Quotes About Theology

Theology is in crisis, largely because it has lost its nerve and forgotten its purpose to help discern, articulate, and commend compelling visions of flourishing life in light of God's self-revelation in Jesus Christ.

A theological articulation can be fruitful in one place at one time but not at that same place at a different time or at a different place at the same time.

Love of enemies is a central moral conviction of the Christian faith; theologians who see their work as a mode of Christian life ought to love their intellectual "enemies": to respect them as human beings, even to seek their friendship, and certainly not to let a personal squabble rob them of a good and productive argument with them.

Many ministers are more the church's institutional managers than its theological guides; correspondingly, many read more management ("leadership") books than they do works of academic theology.

Our theology is insufficiently Christian—and less revealing of the truth than it should be, if Christian claims are indeed true (as we believe them to be)—when we repeat in religious idiom normative stances that nontheologians advocate, often with better arguments and greater rhetorical power.

The problem with Luther's account of the Christian faith and of theology is that he distinguishes too sharply between the "inner person" and the "outer person

What is needed is a biblically rooted,30 patristically guided,31 ecclesially located, and publicly engaged theology, done in critical conversation with the sciences and the various disciplines of the humanities, at the center of which is the question of the flourishing life.

requires going beyond the controversies that occasioned the letters to identify claims undergirding Paul's theology that are so fundamental either for Paul or for both Paul and his audience that they are assumed and therefore referenced merely obliquely and relatively rarely.

To exaggerate a bit: academic theology today is composed of specialists in an unrespected discipline who write for fellow specialists about topics that interest hardly anyone else.

Virtuous theologians work as God's stewards building God's home (1 Cor. 3:9), not masters building their own little empires.

Karl Barth imagined the Christian theologian in the role of John the Baptist in the painting of Matthias Grünewald: he is standing to the side of the cross, holding the open Hebrew Scriptures in one hand and pointing with a finger of the other to the crucified Christ.67 A theologian ought to draw attention to the way of life and to the one who originally embodied it, not to the intellectual prowess, fertile imagination, or dazzling rhetoric of the theologian.

It is not surprising that the liberal arts were most assiduously cultivated in the Middle Ages than ever before or after. When theology is queen of the sciences, liberal education flourishes in her train.

What we believe about God is crucial because it affects what we believe about everything else.

When it comes to helping women become better theologians, the church should be first in line. The church is not threatened if we do. It is endangered if we don't. Where there is weakness in the church, we are all vulnerable. When women are not included in the conversation, there are blind spots in the church's ministry—overlooked needs and issues, places where our theology is underdeveloped and detached. In Christ's

His theology is mostly focused on helping people with their physical needs. All that's important, of course, but he'll hit a dry spell someday and need something more than social causes to keep him going. ... if you're serious about writing on the deeper life, you simply cannot ignore the centrality of Jesus and the Holy Spirit.

It wasn't that Mattie didn't believe in God. She did, she most surely did. She just didn't like some of the things He did, is all.

He, however, who begins with Metaphysics, will not only become confused in matters of religion, but will fall into complete infidelity.

If we go deeply into theology, the same is true of God. It is an error to say: "God is," and it is also an error to say: "God is not." "Is" and "is not" are ideas that come from our mind, and cannot be applied to the wonderful, absolute truth.

If God absolutely and pretemporally decrees that particular persons shall be saved and others damned, apart from any cooperation of human freedom, then God cannot in any sense intend that all shall be saved, as 1 Timothy 4:10 declares. The promise of glory is conditional on grace being received by faith active in love.

God's holiness is not an unloving holiness, and God's love is not an unholy love. It is only by keeping these two primary moral qualities of the divine being closely related that we may rightly behold the character of God. (p. 98)

Theology is the study of God. The study of God is simply to be enjoyed for its own incomparable subject, the One most beautiful, most worthy to be praised. Life with God delights in its very acts of thinking, reading, praying and communing with that One most worthy to behold, pondered and studied, not for its written artifacts or social consequences but for the joy in its object.

The study of God requires intellectual effort, historical imagination, empathic energy, and participation in a vital community of prayer (Augustine, Answer to Skeptics).

She tried to argue, and tell him that he had mixed in his dull brain two matters, theology and morals, which in the primitive days of mankind had been quite distinct.

What woman, indeed, among the most faithful adherents of the truth, believes the promises and threats of the Word in the sense in which she believes in her own children, or would not throw her theology to the wind if weighed against their happiness?