Quotes About Theology

You have a lot to learn, young man. Philosophy. Theology. Literature. Poetry. Drama. History. Archeology. Anthropology. Mythology. Music. These are your tools as much as brush and pigment. You cannot be an artist until you are civilized. You cannot be civilized until you learn. To be civilized is to know where you belong in the continuum of our art and your world. To surmount the past, you must know the past.

Professor Ratzinger specifies that the philosophical view of God was reframed by its convergence with the biblical faith of Christianity in two ways: 1) It removed the idea that God must be totally and solely self-interested, and 2) it recognized that the divine is not limited to pure thought and thus can act in concrete ways.[cxvi]  This union between the Logos and love is another key feature of Ratzinger's theology.

So I offer my definition of theology: theology is the application of Scripture, by persons, to every area of life.11

We need theology in addition to Scripture because God has authorized teaching in the church, and because we need that teaching to mature in the faith.

Las emociones son nuestros sentimientos. Los filósofos griegos enseñaron que la voluntad y las emociones deben estar sujetas al intelecto, y los teólogos reformados también han defendido la "primacía del intelecto".26 Pero la Biblia no

Protestant Scholasticism Successors of Calvin and Luther264 worked out the Reformation insights into systematic form.

Como dije en el capítulo 7, el intelecto, la voluntad y las emociones son una sola cosa en la naturaleza humana. Ahora podemos ver que estas también son una en nuestra naturaleza pecaminosa.

The sixteenth-century parallel: (1) medieval scholasticism as a synthesis between the Bible, Plato, and Aristotle; (2) the heresy of works-salvation, perhaps with Tetzel as an extreme case; (3) Luther the Reformer, who like Athanasius pushes hard for the fundamental principle of justification by faith alone; and (4) Calvin the consolidator, who rethinks the whole of theology in the light of the knowledge gained in the Reformation.

The achievement of late eighth-century scholars was to begin to understand certain of the logical doctrines developed in antiquity, and to bring these into a relation with theology which provided the stimulus for philosophical speculation.

philosophizing happened only because other activities offered the occasion or the stimulation for it. What were these activities? They appeared most prominently in the course of studying the standard curriculum of the seven liberal arts (especially logic), in religious controversy, and in trying to systematize theology.

tried to mix science with theology. He believed in a heaven where perfect truth presided, and he stood convinced that young children, recently arrived from that transcendent realm, were the unheeded messengers of a sacred revelation. He deemed it the work of the teacher to preserve and call forth this natural divinity of the child. If the world's teachers could find

feminist theology today, a primary aim of their theology was practical. They wanted to move Church and society to accountability, humanness, justice, virtue, and peace.

As to the spirits, I care less about what they are capable of communicating, than of the fact of there being communications. I certainly wouldn't set about building a system of theology out of their oracles. God forbid. They seem abundantly foolish, one must admit. There is probably, however, a mixture of good spirits and bad, foolish and wise, of the lower orders perhaps, in both kinds....

I don't believe in God. She drops by once in a while and we argue about it. Now can you stop yammering on with your questions long enough for us to steal a few horses?

That our understanding of theology is based largely on formal, academic treatises has resulted in excluding women from the theological conversation, marginalizing their theological ideas, and impoverishing the theological tradition as a whole.

There is no God. Wait. I take that back, there is a God. There must be. The universe is just too perverse -- there must be an idiosyncratic mind at the helm.

the Summa Contra Gentiles and Summa Theologica. These last two alone total a stupefying two million words. They are a monumental fusion of learning and faith, and a reconciliation of ancient philosophy and Christian theology, without parallel even in the works of Saint Augustine. In fact, together they make Aquinas the one Christian thinker whose system can stand beside those of Aristotle and Plato—in part because it is a brilliant synthesis of the best of both thinkers.

In page after page of the Summa, Aquinas will calmly and tentatively assert a position. Then he looks around at all the counterpositions and objections. He examines whether they hold up under scrutiny; if not, he quietly refutes them and moves on to the next question. At one stroke, a Christian dialectic was born, more sophisticated than Abelard's and more all-embracing than Anselm's, because it stands on a reading of Aristotle's entire corpus.

saw logic as the buttress of theology and his faith, not a substitute for them. If this earns him impatience from later skeptics and freethinkers, it does fit him into his own time and place. Peter Abelard's Aristotle points down the road to Thomas Aquinas, not the Enlightenment.

This sounds very Stoic. But Antisthenes took his Cynic doctrines to the next radical step. He rejected any and all social conventions, including all forms of property and government. He also violently turned his back on Plato's theology and even more violently his theory of Forms. "A horse I see," Antisthenes is supposed to have exclaimed, "but not horseness": words that would echo in the works of the medieval philosopher William of Ockham.

Origen's Platonized theology marks the birth of the Christian humanitarian conscience.

I cannot avoid believing," Luther mused, "that it was Satan himself who introduced the study of Aristotle.

In 1210, it issued its first condemnation of Averroës and his disciples in the West; for good measure, it extended the ban to the works of Aristotle. It was already too late. Just fifteen years after the ban was issued, Aristotle's greatest medieval expositor was born. To his family and neighbors, he was Tommaso D'Aquino. To history, he is Saint Thomas Aquinas, the single greatest creative mind of the Middle Ages.

Aquinas was no Averroist. His life's work would be an implicit repudiation of Averroës's idea that reason has a higher claim to truth than faith does.12 Instead, Thomas Aquinas's reading of Aristotle led him in a different direction. He would conclude that faith and reason are actually two sides of the same coin. His writings would try to persuade his age that men are part of both a divine and a human order, and both have valid standing in their lives.