Quotes About Theology

Atheism is the last word of theism.

As far as theology is concerned, Christian understanding of the meaning of God, Christ, redemption, morality, and human existence is still weighed down by both prescientific and early modern cosmological assumptions.

European theology, for all its brilliance and evident insight, is too much a Western historical product. What we have today, he states, "is a tribal Christology of the last two thousand years which is centered almost exclusively on its own concerns, with almost total neglect of other human religious experiences, a Christology for the internal purposes of Christians, perhaps even to conquer the world.

Shinto theology has no place for the dogma of "original sin." On the contrary, it believes in the innate goodness and God-like purity of the human soul, adoring it as the adytum5 from which divine oracles are proclaimed.

The humanities need to be defended today against the encroachments of physical science, as they once needed to be against the encroachment of theology.

from a Second Vatican Council document: "The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man find true light."4

Only good was created. Every evil thing is a good thing ruined. There are no other ways to get an evil thing.

God does not suffer out of deficiency of being, like created beings. To this extent he is 'apathetic'. But he suffers from the love which is the superabundance and overflowing of his being. In so far he is 'pathetic'.

Anyone who believes in the power of God and the power of Satan can surely not be viewed as a pure monotheist.

The Holy Spirit does not `proceed from the Father and the Son', as the Western church's Nicene Creed maintains. The Spirit proceeds from the Father, rests on the Son, and from the Son radiates into the world.

As Christians understand it, creation is a trinitarian process: God the Father creates through the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit. So all things are created `by God', are formed `through God' and exist `in God'.

God does not suffer out of deficiency of being, like created beings. But he does suffer from his love, which is the overflowing superabundance of his being. And in this sense he can suffer.

Christian theology] awakens pain over the present internal and external enslavements of human beings

Gegenwärtiges und Zukünftiges, Erfahrung und Hoffnung treten in der christlichen Eschatologie in Widerspruch zueinander, so daß durch sie dem Menschen nicht Entsprechung und Einstimmigkeit mit dem Gegebenen zuteil wird, sondern er in den Widerstreit von Hoffnung und Erfahrung hineingezogen wird.

the triune God will indwell the world in a divine way - the world will indwell God in a creaturely way.

At the very root of the modern liberal movement is the loss of the consciousness of sin.

the Christian movement at its inception was not just a way of life in the modern sense, but a way of life founded upon a message. It was based, not upon mere feeling, not upon a mere program of work, but upon an account of facts. In other words it was based upon doctrine.

J. Gresham Machen

The modern liberals, on the other hand, say that Jesus is God not because they think high of Jesus, but because they think desperately low of God.

At any rate, an attack upon Calvin or Turrettin or the Westminster divines does not seem to the modern churchgoer to be a very dangerous thing. In point of fact, however, the attack upon doctrine is not nearly so innocent a matter as our simple churchgoer supposes; for the things objected to in the theology of the Church are also at the very heart of the New Testament. Ultimately the attack is not against the seventeenth century, but against the Bible and against Jesus Himself.

Such for example are the liberal doctrines of the universal fatherhood of God and the universal brotherhood of man.

it may appear that what the liberal theologian has retained after abandoning to the enemy one Christian doctrine after another is not Christianity at all, but a religion which is so entirely different from Christianity as to be long in a distinct category.

How can we be persuaded to go on preaching, and learn to do so effectively? The essential secret is not mastering certain techniques but being mastered by certain convictions. In other words, theology is more important than methodology.1

37. On this point, and the whole paragraph, see especially Oliver O'Donovan, The Ways of Judgment (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005).