Quotes About Doctrine

All but a few of those messages of concern to the Senate and much of the commentary in the news media had come from people who held radical beliefs with evangelical passion and would spring ferociously to their defense at the slightest sign that they were being questioned. Hammett knew their minds: Correctness was virtue; belief was personal validity; doctrine was truth. All else was evil.

The applicability of the Establishment Clause to public funding of benefits to religious schools was settled in Everson v. Board of Ed. of Ewing, which inaugurated the modern era of establishment doctrine.

The United States was born with an imperialist impulse. There has been a long confrontation between Monroe and Bolivar... It is necessary that the Monroe Doctrine be broken.

Basic religion is the reason we have morals.

I think Mormons are good, moral people, but they're not part of Christianity.

The highest men are calm, silent and unknown...The true masters seldom reveal themselves, except in the vibrations the leave behind, and upon which the lesser gurus build their doctrines.

religion is a paramount contributor to human misery. It is not merely the opium of the masses, it is the cyanide.

The world doesn't extend in merely two dimensions. There exist profound depths within itself. This world could never be summarized by materialism or any single doctrine. Accept the great mysteries...and explore the universe from within your world. That is the way of magic.

So holy water really does work?

Desire for God without doctrine is blind; doctrine without desire is empty. The

The theory-practice dichotomy that still bedevils many a theological curriculum serves neither seminary nor church. There is a debilitating dichotomy between what Christians believe (doctrine) and how they live their lives (discipleship).

Doctrine forms disciples when it helps the church to act out its new life in Christ.

Chrysostom at length expressed the need for the overseer of God's people to preach true doctrine and refute false teaching:

Christian doctrine is what the church believes, teaches, and confesses as it prays and suffers, serves and obeys, celebrates and awaits the coming of the kingdom of God. —Jaroslav Pelikan

The English term "martyr" comes from the Greek martys, "witness." Søren Kierkegaard defines witness as "someone who directly demonstrates the truth of the doctrine he proclaims—directly, yes, partly by its being the truth within him, … partly by his volunteering his personal self and saying: See, now, if you can force me to deny this doctrine.

President Eisenhower, like many Americans, is a very fervent believer in a very vague religion.

There is no proper way to discuss what God will do in the future unless we have our feet firmly planted in biblical teaching about what God has done in the past.

You can disagree with another person's opinions. You can disagree with their doctrines. You can't disagree with their experience.

And evangelicalism, from its roots in revivalism and pietism, through its development in the pragmatic, anti-speculative culture of America, to its current existence as a more-or-less amorphous, transdenominational coalition, has historically embodied in its very essence an antipathy to precise and comprehensive doctrinal statements.

Christian theology, in other words, always has a certain ineradicable complexity, which has serious implications for the modern evangelical predilection for simple and very brief statements of faith.

Abandoning the myth of the evangelical movement can only help us, as it will free us to be who we truly are and to speak the gospel in all of its richness as we understand it.

What I am claiming is that mere Christianity, a Christianity which lacks this doctrinal elaboration, is an insufficient basis either for building a church or for guaranteeing the long-term stability of the tradition of the church, i.e. the transmission from generation to generation and from place to place of the faith once for all delivered to the saints.

Much of the appeal of dogma in religion is that it gives its followers rules to follow that rescue them from having to find out who they are and what they really think.

Those who neglect theology may live a shallow, insipid form of Christianity that, in the end, neither affects life nor endures the test of time.