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Eugen Drewermann Quotes

If you want to change people by talking about God, then there is only one way: instead of teaching God, you must live God. Because: teaching God is unthinkable in any other way than the way you would teach love or

If you want to change people by talking about God, then there is only one way: instead of teaching God, you must live God. Because: "teaching" God is unthinkable in any other way than the way you would teach love or poetry. You teach love only through love, poetry only through writing poetry, faith in God only through a contagious way of trusting.

Eugen Drewermann
Teaching, Writing, Talking
"Jesus von Nazareth". Book by Eugen Drewermann, 1996.

We see in the 20th Century an unfortunate trench warfare, in which psychoanalysis, in a struggle against the internalized compulsion and superstition of a particular doctrine, has expressed itself atheistically. By contrast, theology is not merely under suspicion of talking soullessly about God. Both theology and psychology, in striving for human health, need one another like the right and the left hand.

Eugen Drewermann
Struggle, Hands, Talking
Speech at a conference of therapists in Basel, Switzerland, May 21, 1977.

In all cultures, it is the task of a religion to close the field of contingency ...and to set up havens of the absolute where it is possible to be led from acting to listening, from having to being, from planning to hoping, from judging to forgiving from the finite into the infinite. A society in which such open spaces of eternity do not exist or are only insufficiently developed dies of itself due to lack of air to breathe.

Eugen Drewermann
Air, Space, Judging
"A Violent God-Image: An Introduction to the Work of Eugen Drewermann". Book by Matthias Beier, 2004.

People are given a false alternative: the choice between an unenlightened belief and an enlightened unbelief. Most intellectuals seem to pay homage to the second variant.

Eugen Drewermann
People, Choices, Alternatives

Whenever we encounter a human being in such a way that we feel absolutely certain of the infinity of that person's worth and the eternity of his or her life, that is Easter.

Eugen Drewermann
Easter, Encounters, Way
Eugen Drewermann (1994). “Dying We Live: Meditations for Lent and Easter”

In my eyes, concepts of theology have only as much value as they are able to interpret experience. It seems to me that we have long reached the point where we theologians only talk to ourselves and debate with our own history of concepts.

Eugen Drewermann
Eye, Long, Able
"Wort des Heils, Wort der Heilung". Book by Eugen Drewermann, 1989.

You see, my Lord Archbishop, what is "dubious" about my theology is not that it contradicts particular doctrinal teachings, things are much worse or better: what I want, is no more and no less than a fundamental change in the whole way that theology is done today; but I want this out of faith, not out of faithlessness.

Eugen Drewermann
Teaching, Dubious, Fundamentals
Letter to Archbishop J J Degenhardt, 1992.

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