Quotes About Doctrine

I must not take this or that doctrine by itself; but I must make up my mind whether or no it is the one only Catholic Church, and then I shall believe all that she teaches, because she teaches it, and not because I understand it.

It is possible to find within the limits of a stone's throw one Anglican divine who preaches practically the entire cycle of Catholic doctrine with the exception of that bearing upon the prerogative of Peter; another who denies in scarcely veiled language the Corporal Resurrection of Jesus Christ as well as His birth of a Virgin; another whose utterances are so calculated and obscure as to defy reasonable analysis.

The doctrine that future happiness depends upon belief is monstrous. It is the infamy of infamies. The notion that faith in Christ is to be rewarded by an eternity of bliss, while a dependence upon reason, observation and experience merits everlasting pain, is too absurd for refutation, and can be relieved only by that unhappy mixture of insanity and ignorance, called 'faith.

All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.

The issue of singing hymns versus Psalms split churches, including the one in

To have faith in Christ is to believe in him, and, as Stephen Robinson pointed out beautiful in his book Believing Christ (Deseret Book, 1992), it is to believe what the Lord says.

apparently sees some value in the antiquity of the doctrine of ... This means absolutely nothing to me, for whom the Scriptures alone are my sole doctrinal authority, beyond the fact that this is just one more error of the ancient fathers. I could fill pages documenting other errors that the ancient fathers held and espoused. Response to The Classic Arminian View of Election, page 135

But He is a God of love only as far as His justice, holiness, and righteousness will permit! His justice never contradicts His love and His love is in perfect harmony with his justice. If your doctrine makes them oppose one another, your theology is out of sync with Scripture.

Union with Christ is right at the center of the Christian doctrine of salvation. The whole of our relationship with God can be summed up in such terms. John Calvin agreed when he wrote: "For we await salvation from him not because he appears to us afar off, but because he makes us, ingrafted into his body, participants not only in all his benefits but also in himself."1

The doctrinal differences between Hinduism and Buddhism and Taoism are not anywhere near as important as doctrinal differences among Christianity and Islam and Judaism. Holy wars are not fought over them because verbalized statements about reality are never presumed to be reality itself.

For the believer in divine creation, the open question of the Mystery of Being is like an open wound. It stings and gapes, and the believer cannot rest till it be healed up, closed up, smeared with the soothing balm of an answer, even if his doctrine be a sophisticated one like Aquinas's or that of the latest Liberal Protestant theologian.

Were I in philosophic agreement with Mr. Chambers, I would say that his review is the proof of his doctrine that men are born with Original Sin and are inherently corrupt. But I am not in agreement with Mr. Chambers. He cannot blame Adam or God for that review. It is his responsibility.

A rule says, "You must do it this way." A principle says, "This works … and has through all remembered time.

There is no nonsense so gross that society will not, at some time, make a doctrine of it and defend it with every weapon of communal stupidity.

It is part of the received doctrine of modern biography that all characters are Flawed, and as a Christian priest I am quite ready to agree, but the Flaws the biographers exhibited usually meant that the person under discussion had not seen eye to eye with the biographer on matters of politics, or social betterment, or something impersonal.

The collapse of morale in the French Army arose not because of the German attack at Verdun but because the French generals, specifically Nivelle, also adopted the doctrine of attrition, and fought with cran and élan, instead of intelligence.

There was failure at every level: failure to see what was coming; failure to estimate how long the war would last; failure to set up a supreme command to fight the war strategically; and finally failure extended to the battlefields. Whatever their size, in terms of doctrine, the armies of 1914-1916 were nineteenth-century armies.

As for doctrine, Luther asserted the absolute authority of Holy Scripture and that each human must discover the meaning of scripture and establish his or her own, personal relationship with God.

When the Bishop of Gloucester systematically tested Church of England diocesan clergy in 1551, of 311 pastors, 171 could not repeat the Ten Commandments, and 27 did not know the author of the Lord's Prayer.

About all that Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans and Anabaptists agreed upon was the divinity of Jesus and the wickedness of the pope.

we find the university dominated by theology of another kind – a godless theology, to be sure, but one no less insistent upon unquestioning submission to doctrine, and no less ardent in its pursuit of heretics, sceptics and debunkers. People are no longer burned at the stake for their views: they simply fail to get tenure, or, if they are students, they flunk the course. But the effect is similar, namely to reinforce an orthodoxy in which nobody really believes.

Durkheim pointed out that you don't merely believe a religion but (more importantly) you belong to it, and that disputes over religious doctrine are, as a rule, not simply arguments about abstruse questions of metaphysics but attempts to give a viable test of membership, and hence a way of identifying and excluding the heretics who threaten the community from within. Religion

As to why God had singled out John D. Rockefeller for such spectacular bounty, Rockefeller always adverted to his own adherence to the doctrine of stewardship—the notion of the wealthy man as a mere instrument of God, a temporary trustee of his money, who devoted it to good causes. "It has seemed as if I was favored and got increase because the Lord knew that I was going to turn around and give it back."73

The struggle for the survival of the fittest, in the sea and on the land the world over, as well as the law of supply and demand, were observed in all the ages past until the Standard Oil Company preached the doctrines of cooperation, and it did cooperate so successfully and so fairly that its most bitter opponents were won over to its views and made to realize that rational, sane, modern, progressive administration was necessary to success.103