Quotes About Doctrine

the followers of Jesus (most of them? all of them?) came to believe that Jesus was physically raised from the dead. That belief is a historical fact.

Orthodox" Christianity insisted that people are made right with God by faith in Jesus' death and resurrection. This Gospel maintains that people are saved by receiving the correct knowledge of who they really are.

It took a long time indeed for Jesus to be God in the complete, full, and perfect sense, the second member of the Trinity, equal with God from eternity and "of the same essence" as the Father.

Later orthodox theologians would have found this view completely inadequate. In stressing that the Father was "greater" than the Son, Tertullian articulated a view that would later be deemed a heresy. Theology, in these early years of the formation of Christian doctrine, could not stand still. It progressed and got more complicated, sophisticated, and refined as time went on.

The author of "The Little Labyrinth" indicates that the Theodotians maintained that their view—that Jesus was completely human, and not divine, but that he was adopted to be the Son of God—had been the doctrine taught by the apostles themselves and by most of the church in Rome until the time of Bishop Victor, at the end of the second century.

You have forgotten the doctrine of your own church, is it not so? The cross…the bread and wine…the confessional…only symbols. Without faith, the cross is only wood, the bread baked wheat, the wine sour grapes.

The world's religious rivals are clearly related, but they are more like second cousins than identical twins. They do not teach the same doctrines. They do not perform the same rituals. And they do not share the same goals.

You can be active in a church but inactive in its gospel.

The Koran likewise. The Magna Carta. The American Constitution. Billions of people govern their lives by those words. Society has been altered by them.

if the faithful stop believing in dogma, stop relying on the church for absolute guidance, then it is all over.

A womb-to-grave influence over every aspect of a person's life, each milestone dependent solely on adherence to church doctrine.

I believe that the rape-is-not-about-sex doctrine will go down in history as an example of extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds. It is preposterous on the face of it, does not deserve its sanctity, is contradicted by a mass of evidence, and is getting in the way of the only morally relevant goal surrounding rape, the effort to stamp it out.

The doctrine of a soul that outlives the body is anything but righteous, because it necessarily devalues the lives we live on this earth.

Quem tem familiaridade com a vida acadêmica sabe que ela gera cultos ideológicos propensos ao dogma e resistentes à crítica.

In The Blank Slate I argued that the modern denial of the dark side of human nature—the doctrine of the Noble Savage—was a reaction against the romantic militarism, hydraulic theories of aggression, and glorification of struggle and strife that had been popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The Blank Slate is today's Great Chain of Being: a doctrine that is widely embraced as a rationale for meaning and morality and that is under assault from the sciences of the day. As in the century following Galilee, our moral sensibilities will adjust to the biological facts, not only because facts are facts but because the moral credentials of the Blank Slate are just as spurious.

Theology without love simply is very bad theology.

The single axioms of the ideologically possessed are gods, served blindly by their proselytizers.

La doctrina cristiana elevó el alma individual, colocando al esclavo, al dueño, al plebeyo y al noble en una posición de igualdad metafísica, convirtiéndolos en iguales ante Dios y la ley.

The Christian doctrine elevated the individual soul, placing slave and master and commoner and nobleman alike on the same metaphysical footing, rendering them equal before God and the law.

As the Christian revolution progressed, however, the impossible problems it had solved disappeared from view. That's what happens to problems that are solved. And after the solution was implemented, even the fact that such problems had ever existed disappeared from view. Then and only then could the problems that remained, less amenable to quick solution by Christian doctrine, come to occupy a central place in the consciousness of the West

The heresies we should fear are those which can be confused with orthodoxy.

he noticed that the free thinkers, the doctrinaires of the bourgeoisie, people who claimed every liberty that they might stifle the opinions of others, were greedy and shameless puritans whom, in education, he esteemed inferior to the corner shoemaker.

Creer en el primer catecismo que se nos enseña o se nos impone, es renunciar a nuestra personalidad.