Theology Quotes

God has disclosed himself in descriptive terms that give us enough information to be able to know who he is, and he has hidden enough of himself for us to learn the balance between faith and reason.

~ Ravi Zacharias

I had not known before that love is obedience. You want to love, and you can’t, and you hate yourself because you can’t, and all the time love is not some marvelous thing that you feel but some hard thing that you do. And this in a way is easier because with God’s help you can command your will when you can’t command your feelings. With us, feelings seem to be important, but He doesn’t appear to agree with us.

~ Elizabeth Goudge

You are not blamed for your unwilling ignorance, but because you fail to ask about what you do not know.... For no one is prevented from leaving behind the disadvantage of ignorance and seeking the advantage of knowledge.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

There are savages without God in any proper sense of the word, but none without ghosts.

~ Thomas Henry Huxley

Elohim was, in logical terminology, the genus of which ghosts, Chemosh, Dagon, Baal, and Jahveh were species. The Israelite believed Jahveh to be immeasurably superior to all other kinds of Elohim. The inscription on the Moabite stone shows that King Mesa held Chemosh to be, as unquestionably, the superior of Jahveh.

~ Thomas Henry Huxley

The theologians dead, knew no more than the theologians now living.

~ Robert G. Ingersoll

Can any one deny that the old Israelites conceived Jahveh not only in the image of a man, but in that of a changeable, irritable, and, occasionally, violent man?

~ Thomas Henry Huxley

When we talk about the theology of 'God is Dead,' this means that the notion of God must be dead in order for God to reveal himself as a reality. The theologians, if they only use concepts, and not direct experience, are not very helpful. The same goes for nirvana, which is something to be touched and lived and not discussed and described. We have notions that distort truth, reality. A Zen master said the following to a large assembly: 'My friends, every time I use the word Buddha, I suffer. I am allergic to it. Every time I do it, I have to go to the bathroom and rinse my mouth three times in succession.' He said this in order to help his disciples not to get caught up in the notion of Buddha. The Buddha is one thing, but the notion of Buddha is another.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Christian theological history is filled with stories of groups who have developed theories of the election of themselves to salvation and the damnation of others; theories that demonstrate that their particular group has been exclusively endowed with divine truth, so that they possess a unique mission to the world and have a unique authority within it.

~ Richard Holloway

I have found that the more I reflect philosophically on the attributes of God the more overwhelmed I become at his greatness and the more excited I become about Bible doctrine. Whereas easy appeals to mystery prematurely shut off reflection about God, rigorous and earnest effort to understand him is richly rewarded with deeper appreciation of who he is, more confidence in his reality and care, and a more intelligent and profound worship of his person.

~ William Lane Craig

This quarrel over the messianic status of Jesus within first-century Judaism had profound effects on Christianity and prompted it towards a fateful turning point that switched the emphasis from following the way of Jesus to believing things about Jesus. Gradually a Christian came to be thought of not as one who lives and acts in a certain way, but as one who holds certain convictions or theories. The trouble with religious convictions or beliefs is that, since we can rarely prove or disprove them, we get anxious about them and start quarrelling with people whose convictions or theories differ from our own.

~ Richard Holloway

If we, who are finite, contingent, created beings, have got God completely figured out, it makes it seem likely that we invented him...If I am ever completely satisfied with my understanding of who God is and how he operates in the world, I am in danger of ceasing to seek Him.

~ Holly Ordway

There was something that He hid from all men, when he went up a mountain to pray. There was something that he covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.

~ G.k. Chesterton

I want you to see persecution and opposition and slander and misunderstanding and disappointment and self-recrimination and weakness and danger as the normal portion of faithful pastoral ministry.

~ John Piper

Christianity tells us we have free will. God has provided man with a choice whether to believe in Him or not. If God's existence were logically inescapable, there would be no free will to choose whether or not to believe in Him.

~ Stephen Mcandrew

Its helpful to know the reasons for our faith...it helps us not be so vulnerable to doubt, and it helps us not be so vulnerable to false doctrine.

~ Holly Ordway

It's no fun to think about infinity and no cinche to write about it. Again, it helps to look for some human link.

~ William Zinsser

This withdrawal of theology from the world of secular affairs is made more complete by the work of biblical scholars whose endlessly fascinating exercises have made it appear to the lay Christian that no one untrained in their methods can really understand anything the Bible says. We are in a situation analogous to one about which the great Reformers complained. The Bible has been taken out of the hands of the layperson, it has now become the professional property not of the priesthood but of the scholars.

~ Lesslie Newbigin

Here is the tragedy of theology in its distilled essence: The employment of high-powered human intellect, of genius, of profoundly rigorous logical deduction—studying nothing. In the Middle Ages, the great minds capable of transforming the world did not study the world; and so, for most of a millennium, as human beings screamed in agony—decaying from starvation, eaten by leprosy and plague, dying in droves in their twenties—the men of the mind, who could have provided their earthly salvation, abandoned them for otherworldly fantasies.

~ Andrew Bernstein

Theologians, and religionists in general, start with a fantasy premise and then proceed to apply rigorous formal logic to tease out its implications. Stark himself points out that “theology consists of formal reasoning about God.” This is admirably exact. Theologians, beginning with a wished-for creation of their own minds, analyze that creation’s characteristics by rigorous application of the principles of formal—that is, deductive—logic.

~ Andrew Bernstein

Whether you realize it or not, you are a theologian. You come to a book like this with a working theology, an existing understanding of God. Whether you are an agnostic or a fundamentalist — or something in between — you have a working theology that shapes and informs the way you think and live. However, I suspect that you are reading this book because you’re interested in examining your theology more closely. You are open to having it challenged and strengthened. You know that theology — the study of God — is more than an intellectual hobby. It’s a matter of life and death, something that affects the way you think, the decisions you make each day, the way you relate to God and other people, and the way you see yourself and the world around you.

~ Michael S. Horton

I recall the story of the philosopher and the theologian... The two were engaged in disputation and the theologian used the old quip about a philosopher resembling a blind man, in a dark room, looking for a black cat — which wasn't there. ‘That may be,’ said the philosopher, ‘but a theologian would have found it.

~ Julian Huxley

I believe we best say yes to God's glory and sovereignty by saying no to Calvinism.

~ Austin Fischer

The bare knowledge of God's will is inefficacious, it doth not better the heart. Knowledge alone is like a winter sun, which hath no heat or influence; it doth not warm the affections, or purify the conscience. Judas was a great luminary, he knew God's will, but he was a traitor.

~ Thomas Watson

Jesus never spoke of truth in abstraction, as something that stands alone. Jesus always spoke of truth in relation to God being revealed through himself.

~ Tim Mcconnell

Science, unlike theology, never leads to insanity.

~ Luther Burbank

Always, in Lincoln's mature theology, there is paradox. There is starting this, yet there is also tenderness; there is melancholy, yet there is also humor: there is moral law, yet there is also compassion. History is the scene of the working out God's justice, which we can never escape, but it is also the scene of the revelation of the everlasting mercy.

~ Elton Trueblood

The obsession with putting ourselves at the centre of everything is the bane not only of theologians but also of zoologists.

~ Yann Martel

Isn't that funny, that deity is passe but the attributes and implications of deity linger--

~ Gregory Maguire

We are all theologians, either good ones or bad ones. I'd rather be a good one. Wouldn't you?

~ Randy Alcorn

He was too perplexed to please the conventional and too reverent. to please the infidels.

~ Elton Trueblood

God, Lincoln believed, is seen more clearly events that in nature, though He maybe seen there also. It is a majestic thing, thought Lincoln, for a person to be RESPONSIBLE.

~ Elton Trueblood

In religious belief as elsewhere, we must take our chances, recognizing that we could be wrong, dreadfully wrong. There are no guarantees; the religious life is a venture; foolish and debilitating error is a permanent possibility. (If we can be wrong, however, we can also be right.)

~ Alvin Plantinga

most of us happily disavow fairies, astrology and the Flying Spaghetti Monster, without first immersing ourselves in books of Pastafarian theology etc.

~ Richard Dawkins

Theology is for homemakers who need to know who God is, who they are, and what this mundane life is all about.

~ Gloria Furman

And some scientists and other intellectuals are convinced—too eagerly in my view—that the question of God's existence belongs in the forever inaccessible PAP category. From this, as we shall see, they often make the illogical deduction that the hypothesis of God's existence, and the hypothesis of his non-existence, have exactly equal probability of being right.

~ Richard Dawkins

The fact that we can neither prove nor disprove the existence of something does not put existence and non-existence on an even footing.

~ Richard Dawkins

Cosmopolitanism promotes a sense of new _we-ness as regarding every individual human being as a citizen of the cosmos. However, the _we-cosmic-citizens_ are not to promote the _we-ness-in-sameness_, but rather the we-ness-in-alterity_.Unlike the solidarity-in-sameness, cosmopolitan _solidarity-in-alterity_ celebrates the singularity and difference of each individual human being while not denying the historical necessity of the strategic construction of _we_ to challenge the very sociopolitically imposed category

~ Namsoon Kang

Theology should be a discourse that helps the sociopolitical approach to justice to maintain its human face and not to become impersonal.

~ Namsoon Kang

Cosmopolitan theology is a theology for _the impossible_.

~ Namsoon Kang