Quotes About Theology

Gregory of Nazianzus was amused by any who would insistently hold "God to be a male" which he regarded as a misplaced analogy.

You cannot conclude that God, because Father, is therefore male.

The worshiping community confesses and intercedes on the basis of, not the theory of God's existence, but the experience of a multigenerational community of witnesses.

You will remain theologically uneducated until you study carefully Athanasius, Augustine and Aquinas.

Many of Wesley's ultramodern interpreters are focused on accommodating Wesley in ways congenial to contemporary audiences. Some have entirely recast Wesley in terms of liberation theology or process theology or gender studies in a way that leaves Wesley himself only vaguely recognizable. My mission is to let him speak for himself in his own language to modern believers

Questions about God's existence, self disclosure, saving action and almighty power reminded me of my inadequacies. For me the theo in theology had become little more than a question mark. I could confidently discuss philosophy, psychology and social change, but God made me uneasy.

There's a moment for everybody when you look at that picture of Jesus in the church and think, 'This doesn't totally make sense.' If God made everything, then who made God? We have no idea.

Religion is based on the idea that God is an imbecile.

Cyrus Scofield, a preacher from Dallas, Texas, was another link in the chain that connected missionary theology on both sides of the Atlantic. This violent priest produced an annotated, fundamentalist version of the Bible that was published by Oxford University Press in 1909. It was, in a way, the most explicit sketch of the three prongs that form the basis for U.S. policy today: the return of the Jews, the decline of Islam, and the rising fortunes of the United States as a world power.

J. dBudziszewski points out, "The motto 'Reason Alone!' is nonsense anyway. Reason itself presupposes faith. Why? Because a defense of reason by reason is circular, therefore worthless. Our only guarantee that human reason works is God who made it.

C. S. Lewis put it, "If we admit God, must we admit Miracle? Indeed, indeed, you have no security against it. That is the bargain.

Justification is the act of declaring a sinner righteous in the eyes of God.

Surely, no one who believes in an all-good God, who wants all to do good, could consistently claim that God gave Lucifer the desire to rebel against Him. Perish the thought!

Romans 9:13—This verse seems to teach that God does not love everybody.

not that he is totally deprived of all creaturely good metaphysically.

Yes, God is the author of everything, including evil, in the sense that He permits it, but not in the sense that He produces it. Evil happens in His permissive will, but He does not promote evil in His perfect will.

finite being needs a cause, the Cause of all finite beings (God) does not need a cause: He is the Uncaused Cause and Unlimited Limiter of all limited things.

Romans 5:14—Is it fair to judge all people because of Adam's sin?

Maybe humans are just the pet alligators that God flushed down the toilet.

You ever wonder if Adam and Eve were just the puppies God dumped because they wouldn't house-train?

Atheism is partly the result of bad theology, an unpaid bill resulting from failures in depicting God. It is not surprising that many have rejected God when there has been so little to attract them to him. Perhaps they would not reject as readily the God disclosed in Jesus Christ, who is an event of loving relationally and relates readily to the temporal world.

Theology always gets into trouble when its practitioners think they know what God is like apart from what revelation says God is like.

Burning in the ardor of their new faith to convert the pagan masses, the early fathers of the Christian Church strove to emphasize the differences between their religion and its theological predecessor by forcing upon the Jews a kind of spiritual apartheid. The Emperor Theodosius II gave those aspirations legal force in his code, condemning Judaism and, for the first time, legally branding the Jews a people apart.

When I first entered the ministry, I dreamed of communicating God's Word so powerfully that people would mull it over and discuss it during the week. I envisioned impassioned discussions of the deep theological truth I'd presented in the sermon. I must have been smoking something.