Quotes About Doctrine

The stuff that's made up about Jesus - that you have to go through Jesus to get to God and if you're lucky, after you die, if you've done everything right, the reward is you get to sit on the right hand side of God. All that is made up by men. People made it up.

There are some good rules and there are some lousy rules.

I'm a participant in the doctrine of constructive ambiguity.

Few things in war can be as costly as doctrinal rigidity.

The habit of religion is oppressive, an easy way out of thought.

It's only religion. Faith is faith, but religions are no better than the people who practise them.

A religion without followers is just a weird guy with strange ideas.

If they can't find those answers in your holy writings, they'll move on to the next person's holy writings.

Every effort to safeguard what is considered truth inevitably leads to the crippling of truth, for the very act of enshrining a belief and treating it as settled truth and infallible doctrine is to declare that the search for truth has concluded. Any religion with a regard for truth must resist every effort to bring its search for truth to an end. This includes the formation of creeds, which by their nature are presented as conclusive and indisputable.

give me faith not religion...

The Bible gives us a theology which is more human than Calvinism, and more divine than Arminianism, and more Christian than either of them.1243

He also sent messengers to Pope Leo III., with the request to sanction the insertion of the clause in the Nicene Creed. The pope decided in favor of the doctrine of the double procession, but protested against the alteration of the creed, and caused the Nicene Creed, in its original Greek text and the Latin version, to be engraved on two tablets and suspended in the Basilica of St. Peter, as a perpetual testimony against the innovation.

But that the charge of Sabellianism and Montanism should be repeatedly urged against our doctrines, is much the same as if one should lay to our charge the blasphemy of the Anomœans. For if one were carefully to investigate the falsehood of these heresies, he would find that they have great similarity to the error of Eunomius.

The Calvinistic system involves a positive truth: the election to eternal life by free grace, and the negative inference: the reprobation to eternal death by arbitrary justice. The former is the strength, the latter is the weakness of the system. The former is practically accepted by all true believers; the latter always has been, and always will be, repelled by the great majority of Christians.

One person's religion is another person's cult.

The irony at the base of this situation is that the gospel of the free market is just as ideological as those of communism and fascism.

Therefore my advice would encompass the following nine commandments: Do not get used to a sole body language. Do not establish a doctrine. Surprise yourself. Dream in a loud voice. Invent. Keep diligent, mysterious and secret. Have a just and generous heart. Compassion, yes; but no remorse. Acquire a thirst for excellence.

The religious literature handed out by the earnest young missionaries in Temple Square makes no mention of the fact that Joseph Smith--still the religion's focal personage-- married at least thirty-three women and probably as many as forty-eight. Nor does it mention that the youngest of these wives was just fourteen years old when Joseph explained to her that God had commanded that she marry him or face eternal damnation.

Between 1840 and 1844 God instructed the prophet to marry some forty women.

In the morning he called together five trusted Mormon leaders and, "with broken spirit," informed them that God had revealed to him the necessity of relinquishing "the practice of that principle for which the brethren had been willing to lay down their lives." To the shock and utter horror of the other men in the room, President Woodruff explained that "it was the will of the Lord" that the church stop sanctioning the doctrine of plural marriage.

for devotees of doctrine tended to fall in love with their own righteousness, ignoring inconvenient facts.

Unflinching creeds and consuming worldviews could lead to catastrophe, for devotees of doctrine tended to fall in love with their own righteousness, ignoring inconvenient facts. He

He that has doctrinal knowledge and speculation only, without affection, never is engaged in the business of religion.

And here, though it makes an odd sound, yet it is necessary to say, that whoever professes himself a member of the Church of England, ought to believe a God and his providence, together with revealed religion, and the divinity of Christ. For