Quotes About Theologians

Theologians pitted devotion and morality against belief, defining faith no longer as a way of life but rather as intellectual assent to certain creeds or confessions; their books were filled with "quarrelling, disputing, scolding, and reviling."38

Then suddenly—or so it seemed to me—in the past two years Calvinism began emerging as an issue everywhere. Perhaps I am just waking up, but it seems to me that this peculiar doctrine is being promoted far more widely and aggressively now than I was ever aware in the past.4

Whether religion is man-made is a question for philosophers or theologians. But the forms are man-made. They are a human response to something. As a historian of religions, I am interested in those expressions.

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

Averroes, the last of the great medieval Arab philosophers, was fighting a rearguard defense of philosophy that was under attack from theologians, and, though translations of his works were to be much read in the universities of Christian Europe, he had little influence on later generations of thinkers in the Muslim world.

claiming publicly that comets follow natural law and not God's whim was a gutsy thing to do, especially given that the prior year—almost fifty years after Galileo's condemnation—the professor of mathematics at the University of Basel, Peter Megerlin, had been roundly attacked by theologians for accepting the Copernican system and had been banned from teaching it at the university.

If a public policy screecher began demanding that we all start rationing salt water because the planet Earth (which is our only home) was about to run completely out, and that many leading theologians agreed with this (and they would too), and that they offered their agreement in the name of the Lord Jesus, and with many solemn amens, I would still want to know how they could possibly think we were going to run out of salt water

The sinful state and condition in which men are born is designated in theology by the name peccatum originale, which is literally translated in the English "original sin.

We reach in desperation beyond the fog, beyond the very stars, the voids of the universe are ransacked to justify the monster, and stamped with a human face. London is religions opportunity--not the decorous religion of theologians, but an anthropomorphic, crude. Yes, the continuous flow would be tolerable if a man of our own sort--not anyone pompous or tearful--were caring for us up in the sky.

The text, 'Is God a White Racist', By Rev. Dr. William Jones, is still studied by theologians and academics and taught in institutes of higher learning. The book called into question the chief construction of black liberation theology: that God is on the side of the oppressed.

But let us assume, for the moment, that every three-day-old human embryo has a soul worthy of our moral concern. Embryos at this stage occasionally split, becoming separate people (identical twins). Is this a case of one soul splitting into two? Two embryos sometimes fuse into a single individual, called a chimera. You or someone you know may have developed in this way. No doubt theologians are struggling even now to determine what becomes of the extra human soul in such a case.

There were always historians who said [historical Jesus research] can not be done because of historical problems. There were always theologians who said it should not be done because of theological objections. And there were always scholars who said the former when they meant the latter.

It is an old habit with theologians to beat the living with the bones of the dead.

It's the generally accepted privilege of theologians to stretch the heavens, that is the Scriptures, like tanners with a hide.

The problem for Rome, then, is how and when the intervention should be done with a sense of the possibility of going too far in limiting the freedom of theologians. This is not an easy time - neither for Rome nor for the theologians.

Accusations are made directly to Rome about theologians from persons who are not theologians. Some of these accusations are anonymous. The local bishop should be the one to relate to theologians to determine orthodoxy.

Six-hundred-page biographies of German theologians aren't known to fly off the shelves.

In the nineteenth century, many Anglican theologians, both evangelical and catholic, embraced positively the proposal of evolution.

Politicians, ideologists, theologians and philosophers try time and again to provide solutions with nothing remaining: prefab solved problems.

Theology is never any help; it is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn't there. Theologians can persuade themselves of anything.

Sometimes I think the theologians have got it backwards. The big problem is not How to explain the existence of evil in this world. It's How to explain the existence of good.

Our cultural presuppositions affect the development of our theology and what we believe about the Bible. Our culture provides a semantic, conceptual framework through which we view God and the Bible. Most of us who are in ministry in evangelical pulpits have been educated under a Western European influence. The institutions where we have trained were heavily influenced by a European system using European theologians

Farsighted theologians are now working to mine the eternal metal from the teachings of Jesus and to forge it for all time.

Galileo was right, and the Church in this case abused its disciplinary power. As Pope John Paul II admitted in 1992: "This led them [the theologians who condemned Galileo] unduly to transpose into the realm of the doctrine of the faith, a question which in fact pertained to scientific investigation." Such acknowledgments, however, didn't come for almost four centuries.