Quotes About Theology

There is a fundamental syntactical distinction between saying "we question the Bible" and "the Bible questions us.

The Christ event derives its meaning from the fact that the three-personed God is directly acting as one throughout the entire sequence from incarnation to ascension to Last Judgment.

Theology necessitates an image of God as a conscious, rational, supernatural being of unlimited power and scope who cares about humans and imposes moral codes and responsibilities upon them, thereby generating serious intellectual questions such as: 'Why does God allow us to sin?' 'Does the Sixth Commandment prohibit war?'

And because his Spirit was wholly God, he is called God, and he is called man on account of his flesh.

I want to know why the universe exists, why there is something greater than nothing.

It is the task of theologians to establish the limits of justice and injustice regarding the intrinsic goodness or wickedness of an act; it is the task of the observer of public life to establish the relationships of political justice and injustice, that is, of what is useful or harmful to society.

I tend to believe that religious dogma is a consequence of evolution.

You go back to T. H. Huxley, who coined the term, what he said - and I came to believe he is right - is that agnosticism asserts not only that he himself didn't know if there was a God or not, but that nobody could know.

One either has to believe in a God who's terribly prejudiced, or disbelieve the teachings of such exclusionary theologies. Religions have taught us that 'we are better than they.'

I don't believe in a personal God, no. And I don't believe in resurrection as it is in the New Testament.

The historical record of lived Christianity in America reveals that Christian theology and institutions have been the central cultural tent pole holding up the very idea of white supremacy. And the genetic imprint of this legacy remains present and measurable in contemporary white Christianity, not only among evangelicals in the South but also among mainline Protestants in the Midwest and Catholics in the Northeast.

To be sure, this theological worldview has done great damage to those living outside the white Christian canopy. But what has been overlooked by most white Christian leaders is the damage this legacy has done to white Christians themselves. To put it succinctly, it has often put white Christians in the curious position of arguing that their religion and their God require them to aim lower than the highest human values of love, justice, equality, and compassion.

At a pragmatic level, white churches served as connective tissue that brought together leaders from other social realms to coordinate a campaign of massive resistance to black equality. But at a deeper level, white churches were the institutions of ultimate legitimization, where white supremacy was divinely justified via a carefully cultivated Christian theology. White Christian churches composed the cultural score that made white supremacy sing.

Even as Jim Crow laws have been struck from the books in the political realm, most white Christian churches have reformed very little of their nineteenth-century theology and practice, which was designed, by necessity, to coexist comfortably with slavery and segregation. As a result, most white Christian churches continue to serve, consciously or not, as the mechanisms for transmitting and reinforcing white supremacist attitudes among new generations.

Policy makers beware: unless you are ready to admit that you are facing an essentially theological problem in the Middle East, do not go about prescribing solutions, for you may actually make matters worse—particularly by creating the false impression that economic, sociological, or political programs can fix what is, in fact, a delusion of faith

Although the Koran seethes with unrelenting hostility toward the Jews, it's clear from the Koran's many Biblically derived stories that Judaism greatly influenced Islamic theology. The story of Noah's ark appears in sura 10; Jonah and his whale in sura 37. The patriarch Abraham appears in many suras. And as we shall see, Moses figures prominently throughout the Koran, with his confrontation with Pharaoh retold numerous times.

The doctrine of the Trinity is the Christian church's answer to the question, How does truth hang together? And how may it be grasped as one?

The doctrine of Trinity is simply the insistence, against all objections from otherwise founded intuitions of deity, that God in himself is not other than he is in his history with us.

What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" asked the Christian theologian Tertullian... Having received the revealed thruth via Christ, "we want no curious disputation." Well that was then. Today science is so powerful that theologians can't casually dismiss secular knowledge. For most... Athens and Jerusalem must be reconciled or Jerusalem will fall off the map. Philo's thoughtful answer is 'Logos')

When Christians faced oppression at the hands of Roman imperialists, they did what Jews had done when they faced oppression at the hands of Babylonian imperialists: dreamed of vengeance and enshrined the dream in theology.

if they believe that their fortunes are inversely correlated with the foreigners' fortunes, that the foreigners have to lose for them to win—then their theology will probably be less inclusive. Let's

Maybe if I had to boil it down to one easy sentence, it would be this: I believe in evolution, and I believe in God. I just haven't worked out the details yet.

Paul Tillich, for example, maintained that, 'It is as atheistic to affirm the existence of God as it is to deny it.'4

All talk and discussion about God (theo-logy means god-talk) is really an exercise in human self-understanding.