Theology Quotes - Page 3

There is something distinctly odd about the argument, however. Believing is not something you can decide to do as a matter of policy. At least, it is not something I can decide to do as an act of will. I can decide to go to church and I can decide to recite the Nicene Creed, and I can decide to swear on a stack of bibles that I believe every word inside them. But none of that can make me actually believe it if I don't. Pascal's Wager could only ever be an argument for feigning belief in God. And the God that you claim to believe in had better not be of the omniscient kind or he'd see through the deception.

God is not, like creatures, made up of parts. God is spirit, without bodily dimensions. Firstly, no body can cause change without itself being changed. Secondly, things with dimensions are potential of division. But the starting-point for all existence must be wholly real and not potential in any way: though things that get realized begin as potential, preceding them is the source of their realization which must already be real. Thirdly, living bodies are superior to other bodies; and what makes a body living is not the dimensions which make it a body (for then everything with dimensions would be living), but something more excellent like a soul. The most excellent existent of all then cannot be a body. So when the scriptures ascribe dimensions to God they are using spatial extension to symbolize the extent of God's power; just as they ascribe bodily organs to God as metaphors for their functions, and postures like sitting or standing to symbolize authority or strength.

You will see by this that no man should be judged by another here in this life, for the good or evil he has done. Deeds may be properly judged, whether they are good or bad, but not men.

There is no unmoving mover behind the movement. It is only movement. It is not correct to say that life is moving, but life is movement itself. Life and movement are not two different things. In other words, there is no thinker behind the thought. Thought itself is the thinker. If you remove the thought, there is no thinker to be found.

Lewis is a rare example of someone who liked to think about life's great questions because they were forced on him by his own experience.

The main things are the plain things, and the plain things are the main things.

There is not one blade of grass, there is no color in this world that is not intended to make us rejoice.

I do not think either virginity or old age contemptible, and some of the shrewdest minds I have met inhabited the bodies of old maids.

Hold material goods and wealth on a flat palm and not in a clenched fist.

There is only one God and all atheists will learn that after their deaths

There is only one way of salvation. Men are sinful rebels against God, by nature, enemies of holiness and He who is holy. Dominated by sin, ruled over by evil, we are helpless to even drag ourselves toward the true and holy God, even if we wanted to! We are dead in sin. "But God, who is rich in mercy, because of the great love which he loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ" (Ephesians 2:4-5). The Father, in His infinite mercy and grace, saved us in Christ Jesus.

Every single Biblical doctrine of theology, directly or indirectly, ultimately has its basis in the book of Genesis.

We would do our theology better if more was at stake in what we said.

Go back to Socrates: "Know thyself." For Socrates, there are only two kinds of people: the wise, who know they are fools; and fools, who think they are wise. Similarly, for Christ and all the prophets, there are only two kinds of people: saints, who know they are sinners; and sinners, who think they are saints. Which are you?

A theology that cannot be sung is not worth having.... Authentic Christian faith is not merely believed. Nor is it merely acted upon. It is sung - with utter joy sometimes, in uncontrollable tears sometimes, but it is sung.

Experiencing grief and pain is like falling off a cliff. Everything has been turned upside down, and we are no longer in control. As we fall, we see one and only one tree that is growing out from the rock face. So we grab hold of it and cling to it with all our might. This tree is our holy God. He alone can keep us from falling headfirst to our doom. There simply aren’t any other trees to grab. So we cling to this tree (the holy God) with all our might.But what we didn’t realize is that when we fell and grabbed the tree our arm actually became entangled in the branches, so that in reality, the tree is holding us. We hold on to keep from falling, but what we don’t realize is that we can’t fall because the tree has us. We are safe. God, in his holiness, is keeping us and showing mercy to us. We may not be aware of it, but it is true. He is with us even in the deepest and darkest pit.

Indeed, a quick glance around this broken world makes it painfully obvious that we don't need more arguments on behalf of God; we need more people who live as if they are in covenant with Unconditional Love, which is our best definition of God. (p. 21)

The greatest power is the power of pray.

Problems arise when (especially) theologians use such metaphorical language without realizing that that is what they are doing, and without even realizing that there is a distinction between metaphor and reality – saying something like: ‘It is not important whether Jesus really fed the five thousand. What matters is what the idea of the story means to us.’ Actually it is important, because millions of devout people do believe the Bible is literally true.

In any theological struggle, the first thousand years are always the bitterest.

Anyone who utters “salvation only through Christ” inadvertently commits to the greatest blasphemy of all, which is differentiation, and this in turn diminishes the very essence of the title Christian.

Simply to render oneself able to understand what other Christian thinkers have themselves come to understand and to more or less felicitously communicate requires that one's mind not be a blank slate but already properly formed, disciplined, and exercised.

The fact that we can neither prove nor disprove the existence of something does not put existence and non-existence on an even footing.

We must learn to accept ourselves in the painful experiment of living. We must embrace the spiritual adventure of becoming human, moving through the many stages that lie between birth and death.

Just as God's love entered the world, thereby submitting to the misunderstanding and ambiguity that characterize everything worldly, so also Christian love does not exist anywhere but in the worldly, in an infinite variety of concrete worldly action, and subject to misunderstanding and condemnation. Every attempt to portray a Christianity of 'pure' love purged of worldly 'impurities' is a false purism and perfectionism that scorns God's becoming human and falls prey to the fate of all ideologies. God was not too pure to enter the world.

Go to heaven for the climate and hell for the company.

One should regard one's religious or denominational affiliation as a point of departure, a point of entry, not the point of arrival because on cannot confine God to a particular religion or faith tradition, and therefore should not claim one's exclusive ownership of God. Regarding one's religious or denominational affiliation as _accidentality_; not as _inevitability_, is important in religious discourse and practice because such a sense of _accidentality_ of one's affiliation allows a space of _alterity_ of reciprocal contestation and challenge, and a space of planetary gaze that sees others as fellow human beings, _regardless_.

I fear that much of the Christianity that surrounds us assumes our task is to save appearances by protecting God from Job-like anguish. But if God is the God of Jesus Christ, then God does not need our protection. What God demands is not protection, but truth.

I know the theological answers, but do my blood and my pulse?

Implicit … in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or “ism,” any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course, or drive both majorities and minorities into the cruelties of the Inquisition, the pogrom, the gulag, or the jihad....A rejection of absolutism, in all its forms, may sometimes slip into moral relativism or even nihilism, an erosion of values that hold society together…

Is it faith to understand nothing, and merely submit your convictions implicitly to the Church?

Suffering provides the gym equipment on which my faith can be exercised.

Even if one gives up the concept of God, there are quite a few recognized immaterial things that one has to struggle with. Things such as thought, truth, logic, morality, purpose, and justice become a real problem if the universe is simply material. One could say that these things are imaginary, but then they would have to explain the immaterial construct of imagination.

The formula "the Church is the Body of Christ" thus states that the Eucharist, in which the Lord gives us his body, forever remains the place where the Church is generated, where the Lord himself never ceases to found her anew; in the Eucharist the Church is most compactly herself - in all places, yet one only, just as he is one

If we look more closely, we see that any violent display of power, whether political or religious, produces an outburst of folly in a large part of mankind; indeed, this seems actually to be a psychological and sociological law: the power of some needs the folly of others. It is not that certain human capacities, intellectual capacities for instance, become stunted of destroyed, but rather that the upsurge of power makes such an overwhelming impression that men are deprived of their independent judgment, and...give up trying to assess the new state of affairs for themselves.

Love gives you eyes.

Cosmopolitan discourse...provides one with a _public gaze_ with which one can relate oneself to others in a different way.

Without the infinite personal God, all a person can do, as Nietzsche points out, is to make systems. In today's speech we would call them gameplans. A person can erect some sort of structure, some type of limited frame in which he lives, shutting himself up in that frame and not looking beyond it.

The Holy Bible is the written code of holy teachings.

The greatest KNOWLEDGE is the knowledge of GOD.

[God] sees before Him in fact a self-centred, greedy, grumbling, rebellious human animal. But He says "Let us pretend that this is not a mere creature, but our Son. It is like Christ in so far as it is a Man, for He became Man. Let us pretend that it is also like Him in Spirit. Let us treat it as if it were what in fact it is not. Let us pretend in order to make the pretence into a reality." God looks at you as if you were a little Christ: Christ stands beside you to turn you into one. I daresay this idea of a divine makebelieve sounds rather strange at first. But, is it so strange really? Is not that how the higher thing always raises the lower? A mother teaches her baby to talk by talking to it as if it understood long before it really does.

I dared, for the first and last time in my life, to express a theological conclusion: "But how can a necessary being exist totally polluted with the possible? What difference is there, then, between God and primogenial chaos? Isn't affirming God's absolute omnipotence and His absolute freedom with regard to His own choices tantamount to demonstrating that God does not exist?

He (Jesus) gave up his life not because of the so-called sins of humanity, but because he was too adamant to give in to orthodox monstrosity.

Theologians should study in a seminary and before graduating they should make a visit to heaven and hell after which they should submit their thesis and graduate.

Jesus Christ is the Son of God.

I fully recognize there is an urgent need for constructing the _strategic we-nes-in-sameness_ and promoting the _solidarity of sameness_. The sheer realization of the inextricable interconnectedness of I-ness/me-ness and we-ness/us-ness is the round for an authentic solidarity with one another in spite of and regardless of the difference.

If we read the Word of God, we shall know the will of God.

In short, the Lord's Supper was the realization of new social and political arrangements, the embodiment of the social leveling seen in Jesus' ministry, most profoundly in his acts of table fellowship. Importantly, as we have seen, these new social arrangements could only be achieved if the emotions of social stratification were confronted, eliminated, or reinterpreted. In his body metaphor, Paul dramatically reframes these heretical emotions, the emotions of contempt, disgust, honor, and social presentability. Rather, than signaling exclusion and division - the natural expulsive impulse inherent in these emotions - Paul suggests that these emotions should signal just the opposite in the Kingdom of God: honor, care, and embrace.

Love isn’t self-centered, even at the supreme scale.

For wordsmiths and masters of words, without necessarily being harsh with words, the words have a tendency to shoot straight to the hearts of people, and this either deeply touches them or deeply angers them. Like the apostles in all their loving controversies are those who are masters of words while combining this gift with truth.

If I have a theological virtue, it is curiosity or inquisitiveness.

[L]et it be remembered that atheism … is the secret of religion … ; religion … in its heart, in its essence, believes in nothing else than the truth and divinity of human nature.

Heresy is usually quite sophisticated, actually has a meaning, and is to be taken very seriously. It is therefore to be carefully distinguished from turgid, pretentious, badly-written Bullsgeshichte, to use the technical German theological term.

No sooner was the wound given than the remedy was provided and revealed.

Death was far more certain than God.

To know myself as woman in the image of God to know God as Mother and to know my own mother as a window into God: these three are inseparable.If one is implausible to the heart the other two are as well.

Cosmopolitan theology is a theology for _the impossible_.

Theology has not advanced an inch in the last 1,000 years. How much respect does a profession deserve if it cannot add to the knowledge and understanding of man?

I cannot now evaluate the events that, at the end of those thirty years, made me discover the necessity of religious belief. I was not reasoned into my disposition. Though I admire the structured thought of theology, it is to religion no more than counterpoint exercises are to music.

God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him