Theology Quotes
742 quotes
"Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun."
"You will face your greatest opposition when you are closest to your biggest miracle."
"The heart is like a woman, and the head is like a man, and although man is the head of woman, woman is the heart of man, and she turns man's head because she turns his heart."
"And what greater might do we possess as human beings than our capacity to question and to learn?"
"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)"
"A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there. A theologian is the man who finds it."
"All religions are based on obsolete terminology."
"Theology, philosophy, metaphysics, and quantum physics are merely ways for God to have his smart people believe in him"
"Beyond all sciences, philosophies, theologies, and histories, a child's relentless inquiry is truly all it takes to remind us that we don't know as much as we think we know."
"I cannot encourage any fabrication even for the sake of making people feel good. If I were to fabricate consciously and knowingly, I would not only be ordaining myself their enemy, but also ordaining myself God's enemy."
"Violence is spiritual junk food, and boredom is spiritual anorexia."
"There is no unmoving mover behind the movement. It is only movement. It is not correct to say that life is moving, but life is movement itself. Life and movement are not two different things. In other words, there is no thinker behind the thought. Thought itself is the thinker. If you remove the thought, there is no thinker to be found."
"The lust of the flesh directs these desires [of personal union], however, to satisfaction of the body, often at the cost of a real and full communion of persons."
"The ultimate story of success: When a nobody, who has never once in his entire life known the feeling of being remembered or respected, suddenly snaps and becomes a world dictator. On one hand it sounds just, but on the other, it illustrates the reason why a prosperity message has and needs its limitations."
"Not bad, not bad at all,"Diotallevi said. "To arrive at the truth through the painstaking reconstruction of a false text."
"The rich fop Francis of Assisi was bored all his life―until he fell in love with Christ and gave all his stuff away and became the troubadour of Lady Poverty."
"Only God may be adored, because only God is unlimited goodness, truth, and beauty, and thus only God deserves unlimited 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."
"It's not about whether or not someone is a bigot, but whether or not the argument which that someone is arguing is worth being a bigot about."
"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."
"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."
"We're very familiar with the idea that some things are so complex they're beyond our comprehension. This not only keeps us solving and experimenting but also distracted. Many things are really so simple we can't see them under our big noses."
"To respect a mystery is to make way for the answer."
"If your doctrine changed for the better yet your character changed for the worse, you changed for the worse."
"We must not allow our pride to be the motivation behind our apologetics; rather, philoverity, the love of truth must be the full and complete motivation. For pride corrupts truth."
"Theology on the whole is a philosophical commentary on Revelation − an "inspired" commentary in that it forestalls heresies properly so-called, to the extent this is possible, while at the same time being psychologically and morally opportunistic."
"Theological perspective is characterized extrinsically by its concern with defending conceptual and moral interests, whereas pure metaphysics sets forth the nature of things, while being aware of aspects and points of view."
"Theology, founded as it is upon the inevitably antinomic and elliptical − but by no means contradictory or irreconcilable − facts of the sacred Scriptures, is a mental activity that interprets these facts by means of the reason and in relation to a piety that is often more fervent than enlightened; this occasionally results in theories that are doubtless opportune and effective in a given psychological or moral context, but restrictive or even aberrant from the point of view of pure and simple truth, and in any case unacceptable on the plane of metaphysics."
"Ordinary monotheistic theologies operate only with the entirely insufficient alternative of "created" and "uncreated": there is for them only God and the world, the Creator and the created, whereas in reality there is first of all the Absolute and the relative, and then within Relativity there is the creative Uncreated − not the Uncreated in itself − and all that is created."
"Is any man skillful enough to have fashioned himself?"
"If after all my Atheology turns out wrong and your Theology right I feel I shall always be able to pass into Heaven (if I want to) as a friend of G.K.C.'s. Bless you."
"And the more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of of that order was to give room for good things to run wild."
"Question like a child, reason like an adult, and write like a sage."
"Without the knowledge of God ,we perish."
"The city of God is filled with glorious things."
"The wisdom of God is what we ought to seek."
"The holy faith is the fear of God."
"Who can we claim to know God, and deny him by our actions."
"Godliness is a devotion to God."
"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."
"Christianity, like genius, is one of the hardest concepts to forgive. We hear what we want to hear and accept what we want to accept, for the most part, simply because there is nothing more offensive than feeling like you have to re-evaluate your own train of thought and purpose in life. You have to die to an extent in your hunger for faith, for wisdom, and quite frankly, most people aren't ready to die."
"Like apes, we breed, sleep, and die. Yet like God we say, "I am." We are ontological oxymorons."
"The theistic philosopher has a tendency to devalue insufficient worldviews, ideologies, and quite often common sense for the greater good, and in such cases, one should not be discouraged when seen as a bad guy. If he stresses over man's perception of a righteous heart, then he has given his heart to man."
"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."
"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."
"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"."
Peter Kreeft, Before I Go: Letters to Our Children about What Really Matters
"Prayer is an acknowledgment that our need of God's help is not partial but total."
Alistair Begg, Made For His Pleasure: Ten Benchmarks of a Vital Faith
"What the Father gives is the capacity to be a self, freedom, and thus autonomy, but an autonomy which can be understood only as a surrender of self to the other."
"The English experience suggested that nobody really doubted the existence of God until theologians tried to prove it."
The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World
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