Quotes About Theology

Luke's Gospel was clear: Jesus's ministry was essentially liberation on behalf of the poor and the oppressed. I didn't need a doctorate in theology to know that liberation defined the heart of Jesus's ministry. Black people had been preaching and singing about it for centuries.

Christian theology is for the liberation of all humanity, and it could never be neutral in the fight against oppression. That much I knew. And that was how A Black Theology of Liberation was born: with the spirit of Martin and Malcolm, Jimmy, and the black poets of the 1960s.

in 1969, I still regard Jesus Christ today as the chief focus of my perspective on God but not to the exclusion of other religious perspectives. God's reality is not bound by one manifestation of the divine in Jesus but can be found wherever people are being empowered to fight for freedom. Life-giving power for the poor and the oppressed is the primary criterion that we must use to judge the adequacy of our theology, not abstract concepts.

Whether theologians acknowledge it or not, all theologies begin with experience ... We are all particular human beings, finite creatures, and we create our understanding of God out of our experience. Hopefully, our own experience points to the universal, but it is never identical with it. For when we mistake our own talk about God with ultimate reality, we turn it into ideology.

How could any theologian explain the meaning of Christian identity in America and fail to engage white supremacy, its primary negation?

Intrigued by their own expertise in Christian theology, white religionists think they have the moral and intellectual right to determine whether black churches are Christian. They fail to realize that their analysis of Christianity is inseparable from their oppressor-mentality, which shapes everything they say about God.

Not all the gods who appear in these tales and fancies became more than mythological figures. Many of them continued merely in this role, without temple or form of worship; they had but a folklore or finally a theological existence. Others became the great gods of Egypt.

You're not a believer, are you? Haines asked. I mean, a believer in the narrow sense of the word. Creation from nothing and miracles and a personal God. —There's only one sense of the word, it seems to me, Stephen said.

Universalism is based primarily on optimism and an over-simplistic view of God. The

Disbelieve hell, and you unscrew, unsettle, and unpin everything in Scripture.

This man is evil and I wish you hadn't gone after him on your own. But stop judging yourself so harshly. You were protecting a creature who can't protect himself. You don't think God can understand that?" I'm not a theologian, but I believe absolution can be granted to us in many forms. Perhaps it can come in the ends of a woman's fingers on your skin. Some people call it the redemptive power of love. Anyway, why argue with it when it comes your way?

The true Calvinist is someone whose whole life is devoted to the glory of God.

The world's theology The world's theology is easy to define. It is the view . . . that human beings are basically good, that no one is really lost, that belief in Jesus Christ is not necessary for salvation. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools. Romans 1:22

Only a completely unintelligible God can be said to be absolutely good and absolutely powerful yet tolerate the world as it is.

It's not correct to say Jesus is God. Now, don't run and report me to the bishop, all right? It's not correct to say that - Jesus is the union of the human and the divine. That's different.

I like major theology. I like Karl Barth, and I like John Calvin, and I like Martin Luther. The scale of thinking and the power of integration that they're capable of from thinking in that scale is something that's really unique to theology.

The treatment of women in Muslim communities throughout the world is unconscionable. All civilized nations must unite in condemnation of a theology that now threatens to destabilize much of the Earth.

Yet God is so one that He admits of distinction, and so admits of distinction that He still remains unity.

Rome should sometimes intervene and say this or that is not in conformity with the Catholic faith. Theologians should understand that. Some theologians go too far, for example, reducing the Catholic faith to a universal philosophy.

The Bible makes it clear that Adam's sin affected the whole universe. This means that any aliens would also be affected by Adam's sin, but because they are not Adam's descendants, they can't have salvation.

There is no conflict between the ideal of religion and the ideal of science, but science is opposed to theological dogmas because science is founded on fact. To me, the universe is simply a great machine which never came into being and never will end. The human being is no exception to the natural order. Man, like the universe, is a machine.

Science cannot tell theology how to construct a doctrine of creation, but you can't construct a doctrine of creation without taking account of the age of the universe and the evolutionary character of cosmic history.

Of course, nobody would deny the importance of human beings for theological thinking, but the time span of history that theologians think about is a few thousand years of human culture rather than the fifteen billion years of the history of the universe.

We've always had issues up for discussion at Catholic universities.