Quotes About Theology

Or take the belief common among some evangelicals that every individual needs an identifiable point of personal faith conversion to create a "personal relationship with Jesus." That's certainly a key to evangelical revivalism, and one can definitely find various Bible verses that seem to buttress such a claim. But, altogether, the direct biblical evidence for that theology and rhetoric is in fact pretty thin.

Theology is a discipline that is at once oriented to the transcendent and thoroughly located in a particular time and place. It arises out of personal needs and social crises but looks beyond them to truth.

My plea is simply this: every theological idea which makes an impression upon you must be regarded as a challenge to your faith. Do not assume as a matter of course that you believe whatever impresses you theologically and enlightens you intellectually. Otherwise suddenly you are believing no longer in Jesus Christ, but in Luther, or in one of your other theological teachers.

Speaking figuratively, the study of theology often produces overgrown youths whose internal organs have not correspondingly developed. This is a characteristic of adolescence. There is actually something like theological puberty.

Efes Damim (No Blood), was originally published in Wilna in 1837 and included text in Hebrew, Latin, Russian, and Polish. The book was subsequently translated into German, French, and English. But on the other side of the debate, the scribblings of August Rohling, a fraudulent professor of Catholic theology who had taught in Milwaukee, Münster, and Prague, were also translated.

… the essential function of the universe, which is a machine for the making of gods.

Ahora bien, si hay innovación, esta se sitúa precisamente en este punto. La teología debe ser, o volver a ser, una ciencia de la experiencia, aquella cuyos intereses conciernen directamente al destino de cada persona individual.

la palabra «teología» el regusto de una ciencia de la vida (y es tal vez la consecuencia de que, en los países latinos especialmente, estos textos sean percibidos como la más insólita y verdadera impertinencia).

How should the first two chapters of the book of Genesis be understood in their internal, that is, spiritual, sense? It must be done by applying what the Christian world has so utterly forgotten: that everything in the Word, to the smallest detail, envelops and signifies spiritual and celestial things.

Through the Reformation, the mechanical relation of nature and grace was superceded by an ethical one, so that the restoration of the law of God in every sphere of life became the concern of the believer.

The primary principle of the Calvinistic system of thought is the direct and absolute sovereignty of God over all things. Such sovereignty is not one among the many attributes of God, but it comes to expression in all of His attributes.

Calvinism furnishes us with the only theology of culture that is truly relevant for the world in which we live, because it is the true theology of the Word.

I never could understand the fondness some people have for confusing their minds by dwelling on mystical books that merely awaken their doubts and excite their imagination, giving them a bent for exaggeration quite contrary to Christian simplicity. Let

The kingdom of God is not a geographic domain with set boundaries and settled decrees, but a set of relationships in which Christ is sovereign. At the table, Jesus moves us from ideas about life and love to actual living and loving. Martin Luther was right. Theology is table talk.[38] Jesus didn't sell the food of his Father. He issued invitations to the table. In fact, Jesus' favorite image for the kingdom of God is a banquet where everyone is sitting around a table.

Anyone who doesn't need company is either greater than a man, and is a God, or lesser than a man, and is a beast.17 —Aristotle, as quoted by Saint Thomas Aquinas

1. The Culture Shock of Preaching 1 2. Aiming toward Contextual Preaching 31 3. Exegeting the Congregation 56 4. Preaching as Local Theology 91 5. Preaching as Folk Art

The working concept of God for most ordinary Christians is - if one may venture a bold guess- shaped more by the combination of Greek philosophy and Islamic theology that was powerfully injected into the thought of Christendom at the beginning of the High Middle Ages than by the thought of the fathers of the first four centuries.

separation of church from mission is theologically indefensible. More

Natural theology, in other words, is in no way a step on the way toward the theology which takes God's self-revelation as its starting point. It is more likely, in fact, to lead in the opposite direction.

There is surely no part of Christian teaching which has been the subject of so much ridicule and indignant rejection as the doctrine of election.

we really have no right to reproach God for having created the world. For Him it was the only possible way of escaping from the accursed void in which He found himself.

Forget everything you ordinarily associate with religious study. Strip away all the reverence and the awe and the art and the philosophy of it. Treat the subject coldly. Imagine yourself to be a theologist, but a special kind of theologist, one who studies gods the way an entomologist studies insects. Take as your dataset the entirety of world mythology and treat it as a collection of field observations and statistics pertaining to a hypothetical species: the god. Proceed from there.

If I advance new views in Philosophy or Theology, I cannot expect to have many adherents among minds altogether unprepared for such views; yet it is certain that even those who most fiercely oppose me will recognize the power of my voice if it is not a mere echo; and the very novelty will challenge attention, and at last gain adherents if my views have any real insight.

For my own part, I tend to find the doctrinal books often more helpful in devotion than the devotional books, and I rather suspect that the same experience may await others. I believe that many who find that "nothing happens" when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand.