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Theology Quotes

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Theology Quotes

“Theres a verse thats meant a lot to me ever since I was in my early 20s. 2 Timothy 2:8, Paul told Timothy to remember Jesus Christ, descended from David and raised from the dead. Thats a good principle, that if my theology, my whole life can be focused on remembering Jesus. Just trying to remember who He is, what He did, being strong in what He did and what He accomplished.”

“There is the view I call penal non-substitution, or the penal example view. (It is also called the Governmental View in textbooks of theology.) This is often associated with Arminian theology stemming from the great Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius. However, the view was taken up by [Jonathan] Edwards's disciples in New England, who developed a Calvinistic strand of the doctrine.”

“It is often reported that the Five Points of Calvinism are the conceptual hard-core of Reformed thought. That is very misleading. The Five Points supposedly originate with the Synod of Dort in the early seventeenth century. Yet we find important Reformed leaders who were signatories to that documentation who don't think that limited atonement is the right way to think about the scope of Christ's saving work. How can this be? The answer that recent historical theology has thrown up is that the canons of the Synod don't require adherence to the doctrine of limited atonement.”

“There's a stronger and more kind of controversial element of Plotinus' view of matter, which is that he actually identifies it with evil, or at least the principle of evil, and the reason for this is that he thinks that the the One, the highest principle, can also be thought of as the Good, and that's kind of surprising like, because he has this negative theology which doesn't allow us to say anything about the One. But he believes that it can be seen as the principle of goodness as well as unity, and that if you think about it, goodness and unity sort of go along with each other.”

“In general, in the matters that relate to theology or behavior, people to one another, Paul was obviously biblically correct. But when he said that women should always cover their hair or that women should not teach men, women should not have leadership positions in the church, women should not speak in the church, I don't' think that those writings of Paul can be extracted by themselves to stand alone. Also, Paul said that women should be subservient to their husbands but if you read a couple of verses down it says husbands should treat their wives as equals.”

“There's two kinds of thinking. There is conjunctive thinking and there's disjunctive thinking. Disjunctive thinking says it has to be either/or. Now clearly, there are some either/or's - I either trust Christ or I don't. I'm either pregnant or I'm not. But a lot of thinking in Scripture, when it comes to theology is, in my opinion, conjunctive thinking. It's both/and. I believe that and I believe that.”

“When climate change gets some attention in a 100-page document, the most important parts of which will have to do with the theology of stewardship and the theology of "human ecology," it's almost certainly going to be rapturously embraced, or bitterly opposed, as a "global-warming encyclical," despite the evidence that it's much more broadly gauged than that.”

“The pope [Francis] takes his vocabulary from his pastoral experience, not from the rhetorical tool kit of liberation theology, with its Marxist yammering about "center" and "periphery." The "peripheries," for Francis, are all those who have fallen through the cracks of late-modernity and post-modernity - in his native Argentina, because of colossal corruption, political and financial.”

“I guess I will say, going back to the Judaism questions, there are mental reflexes or patterns that I think of as Jewish in my own feelings about mysticism and theology.Franz Kafka is someone I very much revere. If I believed in holy texts I'd go to him as a touchstone. Not that I read Kafka all the time at this point. In a way, this is what I most want to talk about and it's the hardest to talk about.”

“I'm not interested in being an intellectual or in being traditional, conventional. I'm not interested in having great wisdom. I'm not interested in those facets of the evangelical movement. I don't have to get stuff from them. I got my own stuff. If it hits you, okay. That's why I've got so many different races, classes, and such a mixture of theologies and philosophies. I've got agnostics, atheists, Buddhists, Christians, Jews, Muslims the whole spectrum.”

“Palestinian believers have a unique experience with US foreign policy and our close ties with Israel. This alliance has many layers, but given the strong support of the US church, and the frequency of religious language surrounding these policies, Palestinian Christian friends raise important and challenging questions about how we understand the intertwining of theology and politics in the US.”

“Is there an aesthetic "fit" in my work between God and the world? The "I' in my poems has from the beginning identified himself as Catholic, and my books certainly can be read as presenting a Catholic theology "in a very particular sense." Catholicism is a faith morally identified with the human struggle for human dignity and justice. It is a vision of the world incarnationally rooted in the senses, a faith of and in spoken and written words - Scripture, "the Word of God," the Logos.”

“Jesus clearly believed in the reality of Satan and other principalities and powers. Now, I have very compelling historical, philosophical, and existential reasons for concluding that Jesus is Lord, and if I confess him to be Lord, I don't see how I can consider myself in a position to ever correct his theology, especially about such a foundational theological matter!”

“I think one of the great strengths of Americans United is that it has such diversity. That it has not only people who have no religious belief, but lots of people who do and who take that belief very seriously. And I think that provides us with a great opportunity to talk about the separation of church and state. There are plenty of other groups, and some of them are quite good at what they do, but they also have an agenda of non-theism, but we don't have, you might say, a theology. We just have a commitment to the Constitution.”

“Oddly enough, my favorite genre is not fiction. I'm attracted by primary sources that are relevant to historical questions of interest to me, by famous old books on philosophy or theology that I want to see with my own eyes, by essays on contemporary science, by the literatures of antiquity.”