Theology Quotes - Page 25

• Theology is Classified Superstition.

  Elbert Hubbard

  Atheism, Superstitions, Positive Atheism

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• I whispered to Dad during Rosh Hashanah services, "Do you believe in God?" "Not really," he said. "No." "Then why do we come here?" He sucked thoughfully on his Tums tablet and put his arm around me, draping me under his musty woolen prayer shawl, and then shrugged. "I've been wrong before," he said. And that pretty much summed up what theology there was to find in the Foxman home.

  Jonathan Tropper

  Prayer, Dad, Believe

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• The disappearance of theology from the life of the Church, and the orchestration of that disappearance by some of its leaders, is hard to miss today, but oddly enough, not easy to prove. It is hard to miss in the evangelical world--in the vacuous worship that is so prevalent, for example, in the shift form God to the self as the central focus of faith, in the psychologized preaching that follows this shift, in the erosion of its conviction, in its strident pragmatism, in its inability to think incisively about the culture, in its reveling in the irrational.

  David F. Wells

  Thinking, Erosion, Self

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• You have a lot to learn, young man. Philosophy. Theology. Literature. Poetry. Drama. History. Archeology. Anthropology. Mythology. Music. These are your tools as much as brush and pigment. You cannot be an artist until you are civilized. You cannot be civilized until you learn. To be civilized is to know where you belong in the continuum of our art and your world. To surmount the past, you must know the past.

  John Logan

  Art, Philosophy, Drama

  John Logan (2012). “Red”, p.13, Oberon Books

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• This is the reason why our Theology is certain: because it seizes us from ourselves and places us outside ourselves.

  Martin Luther

  Reason Why, Reason, Certain

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• Christian theology is the grandmother of Bolshevism.

  Oswald Spengler

  Christian, Grandmother, Bolshevism

  Oswald Spengler (1942). “Hour Decision”

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• Theology is-- or should be-- a species of poetry,which read quickly or encountered in a hubbub of noise makes no sense. You have to open yourself to a poem with a quiet, receptive mind, in the same way you might listen to a difficult piece of music... If you seize upon a poem and try to extort its meaning before you are ready, it remains opaque. If you bring your own personal agenda to bear upon it, the poem will close upon itself like a clam, because you have denied its unique and separate identity, its inviolate holiness.

  Karen Armstrong

  Unique, Mind, Trying

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• All definite knowledge - so I should contend - belongs to science; all dogma as to what surpasses definite knowledge belongs to theology. But between theology and science there is a No Man's Land, exposed to attack by both sides; this No Man's Land is philosophy.

  Bertrand Russell

  Philosophy, Knowledge, Men

  Bertrand Russell (2008). “History of Western Philosophy”, p.13, Simon and Schuster

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• Why does philosophy use concepts and why does faith use symbols if both try to express the same ultimate? The answer, of course, is that the relation to the ultimate is not the same in each case. The philosophical relation is in principle a detached description of the basic structure in which the ultimate manifests itself. The relation of faith is in principle an involved expression of concern about the meaning of the ultimate for the faithful.

  Paul Tillich

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Expression

  Paul Tillich (1958). “Dynamics of faith”

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• The problem is that, regardless of what our theologies tell us about the purpose of the clergy, the actual effect of the clergy profession is to make the body of Christ lame. This happens not because clergy intend it (they usually intend the opposite) but because the objective nature of the profession inevitably turns the laity into passive receivers.

  Christian Smith

  Opposites, Purpose, Lame

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• Theology is a part of our lives. It's unavoidable. A thoughtless theology guides our lives with just as much force as a thoughtful and informed one.

  Dallas Willard

  Thoughtful, Guides, Force

  Dallas Willard (2009). “The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives”, p.26, Harper Collins

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• What is wonderful about a university like LSE is that you not only receive teaching of very high quality, you also learn where to find the knowledge you are seeking. And you make unexpected discoveries; it was a Marxist professor who introduced me to the work of Cardinal Newman, a great master of English prose as well as theology.

  Pierre Trudeau

  Teaching, Discovery, Quality

  "Memoirs". Book by Pierre Trudeau, 1993.

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• Religion is neither a theology nor a theosophy; it is more than that, it is a discipline, a law, a yoke, an indissoluble engagement.

  Joseph Joubert

  Law, Discipline, Religion

  Joseph Joubert (1896). “Pensées of Joubert”

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• Let us read the Bible without the ill-fitting colored spectacles of theology, just as we read other books, using our own judgment and reason, listening to the voice within, not to the noisy babel without. Most of us possess discriminating reasoning powers. Can we use them or must we be fed by others like babes?

  Luther Burbank

  Fear, Book, Voice

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• As in art, poetry, music, etc., the best theology is worked out in pain

  Steve Chalke

  Art, Pain, Etc

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• Plain experience and common sense inform us that no abstract Person can have made us as we are without also wishing to delete us and start over (Gen. 8:21; Zeph. 1:2). Therefore, the existence of cruel and arbitrary nature, together with the universality of human sin, prevents us from beginning the theological enterprise with any concept of God that is distinct from revelation. All theologies of a cosmic harmonic principle shipwreck on the truths of tragedy, catastrophe, and injustice.

  Paul F. M. Zahl

  Common Sense, Starting Over, Together

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• The significant contribution of empiricism was not the eradication of certainty, but the eradication of infallibility as a criterion of certainty. And this shift from infallibilism to fallibilism has profound consequences not only for toleration, but also for the subordination of faith to reason and theology to philosophy.

  George H. Smith

  Philosophy, Profound, Atheism

  George H. Smith (2000). “Why Atheism?”, Pyr Books

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• I think gardening is nearer to godliness than theology. True gardeners are both iconographers and theologians insofar as these activities are the fruit of prayer 'without ceasing.' Likewise, true gardeners never cease to garden, not even in their sleep, because gardening is not just something they do. It is how they live.

  Vigen Guroian

  Prayer, Sleep, Garden

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• Christianity ... that musty old theology, which already has its grave clothes on, and is about to be buried... A wall of Bible, brimstone, church and corruption has hitherto hemmed women into nothingness.

  Lucy Stone

  Wall, Clothes, Atheism

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• Theology is but a science of applied to God. As schools change theology must necessarily change. Truth is everlasting, but our ideas of truth are not. Theology is but our ideas of truth classified and arranged.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  School, Ideas, Truth Is

  Henry Ward Beecher (1866). “Royal truths”, p.53

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• I think that gardening is nearer to godliness than theology.

  Vigen Guroian

  Thinking, Religion, Gardening

  Vigen Guroian (2001). “Inheriting Paradise: Meditations on Gardening”, p.106, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

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• Once people get hung up on theology, they've lost sanity forever. More people have been killed in the name of Jesus Christ than any other name in the history of the world.

  Gore Vidal

  Jesus, Names, People

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Theology, however implausible many of its truth claims, is one of the most ambitious theoretical arenas left in an increasingly specialized world

  Terry Eagleton

  Ambitious, Arena, World

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• To so many people, the Lord is in danger of being no more than a patron saint of our systematic theology instead of the Christ who is our life.

  W. Ian Thomas

  People, Systematic, Saint

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• Perhaps the greatest lesson [Huxley] learned from reading Carlyle was that real religion, that emotive feeling for Truth and Beauty, could flourish in the absence of an idolatrous theology.

  Adrian Desmond

  Real, Reading, Thinking

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