Quotes About Doctrine

the old doctrine of ignoramus et ignorabimus—"we do not know and will not know.

Women had to discard the doctrines of sexual purity that so often led to frigidity in marriage. Entrepreneurs were glad to help. For just ten cents a woman could buy a discreetly wrapped book titled How I Kept My Husband, which instructed her in how to give oral sex.32

Europe learned that Buddhism was "a Babylon of doctrines so intricate that no one can understand it properly, or describe it.

Most world religions denounced war as a barbaric waste of human life. We treasured the teachings of these religions so dearly that we frequently had to wage war in order to impose them on other people.

ideologically fascist and progressive totalitarianism was never a mere doctrine of statism. Rather, it claimed that the state was the natural brain of the organic body politic.

Whenever and wherever the doctrines of free grace and justification by faith have prevailed in the Christian Church, and according to the degree of clearness with which they have been enforced, the practical duties of Christianity have flourished in the same proportion.

Hence was the different effect that Christ's miracles had to convince the disciples from what they had to convince the Scribes and Pharisees. Not that they had a stronger reason, or had their reason more improved; but their reason was sanctified, and those blinding prejudices, that the Scribes and Pharisees were under, were removed by the sense they had of the excellency of Christ and his doctrine. 2.

This light, and this only, has its fruit in an universal holiness of life. No merely notional or speculative understanding of the doctrines of religion will ever bring to this. But this light, as it reaches the bottom of the heart, and changes the nature, so it will effectually dispose to an universal obedience.

That we manifest our approbation of the Westminster Assembly's Catechism, as containing an excellent system of divinity; and we purpose to preach agreeably to the doctrines of the Bible exhibited therein.

In the 1890s Wilhelm Wundt, the founder of experimental psychology, formulated the doctrine of "affective primacy."7 Affect refers to small flashes of positive or negative feeling that prepare us to approach or avoid something. Every emotion (such as happiness or disgust) includes an affective reaction, but most of our affective reactions are too fleeting to be called emotions (for example, the subtle feelings you get just from reading the words happiness and disgust).

The purpose of Christian doctrine is not merely to make us more knowledgeable but to make us more mature as followers of Jesus Christ, to make us more like him.

Oral argued that the main problem with evangelism was its focus on correct doctrine. Christians, he said, needed to adopt a person-centered approach.6

I soon discovered that the great Christian doctrines connected more pictorially and "asiatically" when I used the classical biblical stories than when I used contemporary (and mainly Western) systematic theologies. Matthew, the most systematic of the Gospels, proved to be the ideal vehicle for teaching the major, Orthodox, Catholic, and Reformation convictions. . . . I found the earthy Gospels to be much closer to my Asian students than the profound yet more abstract Paul.

Membership in the Nazi Party was even forbidden by the Church for some time.

I have always been resistant to doctrine, and any spirituality I had experienced thus far in my life had been much more abstract and not aligned with any recognized religion. For me, the most trustworthy vehicle for spirituality had always proven to be music. It cannot be manipulated, or politicized, and when it is, that becomes immediately obvious.

We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand. A doctrine that is understood is shorn of its strength.

A heresy can spring only from a system that is in full vigor.

They (theological liberals)seemed to know what the answer was supposed to be and weren't much concerned with how to get there. They knew only that whatever answers the Fundamentalists came up with must be wrong.

The entire education of the younger generation of theologians belongs today in church cloister-like schools, in which pure doctrine, the Sermon on the Mount and worship are taken seriously—as they never are (and in present circumstances couldn't be) at the university. It

Thus," he said, "the Christian message is basically amoral and irreligious, paradoxical as that may sound.

Theology must lead to the practical aspects of how to live as a Christian.

Bonhoeffer was not interested in intellectual abstraction. Theology must lead to the practical aspects of how to live as a Christian.

What he had to say was really rather elementary: basic Christianity such as was professed in the Bible and in the doctrines of the Church of England, and to which almost everyone claimed to subscribe, was practically nonexistent in British society.

It is dreadful to hear time and again that National Socialism is a return to barbarism, to the Dark Ages, to times before any new progress toward humanitarianism was made, without these speakers even suspecting that precisely the secularization of life that accompanied the doctrine of humanitarianism is the soil in which such an anti-Christian religious movement as National Socialism was able to prosper.