Quotes About Doctrine

Religion is actually all of these—belief or doctrine, feeling or attitudes, and a way of life or manner of behaving.

the twin pillars that guard the entrance to the shrine of religion are storytelling and cruelty.

I reject any religious doctrine that does not appeal to reason and is in conflict with morality.

A policy is a temporary creed liable to be changed, but while it holds good it has got to be pursued with apostolic zeal.

You are the sole expounder of the doctrine; Wisdom shall die with you, no doubt, good brother, You are the only wise, the sole enlightened

An idea is something you have; an ideology is something that has you

The human spirit inclines readily toward heresy, arguing against imposed doctrine and challenging the institution that prescribes it.

Final perseverance is the doctrine that wins the eternal victory in small things as in great

Beliefs are everywhere, you don't have to be a religious person to believe something.

Different religions are based upon different opinions of the founders of those religions.

For religion is the book and the words within it. It is innocent from any committed action(s).

Since every religion is based upon a philosophical idea, it would make sense that we are all following the philosophies of our religious founders.

The concept of predestination takes away the true meaning of the day of judgment.

When 'biblical' theologies ignore the gospels, something is clearly very wrong." (on atonement theories)

The gospels were all about God becoming king, but the creeds are focused on Jesus being God.

Romans 4 is all about the covenant that God made with Abraham in Genesis 15. It is not a detached statement about someone in the ancient scriptures who was "justified by faith." It is not simply a "proof from scripture" of the "doctrine" that Paul has stated in Romans 3. Abraham is not simply an "example" of either the way God's grace operates or the way some humans have faith.

Justification is not how someone becomes a Christian. It is the declaration that they have become a Christian. And the total context of this doctrine, here in Philippians 3, is that of the expectation - not of a final salvation in which the individual is abstracted from the present world, but of the final new heavens and new earth, as the Lord comes from the heavenly realm to transform the earthly

Theology, after all, was made for the sake of the church, not the church for theology. I

The 'popular Paul' has all too often been addressing sixteenth-century questions in a nineteenth-century tone of voice

Faith involves believing that certain things are true, of course. But (here's another caricature we have to put firmly to bed) this isn't about odd, detached dogmas. It's about certain things in the light of which everything else at last comes into focus.

the church has unhesitatingly privileged the creed and let the canon fend for itself—

Anyone who supposes that, because a church has officially renounced some doctrine, nobody thereafter will hold to it, has little experience of real church life.

so far as I can tell, most people simply don't know what orthodox Christian belief is.

If anywhere in the whole New Testament teaches an explicit doctrine of "penal substitution," this is it—but it falls within the narrative not of a "works contract," not of an angry God determined to punish someone, not of "going to heaven," but of God's vocational covenant with Israel and through Israel, the vocation that focused on the Messiah himself and then opened out at last into a genuinely human existence: