Quotes About Theology

if a Christian no longer places Jesus Christ at the heart of what God is up to in all of history, she's no longer really a Christian.

I can imagine that some of my Buddhist friends, having read the above description of my struggles with a God-as-You, might scratch their heads and ask: "What's the problem? For us, no God, therefore no person, therefore no problem." I admire their immunity and freedom from such difficulties. But I am, or I want to be, a Christian.

As some theologians have commented, if we're convinced that the starting point for our individual lives, or for the human project in general, is marked "original sin" rather than "original blessing," it's going to be all the more difficult to move on.

In sum, passing over to Buddhist spiritual practice has taught me, and can teach my church, that all our words, whether in Christian theology or Christian liturgy, must arise from and lead back to Silence. Only then do they have something to say.

That's it! That's the crux of the problem: Christian dualism has so exaggerated the difference between God and the world that it cannot really show how the two form a unity.

Al Hallaj overreached himself when he said "I am the truth" - ie "I am God." By this he meant, no doubt, that theologically God was in all of us and that he felt one with God: "You have manifested yourself so much that it seems to me that there is only You in me!" But the orthodox viewed statements like these as the deepest heresy. Al Hallaj was put on trial in Baghdad, and executed after horrific public tortures.

The most influential of all early modern pantheists was the philosopher Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677). Born into a family of Jewish refugees from Portugal, Spinoza was trained in Talmudic scholarship but soon developed an unconventional theology of his own. When this became known, he was summoned before a rabbinical court and even offered money to recant. When he refused, he was excommunicated. He earned a humble living as a lens-grinder, and died of consumption in 1677.

sin is separation.

It is not Christianity as a whole, but Calvinist Protestantism whose attitude towards nature contradicts almost completely the Buddhist attitude.

O conhecimento bíblico não deve ser confundido com a maturidade cristã. A exatidão homilética não é o mesmo que piedade. Destreza teológica é muito diferente de santidade prática. Liderança bem sucedida não é o mesmo que um coração para Cristo. Crescimento em influência não deve ser confundido com crescimento em graça.

biography has always been the first clue to theology, and in Christian tradition the reality of God is believed to have been biographized in Jesus as the Christ"I--

How can it be justified And how can it be right For God to give freedom - Sweet And Beautiful Freedom - To give it to a stream, a fish, A brute and a bird And deny it to a human being!

The being called God...bears every mark of a veil woven by philosophical conceit, to hide the ignorance of philosophers even from themselves. They borrow the threads of its texture from the anthropomorphism of the vulgar.

Thus, we need the Bible as the guide to enable us to transform and purify our hermeneutical principles. The circle from the Bible to systematic theology to hermeneutics to the Bible is not a vicious circle, but a spiral of growth and progress, guided by the work of the Holy Spirit in illumination.

Thus down the ages, millions suffered and died. Bad art and disastrous theology had prepared the way for Hitler and his 'final solution'.

The idea of a Supreme Being who creates a world in which one creature is designed to eat another in order to subsist, and then pass a law saying, "Thou shalt not kill," is so monstrously, immeasurably, bottomlessly absurd that I am at a loss to understand how mankind has entertained or given it house room all this long.

It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us,

For Christians, then, the question is not "Who gets the Bible right?" The question is and has always been, "Who gets Jesus right?" The Gospel writers and Paul couldn't have made that any clearer.

Reimagining the God of the Bible is what Christians do. More than that, they have to, if they wish to speak of the biblical God at all.

Anyway, we don't need to get into all that. My point is simply, no, King David, the heavens are not telling the glory of God (Ps. 19:1)—at least not without a lot of heavy theological lifting and perhaps a double bourbon. The heavens actually freak me out and make me wonder whether there is a God at all

In other words, I believe that faith in the Creator is necessarily transrational (not antirational) and mystical. I try to remember that as I work through intellectual challenges—and I mean work through, not avoid.

Walter Brueggemann calls these parts of the Bible Israel's "countertestimony" . . . This spot-on term to name the dark side of the Bible, and which calls into question Israel's main storyline, comes from Walter Brueggemann's Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy.

N. T. Wright's Justification: God's Plan and Paul's Vision or What Paul Really Said.

There is no pure "theology" to be contrasted to "feminist theology" or "Black theology," because the supposed pure theology is driven by its own encultured concerns and assumptions.