Quotes About Theology

On Saint Paul, he's probably one of the best theologians of all time, but I don't believe that some of his teachings are appropriate today.

Christians are guilty of the notion that there was a time when people were required to live by the mosaic law, I just don't know that ever was the case.

Put the Protestant flint and the Catholic steel together, and you will kindle a fire that will burn all around the world.

What I mean by spirituality is not theology, but attitude.

When I pounded ninety-five theses at the Wittenberg doors in 2005 shortly after Ratzinger was made pope, I did so knowing that this man and his minions were a dangerous team to turn the church over to.

Having learned to integrate her readings thoroughly into her own thinking and with years of contemplative study, she creates her own theology. She learns to trust her own experience

The force of Dante's poetry resonated most in those who did not confess the Catholic faith, for believers would inevitably have quibbles with Dante's theology. But for those most distant theologically, Dante's faith was so perfect, so unyielding, that a reader found himself compelled by the poetry to take it all to heart.

In fact, the idea of a God who is both all-powerful and all good is a logical impossibility.

La nueva teología positiva ya no se dedica a hacer juicios de valor tajantes ni a contar historias desgarradoras de sufrimiento y redención: lo que ahora se ofrece en las megaiglesias (y en muchos templos normales) es la promesa de dinero, éxito y salud en esta vida, ahora mismo o dentro de muy poco.

Un giorno Dio disegnò la bocca di Jun Rail. É lì che gli venne quell'idea stramba del peccato. Così la raccontava Ticktel, che sapeva di teologia, perché aveva fatto il cuoco in un seminario ...

I had a theology professor once," I said to John, "who told us that religion was not about being certain but about living with uncertainty. It was about being comfortable with doubt, and maintaining the continuity of one's reverence for a profound mystery.

This is one of the hard-and-fast ironies of the Christian tradition: views that at one time were the majority opinion, or at least that were widely seen as completely acceptable, eventually came to be left behind; and as theology moved forward to become increasingly nuanced and sophisticated, these earlier majority opinions came to be condemned as heresies.

Paul, by the way, never says that Jesus declared himself to be divine.

the idea that Jesus rose on the 'third day' was originally a theological construct, not a historical piece of information.

God was the ultimate source of all that was divine. But there were lower divinities as well. Even within monotheistic Judaism.

In ancient Judaism the king of Israel was considered both Son of God and—astonishingly enough—even God.

In Galatians 4:14 Paul is not contrasting Christ with an angel; he is equating him with an angel.

some believers took the Christological views of the Gospel to an extreme and maintained that Jesus was so much God that he could not really have been a man. The book 1 John was written, then, to counter that view by insisting that 'Jesus Christ came in the flesh' and that anyone who refused to acknowledge his fleshly existence was in fact an antichrist.

But one thing they all (i.e., E. P. Sanders, Geza Vermes, Dale Allison, Paula Fredriksen, and many others) agree on: Jesus did not spend his ministry declaring himself to be divine.

THE VIEW THAT THE earliest Christians understood Jesus to have become the Son of God at his resurrection is not revolutionary among scholars of the New Testament. One of the greatest scholars of the second half of the twentieth century was Raymond Brown.

As a historian I am no longer obsessed with the theological question of how God became a man, but with the historical question of how a man became God.

Eventually Jesus came to be seen as God in every respect, coeternal with the Father, of the same substance as the Father, equal to the Father within the Trinity of three persons, but one God.

How did Jesus understand and describe himself? Did he talk about himself as a divine being? I will argue that he did not.

Almost certainly the divine self-claims in John are not historical.