Andrew Louth Quotes & Sayings

The method of science is logical and rational; the method of the humanities is one of imagination, sympathetic understanding, 'indwelling. — Andrew Louth

The Word bestows adoption on us when he grants us that birth and deification which, transcending nature, come by grace from above through the Spirit. The guarding and preservation of this in God depends on the resolve of those thus born: on their sincere acceptance of the grace bestowed on them and, through the practice of the commandments, on their cultivation of the beauty given to them by grace. Moreover, by emptying themselves of the passions they lay hold of the divine to the same degree as that to which, deliberately emptying himself of his own sublime glory, the Word of God truly became man. — Andrew Louth

The purpose of theology is to safeguard against misunderstandings that frustrate a Christian life of prayer. — Andrew Louth

Creation is not abandoned by God, it is not godless, for apart from God it would not be at all; it is not deprived of grace for it owes its existence to grace. Rather, creation is graced, it is holy; in creation God may be encountered. — Andrew Louth

The individualism of the Romantic theory of interpretation attempts to abstract the individual from his historical context by presenting him with the ideal of presuppositionless understanding; a truer theory of interpretation, which does not seek to elide the historical reality of the one seeking understanding, sets the interpreter himself within tradition. What we understand when we seek to understand the writings of the past is borne to us by tradition. Understanding is an engagement with tradition, not an attempt to escape from it. — Andrew Louth

Darwin caused controversy, not merely because his ideas contradicted Genesis, but because they fell foul of the way in which Genesis had been read by those influenced by the Enlightenment, for it was the Enlightenment that conceived of the human as almost exclusively rational and intellectual, and set the human at a distance from the animal. — Andrew Louth