Quotes About Theology

If God is the Creator of all things and evil is a thing, then God is the Creator of evil and He is to be blamed for its existence. No, evil is not a thing but a wrong choice, or the damage done by a wrong choice. Evil is no more a positive thing than blindness is, but it is just as real.

It is reasonable to love the Absolute absolutely for the same reason it is reasonable to love the relative relatively.

A fundamental principle of Catholic theology is that grace perfects nature rather than setting it aside; and that means that the Christian life is not a two-layer cake, the supernatural simply added on to the natural. It transforms the natural but by perfecting it, not by demeaning it.

Sociologists and anthropologists tell us that religion has three dimensions: creed, code, and cult; or words, works, and worship; or theology, morality, and liturgy.

The major heresies of our day are not about God but about man.

Heidegger says that "the fundamental question of metaphysics" is "why is there anything at all rather than nothing?" The fundamental question is not, as Plato thought, "what" a thing is (every Platonic dialogue is about that, about an essence, a definition, a concept, such as justice or piety or learning) but why it exists, why anything exists. Plato never asked that ultimate question. And the answer is God.

If the unhappiness of the wicked angels comes at length to an end, the happiness of the good will also come to an end, which is inadmissible.

Even God cannot make us love him. "Forced love" is a meaningless impossibility, like "virtuous sin".

St. Augustine says, "If God is, why is there evil? But if God is not, why is there good?

the Lutheran alternative to the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation which is called consubstantiation, in which the bread and wine are not changed but added to, so that Christ becomes really present along with them but they remain.

Second, the origin of evil is not the Creator but the creature's freely choosing sin and selfishness.

Good theology is not the knowledge of theology but the knowledge of God. Bad theology is the theology of the theologian who died and went to Heaven and at the gates of Heaven God offered him the choice between Heaven and a theology lecture on Heaven, and he chose the lecture.

The "good news" part of this point is that we can cooperate in salvation, as we cannot cooperate in creation.

The distinction between the natural and the supernatural is a distinction between two abstract aspects, not two concrete things.

His divinity existed without His humanity before the Incarnation, but ever since the Incarnation His humanity is joined forever to His divinity. His Ascension was not the undoing of His Incarnation.

This is what God did in the Incarnation. Being became a being, the Subject became an object, God became a man, I AM became a He.

In contrast, the a/theistic approach can be seen as a form of disbelieving what one believes, or rather, believing in God while remaining dubious concerning what one believes about God (a distinction that fundamentalism is unable to maintain).

In the Bible we read that while Christ hung on the cross a dark cloud engulfed him. What was this dark cloud? Did it signal the victory of nihilism or was it the dark dwelling place of God?

Man has not eaten God; God has eaten man.

The summation of much pre-Socratic theology and philosophy can be stated as follows: The kosmos is not as it appears to be, and what it probably is, at its deepest level, is exactly that which the human being is at his deepest level — call it mind or soul, it is something unitary which lives and thinks, and only appears to be plural and material.

Art, like theology, a packaged fraud.

The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake.

Well, where is God," said Mrs. Coulter, "if he's alive? And why doesn't he speak anymore? At the beginning of the world, God walked in the Garden and spoke with Adam and Eve. Then he began to withdraw, and he forbade Moses to look at his face. Later, in the time of Daniel, he was aged—he was the Ancient of Days. Where is he now?

Sounds like what we call physics, your experimental theology. You want scientists, not theologians.