Quotessence
Home / Topics / Theology Quotes

Theology Quotes

Browse 1619 quotes about Theology.

Related topics

ChristianIfsMenPeopleThinkingReligionPhilosophyReligiousChurchWorldAtheismKnowsBelieveShouldChristian TheologyWayHumansJesusTheologianChristDoctrineMindPositive AtheismStudyChristianityFactsHas BeensBookMayPersonsTheologicalWantWellsDoeNeedsWholeGivingReasonIdeasMatterMeanViewsFormGodHeartRealityDogmaPrinciplesRealTraditionUseArtBiblicalFirstsImportantKindLawLittlesModernNaturalPrayerSpiritStatesSubjectsTeachingTheoryTurnsWritingAtheistDifferentDivineHeavenLongPracticeScienceBeliefExistenceFatherFeelingsGraceMadeMoralMoralitySinTryingCatholicCertainCharacterEthicsHolyJesus ChristLiteratureNotionSeemsSoulStillsTodayYearsChildrenConceptsmore

Theology Quotes

“12 Days of Christmas (Sonnet 1900) On the first day of Christmas my ode to thee, promise of messy love only sweetens by indignity. On the second day of Christmas my ode to thee, pocketful of moments become memories through amity. On the third day of Christmas my ode to thee, Christ ain't a cult but a voice against animosity. On the fourth day of Christmas my ode to thee, each act of hate is the same old crucifixion frenzy. On the fifth day of Christmas my ode to thee, intolerance is the desecration of sanctity. On the sixth day of Christmas my ode to thee, reason doesn't ruin, but enhances divinity. On the seventh day of Christmas my ode to thee, true miracle unfolds in everyday acts of empathy. On the eighth day of Christmas my ode to thee, save sermon on the mount all else is triviality. On the ninth day of Christmas my ode to thee, faith ought to enhance not degrade humanity. On the tenth day of Christmas my ode to thee, every stream reflects the same aspiring piety. On the eleventh day of Christmas my call to thee, every heart is a living church, from river to the sea. On the twelfth day of Christmas I entrust to thee, season of love and peace transcends ethnicity.”

ChristianChristianityTheologyChristmasPersecutionHate CrimeMerry ChristmasChristian NationalismChristian Poetry12 Days Of Christmas
Book:Little Planet on The Prairie: Dunya Benim, Sorumluluk Benim
Create image

“Do I think I do not need God? How is it that I believe and follow God if my tendency is to think I do not need relationships in my life? These questions started to plague my mind, but I could only come back to the thought of God’s grace. I believe that God allowed me to view him how I needed to; after all, he knew I needed him.”

LifeGraceTheologyPurpose Of LifeMessageFatherhood QuotesPurpose In Life QuoteDo You Need GodGod S Grace Quotes
Book:Reviving Fatherhood: Guiding Every Dad from First Steps to Lasting Legacy
Create image

“If I have so far argued that Foucault is a kind of closet liberal and thus deeply modern, I need to be equally critical of evangelical (and especially American) Christianity's modernity and its appropriation of Enlightenment notions of the autonomous self. Indeed, many otherwise orthodox Christians, who recoil at the notion of theological liberalism, have unwittingly adopted notions of freedom and autonomy that are liberal to the core. Averse to hierarchies and control, contemporary evangelicalism thrives on autonomy: the autonomy of the nondenominational church, at a macrocosmic level, and the autonomy of the individual Christian, at the microcosmic level. And it does not seem to me that the emerging church has changed much on this score; indeed, some elements of emergent spirituality are intensifications of this affirmation of autonomy and a laissez-faire attitude with respect to institutions.”

ChristianityInstitutionsTheologyDoctrineChurchesFoucaultEmergent ChurchNondenominational
Book:Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church
Create image

“In principle, to be sure, the Reformation idea of the universal priesthood of all believers meant that not only the clergy but also the laity, not only the theologian but also the magistrate, had the capacity to read, understand, and apply the teachings of the Bible. Yet one of the contributions of the sacred philology of the biblical humanists to the Reformation was an insistence that, in practice, often contradicted the notion of the universal priesthood: the Bible had to be understood on the basis of the authentic original text, written in Hebrew and Greek which, most of the time, only clergy and theologians could comprehend properly. Thus the scholarly authority of the Reformation clergy replaced the priestly authority of the medieval clergy.”

TheologyReformationProtestantismThe BiblePhilologyPriesthood Of All BelieversChristian HumanismAuthority In ChristianityBiblical Languages
Book:Jesus Through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture
Create image

“Many beginners also at times possess great spiritual avarice. They hardly ever seem content with the spirit God gives them. They become unhappy and peevish because they don't find the consolation they want in spiritual things. Many never have enough of hearing counsels, or learning spiritual maxims, or keeping them and reading books about them. They spend more time in these than in striving after mortification and the perfection of the interior poverty to which they are obliged.”

SpiritualityChristianityPrideTheologyDiscipleshipAvariceReligious EducationMortification Of Sin
Book:Dark night of the soul
Create image

“If he who hath posterity in Sion and kindred in Jerusalem hath been called happy, verily how much happier are we, for we have posterity in the heavenly Jerusalem. Verily.....”

ComfortBlessingSalvationTheologyBlessingsKingdom Of GodNew Jerusalem
Book:Legends of Eastern Saints Chiefly from Syriac Sources. Volume 1: Archelides; Volume 2: Hilaria. Bound with: Eusebii Pamphilii Historiae Ecclesiasticae Lib X, Ed A Schwegler.
Create image

“Stay away from St. Augustine: skillfully formulated subjectivity is not theology, not by a long shot, and it's harmful to young souls. Nothing but journalism with a few dialectical features. You won't take offense at this advice?" "No," I said, "I shall immediately go and throw my St. Augustine into the fire." "That's right," he said almost jubilantly, "into the fire with him. God bless you." I was on the point of saying Thank you, but it didn't seem appropriate, so I merely hung up and wiped the sweat off my face.”

TheologyDialogueSt Augustine
Book:The Clown
Create image

“There was no more reasonable sequitur between “provocation” and “reaction” in the case of the French Revolution than in the case of the Jews and the Nazis, the Armenians and the young Turks, the old Russian regime, the Kerensky interlude and bolshevism, Portuguese colonial rule in Angola and the horrors perpetrated by savage monsters of Holden Roberto’s “Liberation Front,” the Belgian administration in the Congo and the delirious atrocities of Gbenye and Mulele, British colonialism in Kenya and the Mau-Mau. We have to face the fact that man is not “good”—only the extraordinary man is, only the heroic saint or the saintly hero, while the noble savage belongs to the world of fairy tales.”

JusticeTheologyAtrocitiesOriginal SinDemocide
Book:Leftism Revisited: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot
Create image

“Take the beliefs of any fundamentalist, and replace all mentions of their particular religion with any other religion, and you won't be able to tell the difference. Why? Because fundamentalism changes only label from one religion to another, but the underlying prejudice, biases and bigotry remain the same. Because underneath every fundamentalism, there is the same old primitive, animal mind trying its darndest to defend the integrity of its personal mental universe.”

TheologyReligious ExtremismReligious FundamentalismNeurotheologyReligious IntoleranceReligious DiversityPsychology Of ReligionFundamentalistsScripture QuotesPrejudice Intolerance Diversity
Book:Sin Dios Sí Hay Divinidad: The Pastor Who Never Was
Create image

“An attempt to wrest from God the prerogatives of absolute freedom and infinity leads to the inversion of Pentecost and what is in effect a new Babel. 'Postmodernism' represents that Babel perfectly, because when each speaks a language unrelated to that of the other - when language is not the basis of the communication that shapes our being - the only outcome can be fragmentation. In that sense, postmodernism is modernity come home to roost.”

GodTheologyModernityPostmodernismPentecostFragmentationBabel
Book:The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation, and the Culture of Modernity
Create image

“The apostle Paul often appears in Christian thought as the one chiefly responsible for the de-Judaization of the gospel and even for the transmutation of the person of Jesus from a rabbi in the Jewish sense to a divine being in the Greek sense. Such an interpretation of Paul became almost canonical in certain schools of biblical criticism during the nineteenth century, especially that of Ferdinand Christian Baur, who saw the controversy between Paul and Peter as a conflict between the party of Peter, with its 'Judaizing' distortion of the gospel into a new law, and the party of Paul, with its universal vision of the gospel as a message about Jesus for all humanity. Very often, of course, this description of the opposition between Peter and Paul and between law and gospel was cast in the language of the opposition between Roman Catholicism (which traced its succession to Peter as the first pope) and Protestantism (which arose from Luther's interpretation of the epistles of Paul). Luther's favorite among those epistles, the letter to the Romans, became the charter for this supposed declaration of independence from Judaism.”

LawChristianityTheologyDoctrinePeterJudaismGospelMartin LutherPaulRoman CatholicismBook Of Romans
Book:Jesus Through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture
Create image

“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.”

TheologyPractical TheologyAnselmChristopraxis
Book:Christopraxis: A Practical Theology of the Cross
Create image

“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.”

TheologyPractical TheologyTheology Of The CrossAnselmChristopraxis
Book:Christopraxis: A Practical Theology of the Cross
Create image

“...the whole configuration of human development needs to be reconceptualized. A lifetime ought not to be thought of in linear manner, an ascending upward gradient, or a kind of bell-shaped curve in which persons develop from one stage of helplessness as an infant through a lifetime to a final stage of helplessness in old age... In...God resides the ultimate coherence from whom each passion for understanding, each new insight, new stage, new vision of the universe, derives its ultimate intelligibility and toward which all such phenomena point.”

TheologyHuman DevelopmentPractical Theology
Book:The Logic of the Spirit: Human Development in Theological Perspective
Create image

“One could say that Hopkins practiced transubstantiation in every poem. By mysterious talent, he changed plain element into reality sublime. He encountered a jumble of weather, birds, trees, branches, waters, blooms, dewdrops, candle flames, prayers, then instressed them and, delighted, wrote in his journal, 'Chance left free toact falls into an order.”

PoetryBeautyTheologyProphetic ImaginationGerard Manley Hopkins
Book:The Gospel in Gerard Manley Hopkins
Create image

“The Incarnation of Christ raised the energy of everything. And when Hopkins placed his conviction of this into poetry, he tended to mention electricity, lightening, fire, flash, flame. He wrote in his late, great poem, "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and the comfort of the Resurrection": 'In a flash, at a trumpet crash, / I am all at once what Christ is, / since he was what I am and / This jack, joke, poor potsherd, / patch matchwood, immortal diamond, / Is immortal diamond.”

PoetryTheologyIncarnationProphetic ImaginationGerard Manley Hopkins
Book:The Gospel in Gerard Manley Hopkins
Create image

“The whole is the Absolute; but within it every particle is in a constant state of flux and change. It is unchangeable and changeable at the same time, Impersonal and Personal in one. The Personal God and all that exists in the universe are the same Impersonal Being seen through our minds. When we shall be rid of our minds, our little personalities, we shall become one with It. This is what is meant by "Thou art That". For we must know our true nature, the Absolute. The finite, manifested man forgets his source and thinks himself to be entirely separate. We, as personalised, differentiated beings, forget our reality, and the teaching of monism is not that we shall give up these differentiations, but we must learn to understand what they are.”

GodTheologyHinduismVedantaVedanta ConceptsMonism
Book:Practical Vedanta
Create image

“I have to let go of all comparison, all rivalry and competition, and surrender to the Father’s love. This requires a leap of faith because I have little experience of non-comparing love. I can only remain in the resentful complaint that results from my comparisons. In the light of God I can finally see my neighbor as my brother, as the one who belongs as much to God as I do. But outside of God’s house, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, lovers and friends become rivals and even enemies; each perpetually plagued by jealousies, suspicions, and resentments.”

LoveGodFaithSpiritualityTheologyRivalryParablesProdigal SonComparisonsResentfulness
Book:The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming
Create image

“Once again, theology becomes technology... we will smash blatant alarmism about us losing consciousness while merging with 'machines of loving grace' as you may find certain philosophers harping about. If you believe in the conscious universe, this hierarchical matryoshka of conscious systems, then just the opposite beckons to be true – transcending low-dimensional consciousness of man by evolutionarily leaping onto advanced sublime consciousness of the Noosphere – for which many proponents of teleological evolution, the Omega Point cosmology, and digital theology would wholeheartedly vouch.”

ConsciousnessTheologyCosmologyOmega PointNoosphereDigital TheologyConscious SystemTeleological EvolutionConscious UniverseMachines Of Loving Grace
Book:Theology of Digital Physics: Phenomenal Consciousness, The Cosmic Self & The Pantheistic Interpretation of Our Holographic Reality
Create image

“Reformer Needed (The Sonnet) To put the politicians straight, What's needed is a reformer. To put the soldiers straight, What's needed is a reformer. To put the scientists straight, What's needed is a reformer. To put the philosophers straight, What's needed is a reformer. To put the entrepreneurs straight, What's needed is a reformer. To put the preachers straight, What's needed is a reformer. And how does the reformer remain straight, By looking beyond the beliefs of binary lanes.”

IntellectTheologyService Of HumanityAccountabilitySocial ResponsibilityPolitical ScienceSocial ReformerHumanitarian PoemReformer PoetryReformist Poet
Book:Mucize Misafir Merhaba: The Peace Testament
Create image

“Jesus was able to die as the Lamb of God to take away the sins of the world (John 1:29), because He was without sin (Heb. 4:15). He was qualified to be an adequate substitute so mankind doesn't have to die (1 Pet. 3:18), but instead can receive the forgiveness of sins (Matt. 26:28).”

ForgivenessSalvationTheologyEternal LifeScripturesLamb Of GodSubstitutionary AtonementJesus Sacrifice
Book:ONE: Unfolding God's Eternal Purpose from House to House
Create image

“Plato’s heirs—armed with his methods, but unchained from his wistful predilections—abstracted away the faces of the pagan gods: the marbles that in Homer’s day were warm Olympian flesh were philosophized into dust and that dust into theology. Consequently, the labor of keeping beauty and goodness yoked became moot as their separation in the realm of experience, in art and religion—their correspondent spheres of human activity—became so obviously distinct. Christianity supplanted paganism and the art of yore, which had formerly been principally confined to civil and religious expression, was gradually supplanted by an art that was its own unique means by which humanity understood itself. In due course, following the birth of Romanticism, art stood on the field of history its own inexorable self.”

PhilosophyChristianityTheologyPlatoPaganismRomanticismOlympianHomer
Author:Michael Shindler
Create image

“The pairing of these stories challenges readers' expectations. The educated, powerful, Jewish man should understand who Jesus is and respond, yet Nicodemus’s choice to seek Jesus out at night associates him with darkness and unbelief. The Samaritan woman should not understand Jesus. But she holds her own in the conversation, and by the end she clearly sees who Jesus is. In a surprising twist, the Samaritan woman becomes the model for readers to follow.”

TheologyNicodemusThe Samaritan Woman
Book:The Samaritan Woman's Story: Reconsidering John 4 After #ChurchToo
Create image

“It is also possible to say precisely why. Truth seduces us very easily into a kind of joy of possession: I have comprehended this and that, learned it, understood it. Knowledge is power. I am therefore more than the other man who does not know this and that. I have greater possibilities and also greater temptations. Anyone who deals with truth - as we theologians certainly do - succumbs all too easily to the psychology of the possessor. But love is the opposite of the will to possess. It is self-giving. It boasteth not itself, but humbleth itself.”

ChristianityKnowledgeTheologySeminarySpiritual Pride
Book:A Little Exercise for Young Theologians
Create image

“And so they easily suppose that this truce, owing to helplessness, is victory and that they have convinced the other man. But in fact, instead of winning him over, they have merely applied a kind of shock therapy — only it was never 'therapy.' They have smothered the first little flame of a man’s own spiritual life and a first shy question with the fire extinguisher of their erudition. By such performances a person can really be smothered and strangled!”

ChristianityTheologySeminarySpiritual Pride
Book:A Little Exercise for Young Theologians
Create image

“It is a mistake for anyone who is just in this stage to appear before a church as a teacher. He has outgrown the naivete with which in young people’s work he might by all means have taken this part. He has not yet come to that maturity which would permit him to absorb into his own life and reproduce out of the freshness of his own personal faith the things which he imagines intellectually and which are accessible to him through reflection. We must have patience here and be able to wait. For the reasons I have mentioned I do not tolerate sermons by first-semester young theological students swaddled in their gowns. One ought to be able to keep still. During the period when the voice is changing we do not sing, and during this formative period in the life of the theological student he does not preach.”

ChristianityTheologySeminarySpiritual Pride
Book:A Little Exercise for Young Theologians
Create image

“The medieval European, who shared the fundamental assumptions of his Muslim contemporary, would have agreed with him in ascribing religious movements to religious causes, and would have sought no further for an explanation. But when Europeans ceased to accord first place to religion in their thoughts, sentiments, interests, and loyalties, they also ceased to admit that other men, in other times and places, could have done so. To a rationalistic and materialistic generation, it was inconceivable that such great debates and mighty conflicts could have involved no more than ‘merely’ religious issues. And so historians, once they had passed the stage of amused contempt, devised a series of explanations, setting forth for what they described as the ‘real’ or 'ultimate’ significance 'underlying’ religious movements and differences. The clashes and squabbles of the early churches, the great Schism, the Reformation, all were reinterpreted in terms of motives and interests reasonable by the standards of the day—and for religious movements of Islam too explanations were found that tallied with the outlook and interests of the finders.”

ReligionIslamTheologyBernard Lewis
Book:Islam in History: Ideas, People, and Events in the Middle East
Create image

“Nevertheless, we should take the worries about reducing theology to philosophy seriously. So what we need is a philosophical approach to Divine revelation that steers clear of two oposing forms of reductionism that we have encountered so far: On the one hand, a philosophical rationalism that aims at reducing articles of faith to philosophical principles, on the other hand, a theological fideism that takes itself to be free of the restrictions of rationality and reason, and despises rational analysis in matters of faith.”

FaithDivineTheologyRevelationRationalismSchellingFideism
Author:Henning Tegtmeyer
Create image

“To merely blank the page and vaguely assume that 'religion' is the cause of all the world's problems is, on the contrary, an allegation brought about by nothing more than cognitive lethargy; it is when unburied, unpacked, and exposed but a stale conclusion and a misdirection for the one overwhelmed by centuries of sound theology, scholarly thought, and spiritual development.”

ReligionTheologyLazyApologeticsTheology Of Religions
Book:Healology
Create image

“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.”

PoliticsInternetTheologyFundamentalismHeresyMisinformationZeitgeistFaith And ReasonFaith And ScienceSpirit Of The AgeChurch And Culture
Author:David D. Flowers
Create image

“If the first Adam was formed from dust, and the second conceived of Spirit and born of woman, then the coming of the Son of Man signals something even more radical: a third Adam… Not a new individual, but the emergence of a collective humanity, transfigured.”

ChristianityTheologyAdamAtonementSanctificationEschatologySon Of ManTelosSecond Adam
Book:The Son of Man & Its Mystical Awakening: Reclaiming Eschatology & Atonement During a Convergence of Globalization, Nihilism, Science, & Spirituality
Create image

“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.”

TheologyChristian LivingMissionary WorkSufferingsSuffering Jesus
Book:Filling Up the Afflictions of Christ: The Cost of Bringing the Gospel to the Nations in the Lives of William Tyndale, Adoniram Judson, and John Paton
Create image

“Lock-n-Key (The Sonnet) I am the lock, You are the key. Sight of your smile, showers me with glee. I got no need for church-n-mosque, Got no need for God or Jehovah. These are for those seeking security, Upon love's face unfolds my Mecca. Yesterday I was a sensible infant, I studied scripture seeking holiness. Today I am a grownass nutter, Only godly gift is love's holy mess. Bibles are expendable, Altars are expendable. Till love takes preference, God itself is expendable.”

TheologyHolinessUnconditional LoveHumanistSufismSufiDivine LoveLove PoemSelfless LoveSufi Love Poetry
Book:Yüz Şiirlerin Yüzüğü (Ring of 100 Poems, Bilingual Edition): 100 Turkish Poems with Translations
Create image

“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.”

TheologySacramentsJohn Wesley
Book:John Wesley's Doctrine of the Sacraments
Create image