Quotes About Theology

The bland assumption that the Church's life will continue to be fruitful so long as we go on praying and cultivating our souls, irrespective of whether we trouble to think and talk Christianly, and therefore theologically, about anything we or others may do or say, may turn out to have dire results.

A resistance stirs within us. Do we *want* our theology paraded thus? As natural men, no. We do not want it any more than we want the discipling of the Christian moral law, repentance, the painful call of self-surrender. but if it is the intellectual expression of that faith by which we live, how can our minds work Christianly without it? Wherever men think and talk, the banner will have to be raised.

The fact that astronomies change while the stars abide is a true analogy of every realm of human life and thought, religion not least of all. No existent theology can be a final formulation of spiritual truth.

Literature, not science or theology, is the master discipline, the paradigm of inquiry, for postmoderns.

Every substance is as a world apart, independent of everything else except God.

Natural religion itself, seems to decay very much. Many will have human souls to be material: others make God himself a corporeal being.

For things remain possible, even if God does not choose them. Indeed, even if God does not will something to exist, it is possible for it to exist, since, by its nature, it could exist if God were to will it to exist.

Let there be two possible things, A and B, one of which is such that it is necessary that it exists, and let us assume that there is more perfection in A than in B. Then, at least, we can explain why A should exist rather than B and can foresee which of them will exist; indeed, this can be demonstrated, that is, rendered certain from the nature of the thing.

Metaphysics is the clearing house for all fundamental philosophical problems.

The shnorrer was no fool, please note, no simpleton. He often had read a good deal, could quote from the Talmud, and was quick on the verbal draw. Shnorrers were "regulars" in the synagogue and, between prayers, took part in long discussions of theology with their benefactors. The status points involved here are too delicate for Newtonian physics, or Parsonian sociology,* to handle. (Certain Hindu and Oriental groups recognize the beggar in the same way.)

I study theology in the works of creation and find in it new reasons for adoring the creator.

Pastor Elmore roared out, " Ã¢â'¬ËœOn that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened!' And why was that, my friends? Why did the Lord see fit to destroy his own creation, like a sculptor who smashes his clay with his fist, or a painter who slashes his canvas? Why, because it wasn't right and good! And does the pot revile its creator for this? And does the painting weep? No!

Either God is alive, in which case he'll deal with us as he sees fit. Or he is dead, in which case he was never alive, it being unlikely that he died of old age.

The function of Theology? The recitation of the incomprehensible by the unspeakable to pick the pockets of the unthinking.

The quickest way to detect a cult is to sniff for doublethink. The cult seeks control over its membership not by providing a coherent theological system but by providing the opposite: an unstable theology infinitely malleable to the needs of the cult's top echelon and uninterpretable at all times to anyone below that level.

I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.

It seems obvious to me that the notion of God has never been anything but a kind of ideal projection, a reflection upward of the human personality, and that theology never has been and never can be anything but a more and more purified mythology.

If people mean that man has in himself the power to work in partnership with God's grace they are most wretchedly deluding themselves.

Believing right doctrine will no more save you, than doing good works will save you.

We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes.

Let God be good," cried Erasmus the moralist. "Let God be God," replied Luther the theologian. Although

Friedrich Nietzsche: "If Luther had been burned like Hus, the dawn of the Enlightenment might perhaps have come a little earlier and more brilliantly than we can now imagine.

Here we find a parallel to Luther's disdain of reason. In its legitimate sphere reason is the highest gift of God, but the moment it transgresses into theology it becomes the "Devil's Whore." So, too, with free will. Understood as the God-given capacity to make ordinary decisions, to carry out one's responsibilities in the world, free will remains intact. What it cannot do is effect its own salvation.

just as human doing does not place a demand upon the actions of God, so, too, human gazing on the visible objects of creation and history does not deliver a right conception of the divine.