Quotes About Theology

The ultimate goal of theology isn't knowledge, but worship. If our learning and knowledge of God do not lead to the joyful praise of God, we have failed. We learn only that we might laud, which is to say that theology without doxology is idolatry. The only theology worth studying is a theology that can be sung!

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.

Who should listen to discussions of theology? Those for whom it is a serious undertaking, not just another subject like any other for entertaining small-talk, after the races, the theater, songs, food, and sex: for there are people who count chatter on theology and clever deployment of arguments as one of their amusements.

Governmental defense of any theology necessarily weakens the legitimacy of both the government and the theology.

With a background in science I am extremely interested in the meeting ground of science, theology, and philosophy, especially the ethical questions at the border of science and theology.

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.

Let us put theology out of religion. Theology has always sent the worst to heaven, the best to hell.

The worst criminals are not half so immoral as the creators and perpetrators of the unquestionable hell of Christian theology

The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioned our characters in the wrong way.

We are called by God to do theology, that is, to live our lives with a moment-by-moment consciousness of God.

I consider Christianity to be one of the great disasters of the human race... It would be impossible to imagine anything more un - Christianlike than theology.

The spirit of dogmatic theology poisons anything it touches.

At the end of the day, when I am lying in bed and I know the chances of any of our theology being exactly right are a million to one, I need to know that God has things figured out, that if my math is wrong we are still going to be okay. And wonder is that feeling we get when we let go of our silly answers, our mapped out rules that we want God to follow. I don't think there is any better worship than wonder.

Catholic theology believes that God gave man free will, and you can't give somebody free will and then send in a play from the sidelines.

If you expound the teaching of the Logos from the standpoint of the moral life, using materialistic words and examples which correspond to the capacity of your hearers, you make the Logos flesh. Conversely, if you elucidate mystical theology by means of the higher forms of contemplation you make the Logos spirit.

We read, we hear, we believe a good theology of grace. But that’s not the way we live. The good news of the Gospel of grace has not penetrated the level of our emotions.

There is no philosophy that is not to some extent also theology.

My conclusion is that there is no reason to believe any of the dogmas of traditional theology and, further, that there is no reason to wish that they were true. Man, in so far as he is not subject to natural forces, is free to work out his own destiny. The responsibility is his, and so is the opportunity.

Theosophy blesses the world; Theology is its curse.

Theology being the work of males, original sin was traced to the female.

Note, to-day, an instructive, curious spectacle and conflict. Science, (twin, in its fields, of Democracy in its)—Science, testing absolutely all thoughts, all works, has already burst well upon the world—a sun, mounting, most illuminating, most glorious—surely never again to set. But against it, deeply entrench'd, holding possession, yet remains, (not only through the churches and schools, but by imaginative literature, and unregenerate poetry,) the fossil theology of the mythic-materialistic, superstitious, untaught and credulous, fable-loving, primitive ages of humanity.

To me the separation of church and state is a thread that ought to run through public policy so that we can always recognize that we make laws in this country, based not on theology of any particular group, but on the basis of a commonly shared values of the Constitution itself.

A professorship of Theology should have no place in our institution [the University of Virginia]

Infinite possibility in all things is a certainty. That pretty much covers theology and philosophy for me.

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

Since Moses was in Egypt land, Gods people have been struggling for justice while singing freedom songs. Theology can be clarifying. A good sermon has its place. But nothing is more essential for the life of faith in a community than liturgy that invites us to sing the freedom songs that are sung around the throne of God. Brother Ken Sehested is a song leader in that great cloud of witnesses. Receive his words as gift-and keep singing.

If the gospel of Jesus Christ can be proclaimed as a theology of self-esteem, imagine the health this could generate in society!

In the decade of the 1980s, a massive and comprehensive study of religion in American life was undertaken by the Gallup organization. The results of the study were as terrifying as they were revealing. Americans, even evangelical Americans, are woefully ignorant of the content of Scripture and even more ignorant of the history of Christianity and classical Christian theology.

The fact that astronomies change while the stars abide is a true analogy of every realm of human life and thought, religion not least of all. No existent theology can be a final formulation of spiritual truth.

I still love the theology of the Mormon religion and think it is a wonderful way to grow up.

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.

If you meet with a system of theology which magnifies man, flee from it as far as you can.

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.

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.

I did not learn my theology all at once, but had to search constantly deeper and deeper for it. My temptations did that for me, for no one can understand Holy Scripture without practice and temptations...I t is not by reading, writing, or speculation that one becomes a theologian. Nay, rather, it is living, dying, and being damned that makes one a theologian.

The ultimate goal of theology isn't knowledge, but worship.

Theology is just what you really think about God, and if you're going to do that, you'd better use your mind and not just let it be a receptacle - a catch-all for whatever beliefs happen to be passing by.

For many decades now - and certainly during my adult life in academe - the Western intellectual world has not been convinced that theology is a pursuit that can be engaged in with intellectual honesty and integrity.

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

I wrote a story for my kids. It's fiction. It's not systematic theology. It's not a new book of the Bible. It's flawed, I wrote it. All of that goes into the mix, but I love the controversy. It elevates the conversation.

Religion does a lot of good, especially the loving kind, like at Grace Church. I know people who went to a more liberal kind of Christianity and were happy with that. The problem is, for me, there was a process involved in moving from Pentecostalism to a more liberal theology, like Grace Church. What makes me different is that process didn't stop, and it took me all the way. In the end, I couldn't help feeling that all religion, even the most loving kind, is just a speed bump in the progress of the human race.

I think that gardening is nearer to godliness than theology.

[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.

The people has no definite disbelief in the temples of theology. The people has a very fiery and practical disbelief in the temples of physical science.

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.

Bad Religion has never been about criticizing people who are Christian. But we've always been about pointing out the irony and contradictions in Christian theology and the more extreme versions of Christians that seek to challenge modern secularism.

Theology is but our ideas of truth classified and arranged.

There is no absurdity in theology so great that you cannot parallel it by a greater absurdity in Nature.