Theology Quotes

Yet opponents should not herald the demise of evangelicalism. Although much of popular evangelicalism cannot intellectually meet the analyses that call it into question as a viable explanation for human origins and destiny, for most evangelicals it does not need to. Because of the transition from comprehending their religion as a set of doctrines to conceptualizing their religion as an emotional relationship with God, evangelicals have actually made their religion more resilient to intellectual challenges. Calling into question evangelicalism's intellectual foundation ultimately does not undermine the religion because for many evangelicals their adherence was never about those foundations anyway. Evangelicalism becomes true because it FEELS true. Modern evangelicalism has largely transitioned to a new form of truth, one based not on intellectual assent to propositions but on emotional connections.

~ Todd M. Brenneman

Except they kept asking me questions like 'What is your biggest source of conflict about the Pope?' Or 'Has the Pope ever tried to suppress your scientific work?' Completely out of left field!They didn't want to hear me tell them how much Pope Benedict supported the Vatican Observatory and its scientific work. So, finally, frustrated that they weren't getting the story they wanted out of me, one of them asked, 'Would you baptize an extraterrestrial?'What did you answer?Only if she asks!I love it! How did they react?They all got a good laugh, which is what I intended. And then, the next day, they all ran my joke as if it were a straight story, as if I had made some sort of official Vatican pronouncement about aliens.

~ Guy Consolmagno

The Divine decree is the necessary condition of the Divine foreknowledge. If God does not first decide what shall come to pass, he cannot know what will come to pass. An event must be made certain, before it can be known as a certain event. In order that a man may foreknow an act of his own will, he must first have decided to perform it.So long as he is undecided about a particular volition, he cannot foreknow this volition. Unless God had determined to create a world, he could not know that there would be one. For the world cannot create itself, and there is but one being who can create it. If therefore this being has not decided to create a world, there is no certainty that a world will come into existence ; and if there is no certainty of a world, there can be no certain foreknowledge of a world. So long as anything remains undecreed, it is contingent and fortuitous. It may or may not happen. In this state of things, there cannot be knowledge of any kind. If a man had the power to cause an eclipse of the sun, and had decided to do this, he could then foreknow that the event would occur. But if he lacks the power, or if having the power, he has not formed the purpose, he can have no knowledge of any kind respecting the imagined event. He has neither knowledge nor foreknowledge, because there is nothing to be known. Blank ignorance is the mental condition.

~ Shedd

No sooner was the wound given than the remedy was provided and revealed.

~ Matthew Henry

And though he had almost flunked in Greek, his thesis on 'Sixteen Ways of Paying a Church Debt' had won the ten-dollar prize in Practical Theology.

~ Sinclair Lewis

That vague and wandering opinion of Deity is declared by an apostle to be ignorance of God:

~ Augustine Of Hippo

Gideon conquers, the church conquers, we conquer, because faith conquers. But the victory belongs not to Gideon, the church, or ourselves, but to God. And God's victory means our defeat, our humiliation; it means God's derision and wrath at all human pretensions of might, at humans puffing themselves up and thinking they are somebodies themselves. It means the world and its shouting is silenced, that all our ideas and plans are frustrated; it means the cross. The cross over the world -- that means that human beings, even the most noble, go down to dust whether it suits them or not, and with them all the gods and idols and lords of this world. The cross of Jesus Christ --that means God's bitter mockery of all human grandeur and God's bitter suffering in all human misery, God's lordship over all the world.

~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Wesley's theology was, then, largely a theology of reaction. Most of his theological output had polemical overtones, and some works were devoted exclusively to that end. The direction and the intensity of the challenge determined the character and strength of his reply. When this is taken into account, there is no contradiction between his teaching on Baptism and on the Lord's Supper. The Protestant and Catholic strands in Wesley's thought are held together in both cases, but the expression of their relative importance depends on the situation which is being addressed.

~ John R. Parris

The Bible is the greatest love story ever told.

~ Jordan Wells

After the evil spirit of a narrow Scholastic orthodoxy has been driven out, in the end seven much more wicked spirits return in its place.

~ Pope Benedict Xvi

About the time I told God that He didn't exist, I was desperate for an identity.

~ Donald Miller

A big part of me needed something outside myself to tell me who I was. The thing that had been designed to tell me who I was was gone.

~ Donald Miller

It is easy, out of laziness, out of weakness, to throw oneself into the lap of deity, saying, 'I couldn't help it; the way was set.' But think of the glory of the choice!

~ John Steinbeck

The definition of a philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black hat, which isn’t really there. And the definition of a theologian is he’s somebody who finds it.

~ Michael Ruse

God split himself into a myriad parts that he might have friends. This may not be true, but it sounds good—and is no sillier than any other theology.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

Everything hinges on the Christ of the cross. The fact of the cross is the axiom of theological thought. It is impossible to think about the gospel if we have the slightest hesitation on this point. We must determine to carry this theme throughout all the problems of theology without exception... The essence of God can be comprehended only from the 'word of the cross.

~ Kazoh Kitamori

No one book of scripture can be understood by itself, any more than any one part of a tree or member of the body can be understood without reference to the whole of which it is a part.

~ Charles Hodge

The gospel is the gospel of the cross. This means that God loves the objects of his wrath and that he, in his love, embraces men alienated from him.

~ Kazoh Kitamori

We were fortunate his brief psychic vision distracted him from what his fingertips could have told him about my face.Of course we were aware that temporary clairvoyance was a lame and unlikely explanation. The ordering of this world, however is so abstruce, so deep and complex, most explanations that people to make sense of moments of strange experience are inadequate. Our very existence as thinking creatures is an astonishment that cant be solved. Every human cell, with its thousands of protein chains, is more complex than a 747 or the largest cruise ship, in fact more complex than the two combined. All life on earth, in its extravagant variety, offers itself for study, but though we probe to ever deeper layers of its structure, the meaning eludes us.There is no end of wonders and mysteries: fireflies and music boxes, the stars that outnumber all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the world.

~ Dean Koontz

Not the last time in Western history, the revolutionaries armed themselves with a new religion to steel themselves for greater outrageous.

~ Niall Ferguson

Grace is costly because it calls us through our person to the person of Jesus Christ. And when we follow the person of Jesus Christ, when we follow his call through our person, we're sent to act for the concrete person of our neighbor in the world.

~ Andrew Root

No language about God will ever be fully adequate to the burning mystery which it signifies.

~ Elizabeth Johnston

The living water that never runs dry,The water of life, Lord, the saviour of the world.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

One of the most important things I have found is that no oneschool of thought has all of the answers. Sometimes history plugs agap that science can't fill. Often philosophy has answers thatscience relies on for its discoveries. Theology needs the support ofall of these things for any of its claims to make sense.

~ Lewis N. Roe

...only in the late 1100s and 1200s did scholars in Sicily and Spain translate Aristotle's greatest philosophical and scientific texts. These translations had an impact reminiscent of those science fiction stories in which the world suddenly encounters a civilization far in advance of its own. Aristotle had systematically answered the widest range of questions on everything from ethics to physics to biology. Students flocked to the universities advertising that they taught Aristotle. For Christian theologians, all of this posed at least two problems. First, the whole Augustinian tradition had taught that faith provided the standpoint from which one could understand the world correctly. Since Aristotle had not been a Christian, how had he managed to understand so much? Second, most theologians had drawn on the idea, going back to Aristotle's teacher Plato, that the road to knowledge involves turning away from the senses and looking inward to the truths of the soul. Aristotle, on the other hand, taught that all knowledge begins with sense observation.

~ William C. Placher

The irony of rule followers is they often quote a lot of people that do not follow as many rules as they do.

~ Shannon L. Alder

It is most important for the practice of the Christian ministry, especially in its missionary activities toward those both within and without the Christian culture, to consider pagans, humanists, and Jews as members of the latent Spiritual Community and not as complete strangers who are invited into the Spiritual Community from outside. This insight serves as a powerful weapon against ecclesiastical and hierarchical arrogance.

~ Paul Tillich

Mis-information is rampant in this great age of mass-information. While we have more access to learning than ever before in the history of the world, we’re actually getting dumber it seems. The amount of (mis)information at everyone's fingertips has lured us into a false sense of knowing. Whether it be information about science, politics, or theology, our society is suffering from an inability to research, process, filter, and apply. At the same time we seem entirely oblivious to the zeitgeist (spirit of the age) that is nihilistic and libertine, making everything relative and subjective. And Satan himself rushes to blur our vision, stirring up the dust of confusion. The church must respond by teaching the critical faculties of logic and spiritual discernment, embedded in a cohesive framework of fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding). We must obtain a reasonable faith that is consistent with historic Christianity and relevant for our post-modern age. Otherwise, those rejecting the blatant errors of religious fundamentalism will be susceptible to every wind of false doctrine and repackaged heresy imaginable. They will leave the orthodox faith and accept something that vaguely resembles Christianity, but in reality is a vile concoction of demonic lies.

~ David D. Flowers

Human was simultaneously the bearer of God's wise rule into the world, and also the creature who would bring the loyalty and praise of that creation for its Creator into love, speech, and conscious obedience.

~ N.t. Wright

The Anselmian call for faith seeking understanding may start and gather it's energy not in rational study of past theological points but in the pursuit to make sense of our concrete and lived experiences of Jesus who finds us in a hole, knocks us from our horse, or comes to our daughter in her sleep.

~ Andrew Root

The themes of Jesus' teaching are important, but of course he was more than a teacher. All the Gospels put the end of his life at the dramatic center of his story. Here all the hopes of Israel come together—he is the king of the Jews, the greatest of all the suffering prophets. Yet Jesus transformed those expectations. He did not lead Israel to victory over Rome. Indeed, one of the remarkable features of the narratives of his last days is that his increasing isolation makes it impossible to identify him with any one 'side' or cause. The Roman governor sentenced him as a Jewish rebel, but the leaders of Judaism also turned against him. He attacked the powerful on behalf of the poor, but in the end the mob too called for his blood. His own disciples ran away; Peter denied him. He did not go to his death agony as a representative of Jews, or of the poor, or of Christians, but alone, and thus, according to Christian faith, as a representative of all.

~ William C. Placher

Our are speculations are not the measure of our God.

~ J.i. Packer

If books can transform, those have to be conscientious.

~ Sudhir Mittal

If thinking wants to think God, then it must endeavor to tell stories.

~ Eberhard Jüngel

If you don’t know the difference between theology and religiousstudies, then you’re a theologian.

~ Brian Bocking

If you try to talk about a truth that’s merely moral, people always think it’s merely metaphorical. A real live man with two legs once said to me: ‘I only believe in the Holy Ghost in a spiritual sense.’ Naturally, I said: ‘In what other sense could you believe it?’ And then he thought I meant he needn’t believe in anything except evolution, or ethical fellowship, or some bilge. . . . -- The Secret of Father Brown

~ G.k. Chesterton

We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation or of the world to be controlled by ideas which, by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion...What is to-day a matter of academic speculation, begins to-morrow to move armies and pull down empires.

~ J. Gresham Machen

...theology waits as it works. It waits for its lungs again to be filled. Without the renewing breath of the Spirit it cannot speak.

~ Craig Keen

A God who punishes disobedience will teach us to obey and endure when it would be holy to protest and righteous to refuse to cooperate.

~ Rebecca Ann Parker

The Anselmian call for faith seeking understanding may start and gather its energy not in rational study of past theological points but in the pursuit to make sense of our concrete and lived experiences of Jesus who finds us in a hole, knocks us from our horse, or comes to our daughter in her sleep.

~ Andrew Root