colin E. Gunton
  1. 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 of things as they really are.
  2. [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...
  3. In the imposition of a unitary and homogeneous popular culture, disseminated now throughout the world by the spread of Western technology and communications, is to be found one of the central features of modernity's distinctive way of achieving the priority of the one over the...
  4. An attempt to wrest from God the prerogatives of absolute freedom and infinity leads to the inversion of Pentecost and what is in effect a new Babel. 'Postmodernism' represents that Babel perfectly, because when each speaks a language unrelated to that of the other -...
  5. 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...
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