Quotes About Theology

Unless a sharp distinction is maintained between the purpose and function of the Law and the Gospel, the Christian doctrine cannot be kept free from error.

Those who lapse from the Gospel to the Law are no better off than those who lapse from grace into idolatry.

Therefore Augustine was right when he said: "The external works of the Godhead are indivisible.

Theology is nothing else but grammar engaged with the words of the Holy Spirit.

21. A theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theologian of the cross calls a thing what it actually is.

En god teolog lär som följer. Folket måste tyglas med svärdets yttre makt, då det handlar illa, såsom Paulus lär i Rom. 13. Människors samveten får emellertid inte snärjas med falska lagar, så att de plågas med synder, där Gud inte velat, att tal skall vara om synd. Ty samvetena bindes endast av Guds bud.

For if "Free-will" cannot of itself will good, but wills good by grace alone, (for we are speaking of "Free-will" apart from grace and inquiring into the power which properly belongs to each) who does not see, that that good will, merit, and reward, belong to grace alone.

Unity transcends time, style, and numbers. When people hold hands across their own theologies, that unity can bring down the modern-day walls of Jericho.

The Bible did not arrive by fax from heaven

In the political and theological realms we are still stuck on the merry-go-round of church and state, capitalism and communism, Christian or Jew, Catholic or Protestant. We seem incapable of envisioning anything other than the dualistic and tired stalemate of contemporary patriarchal polity...

See that's where it falls apart for me!" Anne cried. "What sticks in my throat is that God gets the credit but never the blame. I just can't swallow that kind of theological candy. Either God's in charge or he's not...

In this connection, unlike their Christian counterparts, Hindus are not disturbed with anavasth? (infinite regresses). The necessity to posit a "first cause" that had no previous cause, as the Christian philosopher Thomas Aquinas suggested, does not appear on the Hindu radar. So there are some metaphysical questions that are neither asked nor answered by Hindus.

Words originated, as did the concept of God, with our species.

I do not purpose to discuss faith in its dogmatic sense today.

For me, philosophy consists in giving another name to what has long been crystallized under the name of God.

Philosophy seeks to be philosophy while remaining non-philosophy, i.e. a 'negative philosophy' (in the sense of 'negative theology'). 'Negative philosophy' has access to the absolute, not as 'beyond,' as a positive second order, but another order which must be on this side, the double, inaccessible without being passed through. True philosophy scoffs at philosophy; true philosophy is a-philosophical. -From Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since Hegel

Theology recognizes the contingency of human existence only to derive it from a necessary being, that is, to remove it. Theology makes use of philosophical wonder only for the purpose of motivating an affirmation which ends it. Philosophy, on the other hand, arouses us to what is problematic in our own existence and in that of the world, to such a point that we shall never be cured of searching for a solution.

One cannot make a direct ontology. My 'indirect' method (being in the beings) is alone conformed with being--'negative philosophy' like 'negative theology.

I do not believe] in a personal God, let alone a Christian God.

The world according to Heidegger is like a prep school for Calvinists.

All theology represents an intellectual rationalization of the possession of sacred values... Every theology... presupposes that the world must have a meaning, and the question is how to interpret this meaning so that it is intellectually conceivable.

The purely emotional form of Pietism is, as Ritschl has pointed out, a religious dilettantism for the leisure class.

The less theorizing you do about God, the more receptive you are to His inpouring.

Theology is ultimately political. The way human communities deify the transcendent and determine the categories of good and evil have more to do with the power dynamics of the social systems which create the theologies than with the spontaneous revelation of truth from another quarter