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Theology Quotes

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Theology Quotes

“The death of the innocent, sinless Christ and the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to us satisfy God’s justice and holiness. If, however, we reject Christ’s atonement, then we are left to face God’s judgment alone. In this case His holiness demands separation from sinful humans and His justice demands death for sinful humans. So justice and mercy are complementary, not contradictory, aspects of God’s nature, as are holiness and love. If we accept God’s love and mercy, He will help us satisfy His justice and holiness. If we reject God’s love and mercy, we must face His justice and holiness alone (Romans 11:22).”

“There is only one way of salvation. Men are sinful rebels against God, by nature, enemies of holiness and He who is holy. Dominated by sin, ruled over by evil, we are helpless to even drag ourselves toward the true and holy God, even if we wanted to! We are dead in sin. "But God, who is rich in mercy, because of the great love which he loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ" (Ephesians 2:4-5). The Father, in His infinite mercy and grace, saved us in Christ Jesus.”

“If I had to sum up the gospel I should have to tell you certain facts: Jesus, the Son of God, became man; he was born of the virgin Mary; lived a perfect life; was falsely accused of men; was crucified, dead, and buried; the third day he rose again from the dead; he ascended into heaven and sitteth on the right hand of God; from whence he shall also come to judge the quick and the dead. This is one of the elementary truths of our gospel; we believe in the resurrection of the dead, the final judgment, and the life everlasting.”

“Here lies hidden the great call to conversion: to look not with the eyes of my own low self-esteem, but with the eyes of God’s love. As long as I keep looking at God as a landowner, as a father who wants to get the most out of me for the least cost, I cannot but become jealous, bitter, and resentful toward my fellow workers or my brothers and sisters. But if I am able to look at the world with the eyes of God’s love and discover that God’s vision is not that of a stereotypical landowner or patriarch but rather that of an all-giving and forgiving father who does not measure out his love to his children according to how well they behave, then I quickly see that my only true response can be deep gratitude.”

“It's about my own self-concept. Can I accept that I am worth looking for? Here lies the core of my spiritual struggle: the struggle against self-rejection, self-contempt, and self-loathing. It is a very fierce battle because the world and its demons conspire to make me think about myself as worthless, useless, and negligible. As long as I am kept “small,” I can easily be seduced to buy things, meet people, or go places that promise a radical change in self-concept even though they are totally incapable of bringing this about. But every time I allow myself to be thus manipulated or seduced, I will have still more reasons for putting myself down and seeing myself as the unwanted child.”

“The quarrel between science and religion, then, is not a matter of how universe came about, or which approach can provide the best "explanation" for it. It is a disagreement about how far back one has to go, though not in the chronological sense. For theology, science does not start far back enough - not in the sense that it fails to posit a Creator, but in the sense that it does not ask questions such as why there is anything in the first place, or why what we do have is actually intellible to us. Perhaps these are phony questions anyway; some philosophers certainly think so. But theologians, as Rowan Williams has argued, are interested in the question of why we ask for explanations at all, or why we assume that the universe hangs together in a way that makes explanations possible. Where do our notions of explanation, regularity, and intelligibility come from? How do we explain rationality and intelligibility themselves, or is this question either superfluous or too hard to answer? Can we not account for rationality because to do so is to presuppose it? Whatever we think of such queries, science as we know it is possible only because the world displays a certain internal order and coherence - possible, that is to say, for roughly aesthetic reasons.”

“We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century - the blindness about which posterity will ask, "But how could they have thought that?" - lies where we have never suspected it... None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.”

“Jesus makes it clear that the way to God is the same as the way to a new childhood. The innocence that is reached through conscious choices. The Beatitudes offer me the simplest route for the journey home, back into the house of my Father. And along this route I will discover the joys of the second childhood: comfort, mercy, and an ever clearer vision of God. It's a place where I can live in freedom without obsessions and compulsions.”

“Resentment and gratitude cannot coexist, since resentment blocks the perception and experience of life as a gift. My resentment tells me that I don’t receive what I deserve. It always manifests itself in envy. The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be celebrated with joy. Gratitude as a discipline involves a conscious choice. I can choose to be grateful even when my emotions and feelings are still steeped in hurt and resentment. I can choose to be grateful when I am criticized, even when my heart still responds in bitterness. There is always the choice between resentment and gratitude.”

“I decide what I am, and I decide the parameters of what I am - for example, I can be a monk and still fall in love, just like, I can be a muslim poet, and still consider the koran to be flawed - I can be a theologian of any faith, and consider all the scriptures to be a mix of good and bad - my mind is the measure, not convention; life is my constitution, not tradition. This is how I created whatever I've created, not in defiance of convention, but indifference - I built my universe, aloof from foolish fractures, to men of ritual it's a terrible sacrilege.”

“Jesus is long gone, he is not coming back. Worshipping him and hoping for his so-called second coming may give you comfort, but it doesn't do anything for either Jesus or the society. The only way you can make any difference in the lives of others as well as your own, is by becoming Christ-like in character and action.”

“That which is now called natural philosophy, embracing the whole circle of science, of which astronomy occupies the chief place, is the study of the works of God, and of the power and wisdom of God in his works, and is the true theology. As to the theology that is now studied in its place, it is the study of human opinions and of human fancies concerning God. It is not the study of God himself in the works that he has made, but in the works or writings that man has made; and it is not among the least of the mischiefs that the Christian system has done to the world, that it has abandoned the original and beautiful system of theology, like a beautiful innocent, to distress and reproach, to make room for the hag of superstition.”

“By far the highest type of religious thought among the Ancients was that of their philosophers. With Saint Augustine, on the contrary, a new age was beginning, in which by far the highest type of philosophical thinking would be that of the theologians. True enough, even the faith of an Augustinian presupposes a certain exercise of natural reason. We cannot believe something, be it the word of God Himself, unless we find some sense in the formulas which we believe. And it can hardly be expected that we will believe in God's Revelation, unless we be given good reasons to think that such a Revelation has indeed taken place.”

“It will be said that, although God’s law is inscribed in our hearts, Scripture is nevertheless the Word of God, and it is no more permissible to say of Scripture that it is mutilated and contaminated than to say this of God’s Word. In reply, I have to say that such objectors are carrying their piety too far, and are turning religion into superstition; indeed, instead of God’s Word they are beginning to worship likenesses and images, that is, paper and ink.”

“The traditional arguments for the existence of God have been fairly thoroughly criticised by philosophers. But the theologian can, if he wishes, accept this criticism. He can admit that no rational proof of God's existence is possible. And he can still retain all that is essential to his position, by holding that God's existence is known in some other, non-rational way. I think, however, that a more telling criticism can be made by way of the traditional problem of evil. Here it can be shown, not that religious beliefs lack rational support, but that they are positively irrational, that the several parts of the essential theological doctrine are inconsistent with one another, so that the theologian can maintain his position as a whole only by a much more extreme rejection of reason than in the former case. He must now be prepared to believe, not merely what cannot be proved, but what can be disproved from other beliefs that he also holds.”

“As a rule, theologians know nothing of this world, and far less of the next; but they have the power of stating the most absurd propositions with faces solemn as stupidity touched by fear. It is a part of their business to malign and vilify the Voltaires, Humes, Paines, Humboldts, Tyndalls, Haeckels, Darwins, Spencers, and Drapers, and to bow with uncovered heads before the murderers, adulterers, and persecutors of the world. They are, for the most part, engaged in poisoning the minds of the young, prejudicing children against science, teaching the astronomy and geology of the bible, and inducing all to desert the sublime standard of reason.”

“The idea that reason and rationality is somehow separate from and antithetical to ones ' heart' is one of the most absurd theologies I have ever in my life heard." ~R. Alan Woods ("Just Keeping It Real", Copyright 2012)”

“Being that 'reason is not antithetical to faith' (Woods) and that Pentecost established the Reality of super-nature (Lewis) and that 'theology matters' (Wimber), then 'empowered evangelicalism' (Nathan) is the natural expression of discipleship." ~R. Alan Woods [2013]”

“From cave paintings depicting hunting grounds to the Babylonian tablets capturing the "whole world" (as they experienced it). Through the advancements of the Middle Ages, especially from Islamic scholars and Chinese cartographers. Massive strides came about with the Renaissance, as exploration and expansion abounded. Then on to the massive leaps to modern surveying and satellite imagery. The journey has been astonishing! I cannot help but think that this mirrors the path of our understanding of God and the world They created. Our sincere, yet limited perspectives began to expand as our experience and understanding grew. The reality of that which we sought to "map out" was (and is) often our best efforts, complicated by ignorance, limitations, bias, and more. We imperfectly stumble towards better, more honest representations. Even then, our growing understanding helps us see the limitations of our own attempts to bring meaning to that which is so much bigger than our capacity to fully understand. Just as we know that the Mercator projection map is deeply problematic and, in many ways, wildly incorrect, so too do so many of our understandings of the Divine often fail to meet our own standards. And in the same way, we also hold on to them because they are familiar and we are so deeply invested in them. And in the end, no matter how good and accurate and true our "maps" are, they will always and only ever be mere representations- pale reflections of a much grander, complex, and ever-changing reality.”

“Očevidno je da ne postoji nikakav smisao povijesti koji bi se dao spasiti leđima okrenutim prema Auschwitzu niti postoji Bog kojemu se čovjek može klanjati leđa okrenutih prema Auschwitzu. Kao teološko-politička katastrofa Auschwitz ne ostavlja pošteđenima niti kršćanstvo i njegovu teologiju niti društvo i njegovu politiku.”

“The thing I am here to say to you is this: that it is worse than useless for Christians to talk about the importance of Christian morality, unless they are prepared to take their stand upon the fundamentals of Christian theology. It is a lie to say that dogma does not matter; it matters enormously. It is fatal to let people suppose that Christianity is only a mode of feeling; it is vitally necessary to insist that it is first and foremost a rational explanation of the universe. It is hopeless to offer Christianity as a vaguely idealistic aspiration of a simple and consoling kind; it is, on the contrary, a hard, tough, exacting, and complex doctrine, steeped in a drastic and uncompromising realism. And it is fatal to imagine that everyone knows quite well what Christianity is and needs only a little encouragement to practice it. The brutal fact is that in this Christian country not one person in a hundred has the faintest notion what the Church teaches about God or man or society or the person of Jesus Christ.”

“Fortunate is the man who is broken in pieces and offered to others, who is poured out and given to others to drink. When his time of trial comes, he will not be afraid. He will have nothing to fear. He will already have understood that, in the celebration of love, by grace man is broken and not divided, eaten and never consumed. By grace he has become Christ, and so his life gives food and drink to his brother. That is to say, he nourishes the other's very existence and makes it grow.”

“It is evident that one who would merely aim at avoiding mortal sin would not be living according to the standard .of moral conduct outlined in the Gospel. Our Lord proposes to us as the ideal ot holiness the very perfection of Our Heavenly Father: "Be ye therefore perfect, as also your heavenly Father is perfect. " Hence, all having God for their Father must approach this divine perfection.... Fundamentally, the whole Sermon on the Mount is nothing but a commentary on and the development of this ideal. The path to follow is the path of renunciation, the path of imitation of Christ and of the love of God: "Any man come to me, and hate not" (that is to say does not renounce) "his father and mother and wife and children and brethren and sisters, yea and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple. " We are bound, then, on certain occasions to choose God and His will rather than the love of parents, of wife, of children, of self, and to sacrifice all to follow Christ. This suppose heroic courage, which will be found wanting in the time of need, unless God in His mercy give a special grace and unless one be prepared by sacrifices that are not of strict obligation. (355)”

“This theological life and witness is a blessing which sweetens man's life. It is a food which is cut up and given to others; a drink poured out and offered in abundance for man to consume and quench his thirst. In this state one does not talk about life, one gives it. One feeds the hungry and gives drink to the thirsty. By contrast, scholastic theology and intellectual constructions do not resemble the Body of the Lord, the true food, nor His Blood, the true drink; rather they are like a stone one finds in one's food. This is how indigestible and inhumanly hard the mass of scholasticism seems to the taste and the mouth of one accustomed to the liturgy of the Church, and it is rejected as something foreign and unacceptable.”

“The real desire [of feminism] is to break away from rationalism, androcentrisim and all forms of philosophy and practices that discriminate against women. The objective is to recover the use of senses, desire, taste, pleasure, pain and the mystery of life. It is a point of view which seeks to reflet with the body, that is, with sensitivity, with sexuality and, finally, with the story of the body itself. ~ Valmar Da Silva in Reading Other-Wise p. 125”

“Yet in order to sustain his creed, contemporary man pays the price in a remarkable lack of introspection. He is blind to the fact that, with all his rationality and efficiency, he is possessed by "powers" that are beyond his control. His gods and demons have not disappeared at all; they have merely got new names. They keep him on the run with restlessness, vague apprehensions, psychological complications, an insatiable need for pills, alcohol, tobacco, food–and, above all else, a large array of neuroses”