Theology Quotes - Page 15

• When you're writing theology, you have to say everything all the time, otherwise people think you've deliberately missed something out.

  N. T. Wright

  Writing, Thinking, People

  "Trevin Wax Interview with N.T. Wright". www.thegospelcoalition.org. November 19, 2007.

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• Music will inevitably get you into Philosophy, and once you logically see that through, will end up getting you into Theology. Once you see that through, it will end up getting you to a simple place of being happy with yourself and everybody around you.

  Gino Vannelli

  Philosophy, Simple, Being Happy With Yourself

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• I knew a witty physician who found theology in the biliary duct, and used to affirm that if there was a disease in the liver, the man became a Calvinist, and if that organ was sound, he became a Unitarian.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Witty, Men, Disease

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1993). “Self-reliance, and Other Essays”, p.86, Courier Corporation

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• The crime of liberation theology was that it takes the Gospels seriously. That's unacceptable. The Gospels are radical pacifist material, if you take a look at them . . . Liberation theology, in Brazil particularly, brought the actual Gospel to  peasants. They said, let's read what the Gospels say, and try to act on the principles they describe. That was the major crime that set off the Reagan wars of terror.

  Noam Chomsky

  War, Trying, Principles

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• [Science] must be amoral by its very nature: The minute it begins separating facts into the two categories of good ones and bad ones it ceases to be science and becomes a mere nuisance, like theology.

  H. L. Mencken

  Two, Nuisance, Facts

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• Natural Theology says not only look up and look out-it also says look down and look in, and you will find the proofs of the reality of God in the depth of your own nature.

  Christopher Dawson

  Reality, Depth, Looks

  Christopher Dawson (2013). “Religion and Culture”, p.23, CUA Press

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• Grace is the essence of theology and gratitude is the essence of ethics.

  G. C. Berkouwer

  Gratitude, Essence, Grace

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• For there is some danger of falling into a soft and effeminate Christianity, under the plea of a lofty and ethereal theology.

  Charles Spurgeon

  Fall, Christianity, Danger

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• Academic theology is false.

  Alexander Schmemann

  Academic

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• An Animated Cartoon Theology:
  1. People are animals.
  2. The body is mortal and subject to incredible pain.
  3. Life is antagonistic to the living.
  4. The flesh can be sawed, crushed, frozen, stretched, burned, bombed, and plucked for music.
  5. The dumb are abused by the smart and the smart destroyed by their own cunning.
  6. The small are tortured by the large and the large destroyed by their own momentum.
  7. We are able to walk on air, but only as long as our illusion supports us.

  E. L. Doctorow

  Pain, Smart, Animal

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• Communion is deeper than theology.

  Samuel Chadwick

  Communion, Deeper

  Samuel Chadwick (2012). “The Path of Prayer”, p.31, CLC Publications

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• I think just the above things. I think I wanted to learn from both cultures. So, I think the music is a little more reflective of the... Catholic culture but the theology, obviously, is much more Reformational.

  Keith Getty

  Thinking, Catholic, Culture

  "Composer/performer Keith Getty is celebrating an Irish Christmas at venues across the USA". Interview with John W. Kennedy, www.beliefnet.com. December 5, 2014.

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• I wouldn't say philosophy and theology are dead. Brain science doesn't invent new philosophies but it helps remind us which of our existing philosophies are more true.

  David Brooks

  Philosophy, Brain, Helping

  "Ask the Author Live: David Brooks on the Composure Class". Live Q&As, www.newyorker.com. January 7, 2011.

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• Romans gave Luther his theology, but it was the Psalms that gave him his thunder.

  Steven J Lawson

  Psalms, Thunder, Luther

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• The hope of science is the perfection of the human race. The hope of theology is the salvation of a few, and the damnation of almost everybody.

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Race, Perfection, Damnation

  1867 The Age of Reason, Mar.

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• Men have gone on to build up vast intellectual schemes, philosophies, and theologies, to prove that ideals are not real as ideals but as antecedently existing actualities. They have failed to see that in converting moral realities into matters of intellectual assent they have evinced lack of moral faith.

  John Dewey

  Philosophy, Real, Men

  William James, John Dewey, John M. Capps, Donald Capps (2005). “James and Dewey on Belief and Experience”, p.236, University of Illinois Press

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• It may be observed in general that the future is purchased by the present. It is not possible to secure distant or permanent happiness but by the forbearance of some immediate gratification. This is so evidently true with regard to the whole of our existence that all precepts of theology have no other tendency than to enforce a life of faith; a life regulated not by our senses but by our belief; a life in which pleasures are to be refused for fear of invisible punishments, and calamities sometimes to be sought, and always endured, in hope of rewards that shall be obtained in another state.

  Samuel Johnson

  Punishment, May, Rewards

  Samuel Johnson (1801). “Works: ¬The Rambler”, p.223

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• I am interested in Scripture and theology. This is an interest that I can assume I would share with a pastor, so that makes me a little bit prone to use that kind of character, perhaps, just at the moment. Then there is also the fact that, having been a church member for many years, I am very aware of how much pastors enrich people's experience, people for whom they are significant. I know that it's a kind of custom of American literature and culture to slang them. I don't think there is any reason why that needs to be persisted in.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Character, Thinking, Years

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• It's a difficult thing to describe theology, what it means and how it disciplines thinking. Certainly, theology is the level at which the highest inquiry into meaning and ethics and beauty coincides with the largest-scale imagination of the nature of reality itself.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Mean, Reality, Thinking

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Often, when I want to read something that is satisfying to me as theology, what I actually read is string theory, or something like that - popularizations, inevitably, of scientific cosmologies - because their description of the scale of things and the intrinsic, astonishing character of reality coincides very beautifully with the most ambitious theology. It is thinking at that scale, and it is thinking that is invested with meaning in a humanly evocative form. That's theology.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Character, Reality, Thinking

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• I think the connection between poetry and theology, which is profound in Western tradition - there is a great deal of wonderful religious poetry - both poetry and theology push conventional definitions and explore perceptions that might be ignored or passed off as conventional, but when they are pressed yield much larger meanings, seem to be part of a much larger system of reality.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Religious, Reality, Thinking

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• The assumption behind any theology that I've ever been familiar with is that there is a profound beauty in being, simply in itself. Poetry, at least traditionally, has been an educing of the beauty of language, the beauty of experience, the beauty of the working of the mind, and so on. The pastor does, indeed, appreciate it.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Past, Appreciate, Profound

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Protestantism, of course, is much more explicitly divided into different traditions - the Pentecostals, the Anglicans. But there is the main tradition of Protestantism that comes out of the Reformation and that produced people like Kant and Hegel and so on, who are not normally thought of as being people writing in a theological tradition, although Hegel, of course, wrote theology his whole life.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Writing, People, Different

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• The idea that the universe itself is physically structured around hierarchy was sort of an integration of earlier science and theology that was made by people like Thomas Aquinas, that was assumed doctrinally in that tradition. The Reformation rejected that model of reality and created a highly individualistic metaphysics in the sense that it located everything normative that can be said about reality in human perception, there being, of course, no other avenue of knowing. There is Scripture, there is conscience, there is perception itself.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Reality, Knowing, Ideas

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• All of our theology must eventually become biography.

  Tim Hansel

  Biographies

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