Theologian Quotes - Page 16

• Science makes no claim to infallibility; it leaves that claim to be made by theologians.

  John Burroughs

  Claims, Made, Infallibility

  John Burroughs (1900). “Writings: The light of day”

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• Medieval theologians used to dispute how the angels in the heaven spent their time, when not balancing on needle points and singing anthems to the Lord. I know. They slump glued to their clouds, glasses at the ready, as the Archangel Micheal (that well-known slasher) and stonewalling St Peter open against the Devils XI. It could not be Heaven, otherwise.

  John Fowles

  Angel, Clouds, Glasses

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• If complex organisms demand an explanation, so does a complex designer. And it's no solution to raise the theologian's plea that God (or the Intelligent Designer) is simply immune to the normal demands of scientific explanation. To do so would be to shoot yourself in the foot. You cannot have it both ways. Either ID belongs in the science classroom, in which case it must submit to the discipline required of a scientific hypothesis. Or it does not, in which case, get it out of the science classroom and send it back to church, where it belongs.

  Richard Dawkins

  Intelligent, Feet, Discipline

  "One side can be wrong" by Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne, www.theguardian.com. September 01, 2005.

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• Theologians will protest that the story of Abraham sacrificing Issac should not be taken as literal fact. And the appropriate response is twofold: first, many, many people even to this day, do take the whole of their Scripture to be literal fact, and they have a great deal of political power over the rest of us, especially in the United States and in the Islamic world. Second, if not of literal fact, how should we take the story? As an alagory? Then an alagory for what? Surely, nothing praiseworthy. As a moral lesson? But what kind of morals could one derive from this appalling story?

  Richard Dawkins

  Islamic, Taken, Sacrifice

  "Richard Dawkins and God". "Background Briefing" with Kirsten Garrett on ABC Radio National, www.abc.net.au. November 26, 2006.

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• I had the intention of becoming a theologian...but now I see how God is, by my endeavors, also glorified in astronomy, for 'the heavens declare the glory of God.'

  Johannes Kepler

  Heaven, Becoming, Astronomy

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• The Scriptures are shallow enough for a babe to come and drink without fear of drowning and deep enough for theologians to swim in without ever reaching the bottom.

  St. Jerome

  Swim, Scripture, Drink

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• We should feel dissonance; we are, after all, immortals trapped in mortal surroundings. We lack unity because long ago a gap fissured open between our mortal and immortal parts; theologians trace the fault line back to the Fall.

  Philip Yancey

  Fall, Long Ago, Unity

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• To those of us who are not theologians, does it matter whether a thing is ordained or merely allowed? Are events that seem out of control caused by God? Or does He allow them to occur at the hands of human beings? You can spend a lot of time pondering that one and end up pretty much where you started. In either case, the purpose remains the same - our sanctification. God is in the business of making us walking, breathing examples of the invisible reality of the presence of Christ in us.

  Elisabeth Elliot

  Reality, Hands, Breathing

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• The God of the theologians is the creation of their empty heads.

  Benito Mussolini

  Creation, Empty, Empty Heads

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• The ideas of theologians are refuted by their adversaries, the ideas of scientists are refuted by their followers.

  Peter Gay

  Ideas, Followers, Scientist

  Peter Gay (1970). “The Bridge of Criticism; Dialogues Among Lucian, Erasmus, and Voltaire on the Enlightenment: --on History and Hope, Imagination and Reason, Constraint and Freedom--and on Its Meaning for Our Time”

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• God cannot suffer - at least not as we do. It has some roots in Greek philosophy: if God is a perfect being, suffering would reduce that perfection, so God cannot suffer. More thoughtful theologians take the phrase in the sense of one of the confessions of faith that talks of God as being "without parts or passions" - he is not physical as we are, and not subject to "passions" in the sense of uncontrollable emotions that can take charge of us at times. God is not "emotional," if that word is used as some kind of weakness.

  Christopher J. H. Wright

  Philosophy, Passion, Thoughtful

  Source: www.patheos.com

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• Theologians are all alike, of whatever religion or country they may be; their aim is always to wield despotic authority over men's consciences; they therefore persecute all of us who have the temerity to tell the truth.

  Frederick The Great

  Country, Men, Atheism

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• Agnostics are people who, like myself, confess themselves to be hopelessly ignorant concerning a variety of matters, about which metaphysicians and theologians, both orthodox and heterodox, dogmatize with the utmost confidence.

  Herbert Spencer

  People, Ignorant, Atheism

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• It is quite likely ... that the central figure of the gospels is not based on any historical individual. Put simply, not only is the theological "Christ of faith" a synthetic construct of theologians, a symbolic "Uncle Sam" figure, but if you could travel ... back to First-Century Nazareth, you would not find a Jesus living there.

  Robert M. Price

  Jesus, Uncles, Historical

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• It is also possible to say precisely why. Truth seduces us very easily into a kind of joy of possession: I have comprehended this and that, learned it, understood it. Knowledge is power. I am therefore more than the other man who does not know this and that. I have greater possibilities and also greater temptations. Anyone who deals with truth - as we theologians certainly do - succumbs all too easily to the psychology of the possessor. But love is the opposite of the will to possess. It is self-giving. It boasteth not itself, but humbleth itself.

  Helmut Thielicke

  Love Is, Men, Opposites

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• Whatever a theologian regards as true must be false: there you have almost a criterion of truth.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Atheism, Criteria, Regard

  Friedrich Nietzsche “Delphi Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche (Illustrated): Friedrich Nietzsche”, Delphi Classics

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• Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science, as strangled snakes beside that of Hercules

  Thomas Huxley

  Lying, Snakes, Cradle

  Thomas Gribble, Thomas Henry Huxley (1871). “The semi-barbarous Hebrew and the extinguished theologian [a reply to T.H. Huxley's Lay sermons].”, p.3

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• The medieval theologian who gazed at the night sky through the eyes of Aristotle and saw angels moving the spheres in harmony has become the modern cosmologist who gazes at the same sky through the eyes of Einstein and sees the hand of God not in angels but in the constants of nature. When confronted with the order and beauty of the universe and the strange coincidences of nature, it¹s very tempting to take the leap of faith from science into religion. I am sure many physicists want to. I only wish they would admit it.

  Tony Rothman

  Moving, Eye, Angel

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• God is omnipotent; God is wholly good; and yet evil exists. There seems to be some contradiction between these three propositions, so that if any two of them were true the third would be false. But at the same time all three are essential parts of most theological positions: the theologian it seems, at once must adhere and cannot consistently adhere to all three.

  J. L. Mackie

  Two, Evil, Essentials

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• "Elohim," the name for the creative power in Genesis, is a female plural, a fact that generations of learned rabbis and Christian theologians have all explained as merely grammatical convention. The King James and most other Bibles translate it as "God," but if you take the grammar literally, it seems to mean "goddesses." Al Shaddai, god of battles, appears later, and YHWH, mispronounced Jehovah, later still.

  Robert Anton Wilson

  Christian, Kings, Mean

  "Everything Is Under Control : Conspiracies, Cults, and Cover-Ups" by Robert Anton Wilson, (p. 197), 1998.

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• It doesn't do to say that heresy produces the development of doctrine, because that annoys the theologians. But it is true to say that as a matter of history the development of doctrine has been largely a reaction on the Church's part to the attacks of heresy.

  Ronald Knox

  Church, Doctrine, Development

  Ronald Arbuthnott Knox (1963). “University and Anglican sermons of Ronald A. Knox: together with sermons preached on various occasions”

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• In Heaven all reviews will be favorable; here on earth, the publisher realizes, plausibility demands an occasional bad one, some convincing lump in all that leaven, and he accepts it somewhat as a theologian accepts Evil.

  Randall Jarrell

  Evil, Heaven, Demand

  "Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964". Book by Randall Jarrell, "Contemporary Poetry Criticism" (p. 59), 1980.

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• Whether we ever get to know about them or not, there are very probably alien civilizations that are superhuman, to the point of being god-like in ways that exceed anything a theologian could possibly imagine. Their technical achievements would seem as supernatural to us as ours would seem to a Dark Age peasant transported to the twenty-first century. Imagine his response to a laptop computer, a mobile telephone, a hydrogen bomb or a jumbo jet.

  Richard Dawkins

  Dark, Civilization, Hydrogen Bomb

  Richard Dawkins (2008). “The God Delusion”, p.98, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The English mind is always in a rage. The intellect of the race is wasted in the sordid and stupid quarrels of second-rate politicians or third-rate theologians.

  Oscar Wilde

  Stupid, Race, Mind

  Intentions "The Critic as Artist" pt. 2 (1891)

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• The philosopher is not an apologist; apologetic concern, as Karl Barth (the one living theologian of unquestionable genius) has rightly insisted, is the death of serious theologizing, and I would add, equally of serious work in the philosophy of religion.

  Donald M. MacKinnon

  Philosophy, Add, Genius

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