Quotes About Theology

There is in every department of investigation great liability to error. Almost all false theories in science and false doctrines in theology are due in a great degree to mistakes as to matters of fact.

Augustine [of Hippo] knew the power and the danger of idolatry and celebrity. And he knew the danger of both was first to permit the idolater to offload the duty of thinking onto their idol. And second to seduce the celebrity, in turn, into thinking his fans have nothing insightful to say. That treatment of a fellow human, a fellow christian, would be not the achievement of theology but the avoidance of it. And he went out of his way in his life and in his words to forestall such approaches.

Columnist Joseph Sobran writes, "The prevailing notion is that the state should be neutral as to religion, and furthermore, that the best way to be neutral about it is to avoid all mention of it. By this sort of logic, nudism is the best compromise among different styles of dress. The secularist version of 'pluralism' amounts to theological nudism."35

How can you insult God?" the Archdeacon asked. "About as much as you can pull his nose. . . . for him to have done it in order to avenge God would have been silly.

He would probably think that the Good was the same thing as God — like a less educated monk of the Dark Ages. Personification

His is a story by, about, and for those committed to God's work of justice, compassion, and liberation in the world. To modern theologians, like the Pharisees, Mark offers no "signs from heaven" (Mark 8: 11f.). To scholars who, like the chief priests, refuse to ideologically commit themselves, he offers no answer (Mk 11: 30–33). But to those willing to raise the wrath of the empire, Mark offers a way of discipleship (8: 34ff.).

Why assume so glibly that the God who presumably created the universe is still running it? It is certainly conceivable that He may have finished it and then turned it over to lesser gods to operate.

For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.

Be clear! Be clear! Be clear!" Clarity does not come easily. When we train to be expositors, we probably spend three or four years in seminary. While that training prepares us to be theologians, it sometimes gets in our way as communicators. Theological jargon, abstract thinking, or scholars' questions become part of the intellectual baggage that hinders preachers from speaking clearly to ordinary men and women.

Like all great rationalists you believed in things that were twice as incredible as theology.

The modesty that theology needs is the recognition that we cannot rationally comprehend God.

Theology has suffered - among evangelicals as well as elsewhere - from an undue desire for clarity and control, something to which the often abstract and rarefied distinctions of Scholastic theology have contributed.

The primary task of theology (and let's forget here about the distinction between biblical and dogmatic theology) is not to explain the historical meaning of the text but to use the Scriptures as a means of grace in drawing the reader to Jesus Christ.

It is the proper function of the theologian to go back and forth, like the angels on Jacob's ladder, between heaven and earth and to weave continually new connections between them.

Între Socrate È™i Hristos exist?, în punctul decisiv, numai contradicÈ›ie, pentru c? Socrate nu poate decât s? indice adev?rul care nu este el, în timp ce Hristos este Adev?rul È™i prin urmare poate s?-l comunice prin Sine ÎnsuÈ™i.

The theme, then, that will be with us throughout this study is the reciprocal relationship of God's transcendence and God's immanence;

theology, for Maximus, is Cosmic Liturgy.

Maximus, along with the tradition reaching from Philo to Gregory of Nyssa, says we can only know God's existence—know that he is14—not his essence, or what he is.

Maximus has been called unscriptural, but Scripture is the background and the presupposition for all that he does, to a wholly different degree than in the one-sided scholastic theology or spiritual works of the sixth century. The Confessor's first major work is his set of answers to the questions of his friend Thalassius on passages in the Holy Scriptures.42 Maximus offers these answers from the fullness both of the exegetical and spiritual tradition and of his own personal meditation.

the Christian must hold that all created being, whether substance or accident, comes from nothing and therefore stands far below God's being in dignity;

God is not "Being" but beyond being, because being necessarily includes multiplicity.98 Yet this "many", as Maximus explains along with Pseudo-Dionysius, is always such only because of unity.

this speciously deep thought was to haunt Christian metaphysics: that love without pain and guilt remains simply a joke, a game.

an affirmation of a paradoxical unity of ontological opposites, rooted in the Chalcedonian Understanding of the Person of Christ—"one individual or person subsisting in two natures, without confusion or change, without division or separation".

Aristotelianism and the theology of Chalcedon enter here into an unbreakable alliance: they preserve the rights of nature against the rampages of an unchecked supernaturalism.