Quotes About Theological

I take comfort in knowing that it was the shepherds to whom the angels appeared when they announced Christ's birth. Invariably throughout the course of history, God has appeared to people on the fringes. It's nice to find theological justification for your quirks.

The narrative and theological force of this story is analogous to that of the saying, "Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you" (Matt. 21:31); just as that saying does not necessarily commend extortionate tax-farming and prostitution as continuing practices, so these stories about centurions cannot be read as endorsements of military careers for Christians.

Barth identifies three temptations that beset Christian ethics: (1) apologetics: the temptation to justify theological ethics on nontheological grounds; (2) differentiation: the temptation to isolate theological ethics as a special sphere of inquiry sharply distinguished from philosophical ethics; (3) coordination: the temptation to correlate theological ethics and philosophical ethics as mutually complementary.

All this – with much more in these chapters – makes up a wonderfully varied but coherent evocation of the biblical and theological meaning of the divine judgment John's prophecy pronounces on Rome; but if we try to read it as prediction of how that judgment will occur we turn it into a confused muddle and miss its real point.

Perhaps enough has been said to indicate that the imagery of Revelation requires close and appropriate study if modern readers are to grasp much of its theological meaning. Misunderstandings of the nature of the imagery and the way it conveys meaning account for many misinterpretations of Revelation, even by careful and learned modern scholars.

The key question in every transaction is whether or not the transaction contributes to the flourishing of each person involved, and this question can only be judged, from a theological point of view, according to the end of human life, which is participation in the life of God.

Each department of knowledge passes through three stages. The theoretic stage; the theological stage and the metaphysical or abstract stage.

We establish no religion in this country, nor will we ever. But we poison our society when we remove its theological underpinnings. We court corruption when we leave society devoid of belief.

Ethics is too fundamentally important a factor in civilization to depend upon a theological or a legal excuse; [pg 035] ethics must conform to the natural laws of human nature.

I believe student ministry needs reformation, not annihilation. I also believe the system currently in operation in many churches — more pizza parties than theological passion and more games than gospel — must be changed.

It was many years until I started meeting other people who were like me: very progressive-minded politically but also very conservative theologically.

The notion of the Bible as literature, though particularly contaminated in English by its use as a rubric for superficial college courses and for dubious publishers' packages, is needlessly concessive and condescending toward literature in any language. (It would at the very least be gratuitous to speak of Dante as literature, given the assured literary status of Dante's great poem, though the Divine Comedy is more explicitly theological, or religious, than most of the Bible.)

I wouldn't burden any decent system of faith by participating in it... I'm not agnostic. Just nonpartisan. Theological Switzerland, that's me.

as Lewis Smedes once pointed out, "We have no ideal world in which to find out what God expects us to do; we have only this changing and broken one. . . . And obedience to unchanging commands must adjust to changing conditions."11 But that in no way implies that the moral and theological guides are themselves relativistic, sometimes binding and at other times not.

There is a biblical benchmark I now use. We will refer to this criterion for every hard question, big idea, topic, assessment of our own obedience, every "should" or "should not" and "will" or "will not" we ascribe to God, every theological sound bite. Here it is: If it isn't also true for a poor single Christian mom in Haiti, it isn't true.

Summa theologiae

Then suddenly—or so it seemed to me—in the past two years Calvinism began emerging as an issue everywhere. Perhaps I am just waking up, but it seems to me that this peculiar doctrine is being promoted far more widely and aggressively now than I was ever aware in the past.4

The apostolic model of exposition of, reflection upon, and deduction from Scripture supports our engagement in the theological enterprise. If we are to help our generation understand the Scriptures, we too must deduce and arrange conclusions from what we have gained from our exegetical labors in Scripture and be ready to "dialogue" with men. Engagement in and the result of this task is theology.

There are many American conservatives, including those influenced by the Roman Catholic tradition of natural law philosophy, who believe that, in the end, the conservative position rests on theological foundations.

In so far as it helps the individual to forget himself and his ready-made opinions about the universe, religion will prepare the way for realization. In so far as it arouses and justifies such passions as fear, scrupulosity, righteous indignation, institutional patriotism and crusading hate, in so far as it harps on the saving virtues of certain theological notions, certain hallowed arrangements of words, religion is an obstacle in the way of realization.

Lutheranism restricted itself to an exclusively ecclesiastical and theological character, while Calvinism put its impress in and outside the church upon every aspect of human life.

which contemporary ecclesiastics were in good favor, which in bad, what recent theological hypothesis was suspect, and how this or that Jesuit or Dominican had skated on thin ice or sailed near the wind in his Lenten discourses; he had everything except the Faith

The first reason for the preponderant influence of those Evangelicals who define themselves as advocates of Religious Right theological and political ideologies is that they have both the financial means and technological know-how to make widespread use of modern electronic forms of communication.

For more than two decades, as the temperature climbed in Mississippi race relations, Reverend Hudgins built brick by brick a theological bulwark of personal and individual salvation, designed to protect white Christian power and white Christian consciences from black demands for justice.