Not bad, not bad at all,' Diotallevi said. 'To arrive at the truth through the painstaking reconstruction of a false text.

Our true wisdom is to embrace with meek docility, and without reservation, whatever the holy scriptures have delivered.

The wisdom of God is what we ought to seek.

The Holy God gives grace.

The theologian is interested specifically in the modern novel because there he sees reflected the man of our time, the unbeliever, who is nevertheless grappling in a desperate and usually honest way with intense problems of the spirit.

I write with the entire alphabet, not just the popular letters.Readers don't want to lose themselves in the text. They want to find themselves in it.

For wordsmiths and masters of words, without necessarily being harsh with words, the words have a tendency to shoot straight to the hearts of people, and this either deeply touches them or deeply angers them. Like the apostles in all their loving controversies are those who are masters of words while combining this gift with truth.

The holiness of the gospel softens the hardness of the heart.

In my view, the gospels are true, not historically, but theologically, or, as I would argue, prophetically! What we have is, the Messiah’s history written in advance in story form.

Only a very few can be learned, but all can be Christian, all can be devout, and – I shall boldly add – all can be theologians.