Quotes about theology

Commandments are the railroad tracks on which the life empowered by the love of God poured into the heart by the Holy Spirit runs. Love empowers the engine law guides the direction. They are mutually interdependent. The notion that love can operate apart from law is a figment of the imagination. It is not only bad theology it is poor psychology. It has to borrow from law to give eyes to love.

God gives us not only the truth but also the ability to believe it not only the new thing to see but also the new eye to see it with.

A poet is not an apostle he drives out devils only by the power of the devil.

They had not yet attained the stupefying boredom of omnipotence their experiments did not always succeed.

I don't care what problem you face it has no power to defeat the cross of Christ.

Theology is never any help it is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn't there. Theologians can persuade themselves of anything.

Joy isn't grounded in our circumstances it is grounded in the unchanging character of God.

This withdrawal of theology from the world of secular affairs is made more complete by the work of biblical scholars whose endlessly fascinating exercises have made it appear to the lay Christian that no one untrained in their methods can really understand anything the Bible says. We are in a situation analogous to one about which the great Reformers complained. The Bible has been taken out of the hands of the layperson it has now become the professional property not of the priesthood but of the

knowledge depends on the mode of the knower for what is known is in the knower according to the measure of his mode

It helps to not confuse theological philosophers with evangelists. There is a difference but objectively neither better than the other: an evangelist's mission is to convert a theological philosopher's mission is to build an understanding of a position.

Theology is an attempt to hack god's mind and look at the universe as he does god's firewalls are so strong no attempt has ever been successful.

The freedom to talk with God and of God is being opened by God's joy. It cannot be forced. For true awareness cannot be coercive it does not come about by either authoritarian pressure or the force of logic. It presupposes liberty. Being aware of God is an art and--if the term may be permitted--a noble game.

Do I need to wriggle my breasts at you again?""No, please. I don't know if I'd be able to stand the theological debate that would follow.

...'joy' in Phillippians is a defiant 'Nevertheless!' that Paul sets like a full stop against the Philippians' anxiety...

The sensayer frowned. “You’re saying you discuss theology while having sex.”“For beginners it’s before and after mostly, managing it during sex takes skill and concentration.

Me? You are laughing at me. Put your hand here. This has no theology.' I mocked myself while I made love. I flung myself into pleasure like a suicide on to a pavement.

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

Our fates are locked together. It would be foolish of me to anger God by leaving you.

. . . the mysteries, on belief in which theology would hang the destinies of mankind, are cunningly devised fables whose origin and growth are traceable to the age of Ignorance, the mother of credulity.

Those who hold to the Christian faith see law as an ultimate order of the universe. It is the invariable factor in a variable world, the unchanging order in a changing universe. Law for the Christian is thus absolute, final, and an aspect of God's creation and a manifestation of His nature. In terms of this, the Christian can hold that right is right, and wrong is wrong, that good and evil are unchanging moral categories rather than relative terms.From an evolutionary perspective, however, we ha

How do evil people find the strength to do good?

The danger of refusing to reflect upon the psychological dynamics of faith and belief is that what we feel to be self evidently true, for psychological reasons, might be, upon inspection, highly questionable, intellectually or morally. Too often, as we all know, the 'feeling of rightness' trumps sober reflection and moral discernment. Further, we are often unwilling to listen to others until we are, to some degree, psychologically open to persuasion. The Parable of the Sower comes to mind.

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

In the Middle Ages there was no salvation outside the Church, and the theologians had a hard time explaining what God did with those pagans who were visibly virtuous or saintly. Similarly, in contemporary society effort is not productive unless it is done at the behest of a boss, and economists have a hard time dealing with the obvious usefulness of people when they are outside the corporate control of a corporation, volunteer agency, or labour camp.

I am going to show you great and mighty things which no one has ever seen before.... I am going to take you places where no one has ever been. I am going to take you to heights where no one has ever reached. If you will only come to me with all your heart, I will do a mighty work in you, which no man can undo but yourself.

A time will come in your life, William, where your faith will be tested... and you must stay faithful to the word and vision that the All-Father has given to you.

It is you I foreknew and have predestined for such a time as this. Just as My heart has so eagerly chosen you, William Ore, you must also choose me.

Who are theologians? What kind of self-identity could or should a theologian claim? Should a theologian be a defender or transmitter of Christian _tradition_? What if the _tradition_ itself carries a dark side, implicitly or explicitly, bounded by religious or cultural superiorism, ethnocentrism, homophobism, exclusive nationalism, sexism, racism, and so forth? What kind of _identity_ would then justify my rule as theologian? This question has been lingering in my mind throughout the time I have

Although I believe identity politics '"produces limited but real empowerment for its participants," it is important to note that it contains significant problems: first, its essentialist tendency; second, its fixed _we-they_ binary position; third, its homogenization of diverse social oppression; fourth, its simplification of the complexity and paradox of being privileged and unprivileged; and fifth its ruling out of intersectional space of diverse forms of oppression in reality.

Cosmopolitan discourse is in a way a response to the issue of solidarity. Although the precondition for solidarity can be a _community_, solidarity requires more intentional commitment and performance than does community.

The real desire [of feminism] is to break away from rationalism, androcentrisim and all forms of philosophy and practices that discriminate against women. The objective is to recover the use of senses, desire, taste, pleasure, pain and the mystery of life. It is a point of view which seeks to reflet with the body, that is, with sensitivity, with sexuality and, finally, with the story of the body itself. ~ Valmar Da Silva in Reading Other-Wise p. 125

The right method of philosophy would be this. To say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions. This method would be unsatisfying to the other - he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy - but it would be the only strictly cor

Love gives you eyes.

Violence is spiritual junk food, and boredom is spiritual anorexia.

The delight we take in our senses is an implicit desire to know the ultimate reason for things, the highest cause. The desire for wisdom that philosophy etymologically is is a desire for the highest or divine causes. Philosophy culminates in theology. All other knowledge contains the seeds of contemplation of the divine.

To theology, ... only what it holds sacred is true, whereas to philosophy, only what holds true is sacred.

No one else can want for me. No one can substitute his act of will for mine. It does sometimes happen that someone very much wants me to want what he wants. This is the moment when the impassable frontier between him and me, which is drawn by free will, becomes most obvious. I may not want that which he wants me to want - and in this precisely I am incommunicabilis. I am, and I must be, independent in my actions. All human relationships are posited on this fact.

The most total opposite of pleasure is not pain but boredom, for we are willing to risk pain to make a boring life interesting.

Everything smaller than Heaven bores us because only Heaven is bigger than our hearts.

Only God may be adored, because only God is unlimited goodness, truth, and beauty, and thus only God deserves unlimited love.

Theology, philosophy, metaphysics, and quantum physics are merely ways for God to have his smart people believe in him

I wanted that future officer to weigh decisions with a supple mind and to be comfortable with nuance and uncertainty.

The theological perspective of participation actually saves the appearances by exceeding them. It recognizes that materialism and spiritualism are false alternatives, since if there is only finite matter there is not even that, and that for phenomena really to be there they must be more than there. Hence, by appealing to an eternal source for bodies, their art, language, sexual and political union, one is not ethereally taking leave of their density. On the contrary, one is insisting that behind

I am what some would say 'holy, and wholly other than you.' The problem is that many folks try to grasp some sense of who I am by taking the best version of themselves, projecting that to the nth degree, factoring in all the goodness they can perceive, which often isn't much, and then call that God. And while it may seem like a noble effort, the truth is that it falls pitifully short of who I really am. I'm not merely the best version of you that you can think of. I am far more than that, above

All religions are based on obsolete terminology.

We...sin not because we want what is evil, but because we want what isn't good enough.

Our culture has filled our heads but emptied our hearts, stuffed our wallets but starved our wonder. It has fed our thirst for facts but not for meaning or mystery. It produces "nice" people, not heroes.

What causes love, since it is a passion, is its object; and since it is a sort of affinity or agreement with the object, what causes love is the goodness or agreeableness of that object. Evil can only be loved because it seems good, because being partially good it is perceived as wholly so. And the beautiful is a form of the good: if something is agreeable in general we call it good, and if the perception of it is agreeable we call it beautiful. But goodness must be known before it can become th

The emotion of love is an affective emotion, directly reacting to goodness, rather than an aggressive one, reacting to challenge. Not only our so-called natural ability to grow and propagate exemplify natural love, but every faculty has a built-in affinity for what accords with its nature. By passion we mean some result of being acted on: either a form induced by the agent (like weight) or a movement consequent on the form (like falling to the ground). Whatever we desire acts on us in this way,

Like apes, we breed, sleep, and die. Yet like God we say, "I am." We are ontological oxymorons.

Our enemies are quite good for relentlessly keeping us sharp and on our toes. This especially goes for sincere philosophers. They use their enemies to challenge their arguments so that they can know the weak points in their own reasoning and how to argue for and strengthen their position. There are just none like one's enemies to always look for his mistakes and do it harder than anyone else.

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.

It is closer to the truth to say that God is crazy than that God is reasonable. I suspect God merely smiles when someone calls him crazy, but shakes His head and frowns when someone calls Him reasonable.

God's pleasure--the beauty creation possesses in his regard--underlies the distinct being of creation, and so beauty is the first and truest word concerning all that appears within being; beauty is the showing of what is; God looked upon what he had wrought and saw that it was good.

Question the answers, I repeated every class. Reevaluate your conclusions when the evidence changes.

The priest therefore saw what the anchorite could not. That God needs no witness. Neither to himself nor against. The truth is rather that if there were no God then there could be no witness for there could be no identity to the world but only each man's opinion of it. The priest saw that there is no man who is elect because there is no man who is not. To God every man is a heretic.

Not bad, not bad at all," Diotallevi said. "To arrive at the truth through the painstaking reconstruction of a false text.

His Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. This is no limit to His power. If you choose to say, ‘God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it,’ you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words, 'God can.' It remains true

If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.

Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.

For Christians . . . an unreflective faith is not possible if we take seriously the injunction to love God with the mind as well as the heart and soul.

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

*There is only one God*. Whatever exists is *ipso facto* individual; to be one it needs no extra property and calling it one merely denies that it is divided. Simple things are neither divided nor divisible; composite things do not exist when their parts are divided. So existence stands or falls with individuality, and things guard their unity as they do their existence. But what is simply speaking one can yet in certain respects be many: an individual thing, essentially undivided, can have many

There appears to be a fifth way, that of eminence. According to this I argue that it is incompatible with the idea of a most perfect being that anything should excel it in perfection (from the corollary to the fourth conclusion of the third chapter) . Now there is nothing incompatible about a finite thing being excelled in perfection; therefore, etc. The minor is proved from this, that to be infinite is not incompatible with being; but the infinite is greater than any finite being. Another formu

Philosophy is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat.Metaphysics is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat that isn't there.Theology is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat that isn't there, and shouting "I found it!"Science is like being in a dark room looking for a black cat while using a flashlight.

The Church does not dispense the sacrament of baptism in order to acquire for herself an increase in membership but in order to consecrate a human being to God and to communicate to that person the divine gift of birth from God.

To be a child means to owe one's existence to another, and even in our adult life we never quite reach the point where we no longer have to give thanks for being the person we are.

Protestants believe that the sacraments are like ladders that God gave to us by which we can climb up to Him. Catholics believe that they are like ladders that God gave to Himself by which He climbs down to us.

Spontaneously, without any theological training, I, a child, grasped the incompatibility of God and shit and thus came to question the basic thesis of Christian anthropology, namely that man was created in God's image. Either/or: either man was created in God's image - and has intestines! - or God lacks intestines and man is not like him.The ancient Gnostics felt as I did at the age of five. In the second century, the Great Gnostic master Valentinus resolved the damnable dilemma by claiming that

What gave you this idea of an imperfect god?''I don't know. It seems quite feasible to me. That is the only god I could imagine believing in, a god whose passion is not a redemption, who saves nothing, fulfills no purpose--a god who simply is.

We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century - the blindness about which posterity will ask, "But how could they have thought that?" - lies where we have never suspected it... None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already da

Like when you sit in front of a fire in winter — you are just there in front of the fire. You don't have to be smart or anything. The fire warms you.

When man is with God in awe and love, then he is praying.

Don't be more serious than God. God invented dog farts. God designed your body's plumbing system. God designed an ostrich. If He didn't do it, He permitted a drunken angel to do it. Empirical facts can add significantly to the meaning of "being godlike".

Theological formation is the gradual and often painful discovery of God's incomprehensibility. You can be competent in many things, but you cannot be competent in God.

The peace of the celestial city is the perfectly ordered and harmonious enjoyment of God, and of one another in God. (City of God, Book 19)

...What I have denied and what my reason compels me to deny, is the existence of a Being throned above us as a god, directing our mundane affairs in detail, regarding us as individuals, punishing us, rewarding us as human judges might.When the churches learn to take this rational view of things, when they become true schools of ethics and stop teaching fables, they will be more effective than they are to-day... If they would turn all that ability to teaching this one thing – the fact that honest

There is a beauty in paradox when it comes to talking about things of ultimate concern. Paradox works against our tendency to stay superficial in our faith, or to rest on easy answers or categorical thinking. It breaks apart our categories by showing the inadequacy of them and by pointing to a reality larger than us, the reality of gloria, of light, of beyond-the-beyond. I like to call it paradoxology—the glory of paradox, paradox-doxology—which takes us somewhere we wouldn’t be capable of going

Tko npr. formulira govor o Bogu Abrahamovu, Izakovu i Jakovljevu tako da se u njemu više ne čuje Jobov uzdisaj i tužaljka 'Ta dokle još?', taj se ne bavi teologijom nego mitologijom.

At best we are but clay, animated dust; but viewed as sinners, we are monsters indeed. Let it be published in heaven as a miracle that the Lord Jesus should set His heart's love upon people like us.

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.

The evil and suffering in this world are greater than any of us can comprehend. But evil and suffering are not ultimate. God is. Satan, the great lover of evil and suffering, is not sovereign. God is.

The love of Christ for me will get last say. He is merciful to me for his name’s sake, for the sake of his own goodness, for the sake of his steadfast love and compassion (Psalm 25). When he thinks about me, he remembers what he is like, and that is my exceeding joy. My indestructible hope is that he has turned his face towards me, and he will never turn away.

No matter what God's power may be, the first aspect of God is never that of the absolute Master, the Almighty. It is that of the God who puts himself on our human level and limits himself.

We imagine that our theological/conceptual systems are the means by which we know God as God is. I truly believe that such postures and perspectives put us in danger of conceptual idolatry, worshiping our ideas of and frameworks for God.

To reject the Word of God is forsake the holy grace.

If we neither regard the deeds nor respect the works of God, it leads to rebellion.

Jesus Christ is the Son of God.

The Might God, Eternal Father.

Without the knowledge of God ,we perish.

The city of God is filled with glorious things.

The invisible God.

The thought of a man is futile. But the word of God is flawless.

To doubt the existence of God is the greatest delusion.

The greatest KNOWLEDGE is the knowledge of GOD.

The Holy God gives grace.

A man only misfortune is to forsake his Maker.

Education without the knowledge of the Holy One is the darkest doom.

Hate sin. Love righteousness of God.