Best 843 quotes in «theology quotes» category

If we read the Word of God, we shall know the will of God.

If we longer rely on God, it means we have rejected the rule of a righteous Ruler.

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

If we seek the excellent knowledge of Christ Jesus, we shall be filled with fullness of God.

If we put faith in Christ Jesus, we are justified by faith in Christ.

If what they say is right we're none of us going to have time to do all that we planned to do. But we can keep on doing it as long as we can.

If we were to suppose that mankind never can or will be in a better condition, it seems impossible to justify by any kind of theodicy the mere fact that such a race of corrupt beings could have been created on earth at all.

If we, who are finite, contingent, created beings, have got God completely figured out, it makes it seem likely that we invented him...If I am ever completely satisfied with my understanding of who God is and how he operates in the world, I am in danger of ceasing to seek Him.

If you do believe in God, and your first instinct in all things must be gratitude: for creation, or love, for mercy.

If you do not love, you will not be alive; if you love effectively, you will be killed.

If you don’t know the difference between theology and religious studies, then you’re a theologian.

If you hate the poor, do not ask The Divine One for wealth. If you hate the despised, do not ask The Divine One for honor. If you hate the oppressed, do not ask The Divine One for freedom. If you hate the lowly, do not ask The Divine One for influence. If you hate the fatherless, do not ask The Divine One for children. If you hate the lonely, do not ask The Divine One for friends. If you hate the orphaned, do not ask The Divine One for parents. If you hate the divorced, do not ask The Divine One for a family. If you hate the weak, do not ask The Divine One for strength. If you hate the helpless, do not ask The Divine One for might. If you hate the timid, do not ask The Divine One for courage. If you hate the helpless, do not ask The Divine One for power. If you hate the avarage, do not ask The Divine One for excellence. If you hate the common, do not ask The Divine One for nobility. If you hate the meek, do not ask The Divine One for authority. If you hate the gentle, do not ask The Divine One for fortitude. If you hate the confused, do not ask The Divine One for understanding. If you hate the perplexed, do not ask The Divine One for insight. If you hate the ignorant, do not ask The Divine One for knowledge. If you hate the senseless, do not ask The Divine One for wisdom. If you hate the anxious, do not ask The Divine One for joy. If you hate the hopeless, do not ask The Divine One for faith. If you hate the downtrodden, do not ask The Divine One for peace. If you hate the forsaken, do not ask The Divine One for love.

If you meditate on the Holy Scriptures, you mind shall me on the Jesus Christ, the Saviour,

If you persist in continually chipping away at your bad theology, eventually the lies will crumble, and you will uncover nuggets of truth that will set you free.

If your doctrine changed for the better yet your character changed for the worse, you changed for the worse.

If your Lord calls you to suffering, do not be dismayed, for He will provide a deeper portion of Christ in your suffering. The softest pillow will be placed under your head though you must set your bare feet among thorns. Do not be afraid at suffering for Christ, for He has a sweet peace for a sufferer. God has called you to Christ's side, and if the wind is now in His face, you cannot expect to rest on the sheltered side of the hill. You cannot be above your Master who received many an innocent stroke. The greatest temptation out of hell is to live without trials. A pool of standing water will turn stagnant. Faith grows more with the sharp winter storm in its face. Grace withers without adversity. You cannot sneak quietly into heaven without a cross. Crosses form us into His image. They cut away the pieces of our corruption. Lord cut, carve, wound; Lord do anything to perfect Your image in us and make us fit for glory! We need winnowing before we enter the kingdom of God. O what I owe to the file, hammer, and furnace! Why should I be surprised at the plough that makes such deep furrows in my soul? Whatever direction the wind blows, it will blow us to the Lord. His hand will direct us safely to the heavenly shore to find the weight of eternal glory. As we look back to our pains and suffering, we shall see that suffering is not worthy to be compared to our first night's welcome home in heaven. If we could smell of heaven and our country above, our crosses would not bite us. Lay all your loads by faith on Christ, ease yourself, and let Him bear all. He can, He does, and He will bear you. Whether God comes with a rod or a crown, He comes with Himself. "Have courage, I am your salvation!" Welcome, welcome Jesus!

IGNORANCE is without gaining Knowledge & Knowledge is gained without IGNORANCE

If your orthodoxy doesn't fully affirm compassion- if it is not, itself, deeply compassionate- then it is no orthodoxy at all.

If you try to talk about a truth that’s merely moral, people always think it’s merely metaphorical. A real live man with two legs once said to me: ‘I only believe in the Holy Ghost in a spiritual sense.’ Naturally, I said: ‘In what other sense could you believe it?’ And then he thought I meant he needn’t believe in anything except evolution, or ethical fellowship, or some bilge. . . . -- The Secret of Father Brown

If you wholly seek God, you will find the Mighty One.

I (God) am only a part of your own human consciousness, but a really bizarre part.

I had not known before that love is obedience. You want to love, and you can’t, and you hate yourself because you can’t, and all the time love is not some marvelous thing that you feel but some hard thing that you do. And this in a way is easier because with God’s help you can command your will when you can’t command your feelings. With us, feelings seem to be important, but He doesn’t appear to agree with us.

Ignorance is the deepest sin of dark doom.

I have calculated in scripture the degree at which Gods love is for humanity; and it is nothing but infinite.

I have considered the impudent accusations of Mr Dawkins with exasperation at his lack of serious scholarship. He has apparently not read the detailed discourses of Count Roderigo of Seville on the exquisite and exotic leathers of the Emperor's boots, nor does he give a moment's consideration to Bellini's masterwork, On the Luminescence of the Emperor's Feathered Hat. We have entire schools dedicated to writing learned treatises on the beauty of the Emperor's raiment, and every major newspaper runs a section dedicated to imperial fashion ... Dawkins arrogantly ignores all these deep philosophical ponderings to crudely accuse the Emperor of nudity ... Until Dawkins has trained in the shops of Paris and Milan, until he has learned to tell the difference between a ruffled flounce and a puffy pantaloon, we should all pretend he has not spoken out against the Emperor's taste. His training in biology may give him the ability to recognize dangling genitalia when he sees it, but it has not taught him the proper appreciation of Imaginary Fabrics.

I’ll forever be grateful to my childhood pastor for making me read the Heidelberg Catechism and meet in his office with him to talk about it before I made a profession of faith in the fourth grade. I was nervous to meet with him, even more nervous to meet before all the elders. But both meetings were pleasant. And besides, I was forced to read through all 129 questions and answers at age nine.That was a blessing I didn’t realize at the time. Ever since then I’ve had a copy of the Catechism and have grown to understand it and cherish it more and more over the years.

I haven't even read everything I wrote.

I'll never understand the arrogance of some atheists. It doesn't seem outlandish to me for a creation to believe he or she has a creator.

I love theologians, they know god cannot speak so they spend their energy trying to explain to us what his silence means

Implicit … in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or “ism,” any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course, or drive both majorities and minorities into the cruelties of the Inquisition, the pogrom, the gulag, or the jihad. ... A rejection of absolutism, in all its forms, may sometimes slip into moral relativism or even nihilism, an erosion of values that hold society together…

In a few years all our restless and angry hearts will be quiet in death, but those who come after us will live in the world which our sins have blighted or which our love of right has redeemed.

In AA we don’t come to God through theology but through experience, mostly of the humbling and humiliating variety, often reluctantly, and sometimes even kicking and screaming. – p. 179

In contrast, the a/theistic approach can be seen as a form of disbelieving what one believes, or rather, believing in God while remaining dubious concerning what one believes about God (a distinction that fundamentalism is unable to maintain).

Indeed, a quick glance around this broken world makes it painfully obvious that we don't need more arguments on behalf of God; we need more people who live as if they are in covenant with Unconditional Love, which is our best definition of God. (p. 21)

In Demons of the Flesh, Zeena describes how Shiva and Shakti are actually ‘two sides of the same deity’. The goal of the initiate on the left-hand path is to become ‘this bisexual twin godhead’ and activate a state of perceptual sexual ecstasy within one's own consciousness. Zeena points out that a corresponding symbolism is found in the western hermeticism in the idea of ‘the inner androgyne.’ --About Zeena Schreck by Malin Fitger 'Contemporary notions of Kundalini, its background and role within new Western religiosity,' University of Stockholm, 2004

I never attempt to take away people’s God from them, because that God is associated with a lot of human sentiments in the human psyche that act as fuel in daily survival. If you try to take away some hungry man’s stale bread, he would fight back, but if you give him something healthier and more substantial than the bread, then he would throw away the bread himself and accept your better food. The same is for God.

In his last years Linacre gave up medicine for the Church and then for the first time read the gospels. On so doing he exclaimed, 'Either this is not the gospel or we are not Christians.

In order to pick something up, you've got to put something down.

In other words, I have tried to learn in my writing a monastic lesson I could probably not have learned otherwise: to let go of my idea of myself, to take myself with more than one grain of salt... In religious terms, this is simply a matter of accepting life, and everything in life as a gift, and clinging to none of it, as far as you are able. You give some of it to others, if you can. Yet one should be able to share things with others without bothering too much about how they like it, either, or how they accept it. Assume they will accept it, if they need it. And if they don’t need it, why should they accept it? That is their business. Let me accept what is mine and give them all their share, and go my way.

In principle, to be sure, the Reformation idea of the universal priesthood of all believers meant that not only the clergy but also the laity, not only the theologian but also the magistrate, had the capacity to read, understand, and apply the teachings of the Bible. Yet one of the contributions of the sacred philology of the biblical humanists to the Reformation was an insistence that, in practice, often contradicted the notion of the universal priesthood: the Bible had to be understood on the basis of the authentic original text, written in Hebrew and Greek which, most of the time, only clergy and theologians could comprehend properly. Thus the scholarly authority of the Reformation clergy replaced the priestly authority of the medieval clergy.

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 presentability. Rather, than signaling exclusion and division - the natural expulsive impulse inherent in these emotions - Paul suggests that these emotions should signal just the opposite in the Kingdom of God: honor, care, and embrace.

In life, you have 3 choices. Give up, give in, or give it your all.

In reality, religion is not a system of following doctrines at all. If anything, it is about not following any doctrine and finding out things for yourself.

In short, an astonishingly broad spectrum of theologies of justification existed in the later medieval period, encompassing practically every option that had not been specifically condemned as heretical by the Council of Carthage. In the absence of any definitive magisterial pronouncement concerning which of these options (or even what range of options) could be considered authentically catholic, it was left to each theologian to reach his own decision in this matter. A self-perpetuating doctrinal pluralism was thus an inevitability.

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.

In the conclusion of his "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" sermon, Johnathan Edwards says, "The axe is in an extraordinary manner laid at the root of the trees, that every tree that brings not forth good fruit, may be hewn down, and cast into the fire." And I say "Amen." I thank God that the theological tree that produced the bitter fruit of belief in an angry, violent, and retributive God has at last been hewn down and cast into the fire. In my life the poisonous tree of angry God theology is now gone. In its place grows the tree of Life, a tree whose leaves bring healing. It's a tree that looks like it once may have been an ugly cross, but it is now beautiful and verdant, producing the fruit of eternal life. Planted by the Father himself, this tree is an everlasting reminder that I am a forgiven sinner in the hands of a loving God.

In the history of philosophy, the term “rationalism” has two distinct meanings. In one sense, it signifies an unbreached commitment to reasoned thought in contrast to any irrationalist rejection of the mind. In this sense, Aristotle and Ayn Rand are preeminent rationalists, opposed to any form of unreason, including faith. In a narrower sense, however, rationalism contrasts with empiricism as regards the false dichotomy between commitment to so-called “pure” reason (i.e., reason detached from perceptual reality) and an exclusive reliance on sense experience (i.e., observation without inference therefrom). Rationalism, in this sense, is a commitment to reason construed as logical deduction from non-observational starting points, and a distrust of sense experience (e.g., the method of Descartes). Empiricism, according to this mistaken dichotomy, is a belief that sense experience provides factual knowledge, but any inference beyond observation is a mere manipulation of words or verbal symbols (e.g., the approach of Hume). Both Aristotle and Ayn Rand reject such a false dichotomy between reason and sense experience; neither are rationalists in this narrow sense. Theology is the purest expression of rationalism in the sense of proceeding by logical deduction from premises ungrounded in observable fact—deduction without reference to reality. The so-called “thinking” involved here is purely formal, observationally baseless, devoid of facts, cut off from reality. Thomas Aquinas, for example, was history’s foremost expert regarding the field of “angelology.” No one could match his “knowledge” of angels, and he devoted far more of his massive Summa Theologica to them than to physics.

In the moral theology of the nineteenth century, kissing with tongues was a mortal sin "in intent and in the deed itself.

In the scientific community, the adjective ‘theological’ is some- times used pejoratively to refer to a vague or ill-formulated belief. I believe this usage to be very far from the truth. It sad- dens me that some of my colleagues remain unaware of the truth-seeking intent and rational scrupulosity that character- ise theological discourse at its best.

...in the sacraments we encounter not merely fragments of earthly reality, but rather, signs in which the living God himself acts, taking up the earthly element as a testimony to his trustworthy promise.