Theology Quotes - Page 10

• You have to be closer to religious origins -- the generation of the 20's was truly secular in that it still knew its theology and its varieties of religious experience. We are post-secular, inventing new faiths, without any sense of organizing truths. The truths we accept are so multiple that honesty becomes little more than a strategy by which you manage your tendencies toward duplicity.

  Ann Douglas

  Religious, Honesty, Duplicity

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• You know how it is in the symphony when you are listening to the symphony, the last notes die away, and there's often a beat of silence in the auditorium before the applause begins. It's a very full and pregnant silence. Now theology should bring us to live into that silence, into that pregnant pause.

  Karen Armstrong

  Symphony, Silence, Listening

  "Big Think Interview With Karen Armstrong". Interview with Austin Allen, bigthink.com. November 16, 2009.

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• The trouble with a lot of modern theology and a lot of modern thinking about God, is that we think of God a sort of being like ourselves, but bigger and better with likes and dislikes similar to our own.

  Karen Armstrong

  Thinking, Likes And Dislikes, Bigger And Better

  Interview with Austin Allen, bigthink.com. November 16, 2009.

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• I began to read for myself and realised that here was somebody who could teach me profound biblical theology, get inside my heart with his spiritual analysis, and help me to become a minister of the gospel, which is what I wanted to be.

  Sinclair B. Ferguson

  Spiritual, Heart, Biblical

  Source: booksataglance.com

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• Indifference to all the refinements of life--it's really shocking. Just Calvinism, that's all. Calvinism without the excuse of Calvin's theology.

  Aldous Huxley

  Luxury, Reform, Indifference

  Aldous Huxley (1953). “The collected works of Aldous Huxley”

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• A theology whose god is a metaphor is wasting its time.

  Mason Cooley

  Religion, Metaphor

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• It is a mystery to me how a theologian can be praised for having brought himself to disbelieve dogmas. I've always thought that those who have brought themselves to believe in dogmas merit the true recognition owing a heroic deed.

  Karl Kraus

  Believe, Heroic Deeds, Religion

  Karl Kraus (1976). “Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms”

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• The Christ of Theology is not alive for us today. He is wrapped in the grave cloths of dogma.

  Albert Schweitzer

  Alive, Today, Dogma

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• Intelligent Design has been hijacked by a narrow group of creationist fundamentalists in America to mean something it didn't originally mean at all. It's another form of the God of the gaps. It's bad theology in that it turns God once again into the pagan god of thunder and lightning.

  Guy Consolmagno

  Mean, Intelligent, America

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• The beginning of Christendom, is, strictly, at a point out of time. A metphysical trigonometry finds it among the spiritual Secrets, at the meeting of two heavenward lines, one drawn from Bethany along the Ascent of the Messias, the other from Jerusalem against the Descent of the Paraclete. That measurement, the measurement of eternity in operation, of the bright cloud and the rushing wind, is, in effect, theology.

  Charles Williams

  Spiritual, Clouds, Wind

  Charles Williams (2016). “The Descent of the Dove: A Short History of the Holy Spirit in the Church”, p.1, Wipf and Stock Publishers

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• Bad theology dishonors God and hurts people. Churches that sever the root of truth may flourish for a season, but they will wither eventually or turn into something besides a Christian church.

  John Piper

  Christian, Hurt, Roots

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• Bad theology dishonors God and hurts people.

  John Piper

  Hurt, People, Dishonor

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• Theology, not morality, is the first business on the church's agenda of reform, and the church, not society, is the first target of divine criticism.

  Michael Horton

  Criticism, Church, Reform

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• Bad theology will eventually hurt people and dishonor God in proportion to its badness.

  John Piper

  Hurt, People, Dishonor

  John Piper (2009). “Taste and See: Savoring the Supremacy of God in All of Life”, p.348, Multnomah

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• Every faith uses some kind of tool to understand itself better. Faith seeks understanding. The Western tradition has used philosophy to understand the truths of the faith and you come up with theology. Where as, Islam at a certain point said: we'll use law. There are these four major, developed schools of Islamic jurisprudence.

  Francis George

  Philosophy, Islamic, School

  Source: www.realclearreligion.org

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• Theology differs from science in many respects, because of its different subject matter, a personal God who cannot be put to the test in the way that the impersonal physical world can be subjected to experimental enquiry. Yet science and theology have this in common, that each can be, and should be defended as being investigations of what is, the search for increasing verisimilitude in our understanding of reality.

  John Polkinghorne

  Reality, Understanding, Tests

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• The existence of very pious feelings, in conjunction with intolerance, cruelty, and selfish policy, has never ceased to surprise and perplex those who have viewed it calmly from a distance. ... It is impossible to exaggerate the evil work theology has done in the world. What destruction of the beautiful monuments of past ages, what waste of life, what disturbance of domestic and social happiness, what perverted feelings, what blighted hearts, have always marked its baneful progress!

  Lydia M. Child

  Beautiful, Selfish, Distance

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• It could plausibly be argued that far from Christian theology having hampered the study of nature for fifteen hundred years, it was Greek corruptions of biblical Christianity which hampered it.

  Mary Hesse

  Christian, Biblical, Years

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• Rationally considered, nothing can be more absurd than the baptism of infants under any circumstances. No statement, no matter by whom it may be said to have been uttered, can make that true which is radically false. If an innocent child, unconscious of good or evil, irresponsible to God and man, incapable of thought or action, is not already, in accordance with Christian theology, a member of Christ, then no vicarious promise or priestly ablution can make him one. For if this were so, a similar ceremony under devil worship could make him a member of Satan.

  Tennessee Celeste Claflin

  Christian, Children, Men

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• Christianity in our country is a lot like what the Ducksters profess. No longer doctrinaire or demanding, the mishmash of pop-religion practiced in churches across America is an extension of the therapeutic culture: festooned with feelings, mostly misdirected. Untempered by intelligent interpretation of scripture... American pop-theology: light on doctrine, heavy on hellfire and damnation.

  Ilana Mercer

  Country, Intelligent, Light

  "Duck Dynasty: A Decoy For Dummies". American Daily Herald, December 27, 2013.

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• Margaret Miles offers a stunning treatment of human experience, coaxing humans to leave dualisms behind and embrace our intelligent bodies. In a foundational text, she draws on the arts, philosophy and theology, and her experience as a hospice volunteer to explore concrete alternatives to privileging the rational mind. Her erudition, wisdom, and graceful writing are compelling proof of the intelligent body.

  Mary E. Hunt

  Art, Philosophy, Writing

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• Science tells us what we can know but what we can know is little and if we forget how much we cannot know we become insensitive of many things of very great importance. Theology, on the other hand induces a dogmatic belief that we have knowledge where in fact we have ignorance and by doing so generates a kind of impertinent insolence towards the universe. Uncertainty in the presence of vivid hopes and fears is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales.

  Bertrand Russell

  Ignorance, Hands, Support

  Bertrand Russell (2013). “History of Western Philosophy: Collectors Edition”, p.2, Routledge

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• The antagonism between science and religion, about which we hear so much, appears to me to be purely factitiousfabricated, on the one hand, by short-sighted religious people who confound a certain branch of science, theology, with religion; and, on the other, by equally short-sighted scientific people who forget that science takes for its province only that which is susceptible of clear intellectual comprehension; and that, outside the boundaries of that province, they must be content with imagination, with hope, and with ignorance

  Thomas Huxley

  Religious, Ignorance, Hands

  Thomas Henry Huxley (1892). “Essays Upon Some Controverted Questions”

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• Next to theology I give to music the highest place and honor. And we see how David and all the saints have wrought their godly thoughts into verse, rhyme, and song.

  Martin Luther

  Song, Godly, Giving

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• The more I read, the less I admire modern theology. the more I study the productions of the new schools of theological teachers, the more I marvel that men and women can be satisfied with such writings. There is a vagueness, a mistiness, a shallowness, an indistinctness, a superficiality, an aimlessness, a hollowness about the literature of the 'broader and kinder systems', as they are called, which to my mind stamps their origin on their face. They are of the earth, earthy.

  J. C. Ryle

  Teacher, Writing, School

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