Quotes About Theology

There is no way that the Fourth Gospel was written by John Zebedee or by any of the disciples of Jesus. The author of this book is not a single individual, but is at least three different writers/editors, who did their layered work over a period of 25 to 30 years.

Reformation names the disunity in which we currently stand. We who remain in the Protestant tradition want to say that Reformation was a success.

Traditional arguments for the existence of God and contemporary attempts to use fine-tuning and cosmology to back up the case for his existence always strike me as kinds of games, since hardly anyone believes on the basis of these arguments at all.

Traditional Christians cannot conceive of God as Mormons do: a God who has a wife, who invites other human beings to become gods with him.

The Christian leaders of the future have to be theologians, persons who know the heart of God and are trained - through prayer, study, and careful analysis - to manifest the divine event of God's saving work in the midst of the many seemingly random events of their time.

I was never close to Jerry Falwell because he had his ministry, I had mine. And we came from different theological training and from a different psychological education.

Orthodox theologians insisted that the rest of humankind were only transitory creatures, lost in sin - a view that would support what would become their dominant teaching about salvation, offered only through Christ, and, in particular, through the church they claimed to represent.

Frederick, is God dead?

If there is something more excellent than the truth, then that is God; if not, then truth itself is God.

There is no salvation outside the church.

How, then, does an order of causes which is certain to the foreknowledge of God necessitate that there should be nothing which is dependent on our wills, when our wills themselves have a very important place in the order of causes?

For if eternity and time are rightly distinguished by this, that time does not exist without some movement and transition, while in eternity there is no change, who does not see that there could have been no time had not some creature been made, which by some motion could give birth to change.

And it was manifested unto me, that those things be good which yet are corrupted; which neither were they sovereignly good, nor unless they were good could be corrupted: for if sovereignly good, they were incorruptible, if not good at all, there were nothing in them to be corrupted. For corruption injures, but unless it diminished goodness, it could not injure.

To what purpose, then, is it that this most learned and most acute man Varro attempts, as it were, with subtle disputation, to reduce and refer all these gods to heaven and earth? He cannot do it. They go out of his hands like water; they shrink back; they slip down and fall.

Accordingly we say that there is no unchangeable good but the one, true, blessed God; that the things which He made are indeed good because from Him, yet mutable because made not out of Him, but out of nothing.

For evil has no positive nature; but the loss of good has received the name "evil."

Therefore we are by no means compelled, either, retaining the prescience of God, to take away the freedom of the will, or, retaining the freedom of the will, to deny that He is prescient of future things, which is impious. But we embrace both. We faithfully and sincerely confess both. The former, that we may believe well; the latter, that we may live well.

Nothing which implies contradiction falls under the omnipotence of God.

Gnosticism has always been difficult to define, largely because it is a system of thought based upon and frequently amended by experiences of nonordinary states of consciousness, and thus it is resistant to theological rigidity.

Calvinism did not spring from Calvin. We believe that it sprang from the great Founder of all truth.

The truth of the Christian faith surpasses the capacity of reason.

In low theologies, hell is invariably the deepest truth, and the love of God is not so deep as hell.

Theology moves back and forth between two poles, the eternal truth of its foundations and the temporal situation in which the eternal truth must be received.

Faith and Reason are like two wings of the human spirit by which is soars to the truth.