Quotes About Theology

People in today's world, whether Muslim or not, will not pay attention to Christians because we can explain our theology in crystal-clear terms. They will not esteem us because we give to charity or maintain a positive outlook on life. What will impress them is genuine love in our hearts.

Above all, we will see how intimately linked all these doctrinal struggles were to the politics of the great empires. Power invariably attracts religion, and religion attracts power. Theology is secondary.

For the state, theology is too important to be left to the theologians.

Islam, believing that Jesus was only a physical being and not a divinity, shares the view that Jesus only seemed to die on the cross, but was saved by God and taken to heaven.

The view was thus declared heretical in 416 CE. Islam, too, denies the validity of original sin and of mankind's inherent sinfulness.

Power, then, is the final trap, the ultimate corrupter: the closer religion becomes linked with state power, the further it drifts away from the realm of intellect and spirit and into the realm of the political—with direct implications for state power and authority. The state cannot then be indifferent to theology. When the state's official beliefs and doctrines are challenged, the state's authority itself is challenged—and the state does not look kindly upon it.

Our task is to decipher the meaning of the historical-theological text in biblical narrative, not to reconstruct the original event.

Romans has been called the "systematic theology" of the New Testament, and Paul began by exploring the total depravity of humankind in 1:18–3:20.

Pelagius (c. AD 360–418) later espoused the view that we could earn salvation by our works, which Augustine (AD 354–430) and the church rightly deemed a heresy.

When revealed theology is reduced to an autonomous study of man, when biblical authority is replaced by an unstable human wisdom, when behavior is directed by the descriptions of social science instead of the prescriptions of God's Word, then we have returned to the situation prevailing at the time of the Book of Judges: every man will do what is right in his own eyes.

You have to be doubly foolish to be a Satanist," Stoney muttered. "Doubly?" "Not only do you need to believe all the nonsense of Christian theology, you then have to turn around and back the preordained, guaranteed-to-fail, absolutely futile losing side.

Imagine a person who comes in here tonight and argues 'no air exists' but continues to breathe air while he argues. Now intellectually, atheists continue to breathe - they continue to use reason and draw scientific conclusions [which assumes an orderly universe], to make moral judgments [which assumes absolute values] - but the atheistic view of things would in theory make such 'breathing' impossible. They are breathing God's air all the time they are arguing against him.

Without faith, there is no proper understanding by which a man can judge. As Augustine well said, 'I believe in order to understand'.

There is no way to use non-Christian language and logic to arrive at Christian utterances, conclusions, and behavior.

Christianity is reasonable in virtue of the impossibility of the contrary.

by whom was man to be recalled to the grace of his original state? To whom belonged the restoration of the fallen one, the recovery of the lost, the leading back the wanderer by the hand? To whom else than entirely to Him Who is the Lord of his nature? For Him only Who at the first had given the life was it possible, or fitting, to recover it when lost. This is what we are taught and learn from the Revelation of the truth, that God in the beginning made man and saved him when he had fallen.

the monstrous notion of being so blissed-out in Heaven you won't notice your loved ones shrieking for mercy in Hell — this is put forward by many Christian theologians, including the supposedly respectable William Lane Craig, in response to direct questions from believers who find this whole "not knowing or caring if our loved ones are in agony" thing rather hard to swallow.

if the classic idea of the Atonement ever again resumes a leading place in Christian theology, it is not likely that it will revert to precisely the same forms of expression that it has used in the past; its revival will not consist in a putting back of the clock.

An essential clue to the understanding of poverty in liberation theology is the distinction, made in the Medellín document "Poverty of the Church," between three meanings of the term "poverty": real poverty as an evil—that is something that God does not want; spiritual poverty, in the sense of a readiness to do God's will; and solidarity with the poor, along with protest against the conditions under which they suffer.

The praxis on which liberation theology reflects is a praxis of solidarity in the interests of liberation and is inspired by the gospel.

We are thus in the presence of a new and stinging irony: the friends with their carefully developed theological speeches have not in fact produced more than spontaneously foolish and indeed almost blasphemous responses to the situation.

In liberation theology the way to rational talk of God is located within a broader and more challenging course of action: the following of Jesus.

Whatever the theological and ritual differences among modern Jews, Christians, and Muslims (in all their diversity), both internally and externally, the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem in 70 is for all of them an essential episode in their intertwined and often competitive histories. Countless people over the last two thousand years have drawn strategic, philosophical, spiritual, and personal lessons from the war of Jews

I do think that it is impossible to do Christian theology with integrity in America without asking the question, What has the gospel to do with the black struggle for liberation?