Theology Quotes - page 16
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.
Maximus the Confessor
I agree ... that a professorship of Theology should have no place in our institution. But we cannot always do what is absolutely best. Those with whom we act, entertaining different views, have the power and the right of carrying them into practice. Truth advances, and error recedes step by step only; and to do to our fellow men the most good in our power, we must lead where we can, follow where we cannot, and still go with them, watching always the favorable moment for helping them to another step.
Thomas Jefferson
Is dogmatic or scholastic theology less doubted in point of fact for claiming, as it does, to be in point of right undoubtable? And if not, what command over truth would this kind of theology really lose if, instead of absolute certainty, she only claimed reasonable probability for her conclusions? If we claim only reasonable probability, it will be as much as men who love the truth can ever at any given moment hope to have within their grasp. Pretty surely it will be more than we could have had, if we were unconscious of our liability to err.
William James
He attended Elizabeth Rodman Voorhees College in Vellore, a school run by the American Arcot Mission of the Reformed Church in America where he was introduced to the Dutch Reform Theology, which emphasized a righteous God, unconditional grace, and election, and which criticized Hinduism as intellectually incoherent and ethically unsound. This is where he encountered what would have appeared to him as crippling assaults on his Hindu sensibilities. He also would have witnessed the positive contributions of the social programs undertaken by the Mission in the name of propagation of the Christian gospel.
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
There was then no professorship in mathematics and no opening for a mathematician to a career at Cambridge; and so Wallis reluctantly left the university. In 1649 he was appointed to the Savilian chair of geometry at Oxford, where he lived until his death on Oct. 28, 1703. It was there that all his mathematical works were published. Besides those he wrote on theology, logic, and philosophy; and was the first to devise a system for teaching deaf mutes.
John Wallis
Raised as a Roman Catholic, I internalized the social values of that faith and still hold most of them, even though its theology no longer persuades me. I have no quarrel with what anyone else subscribes to; everyone deals with these things in his own way, and I have no truths to impart. All I require of a religion is that it be tolerant of those who do not agree with it. I know a priest whose eyes twinkle when he says, "You go about God's work in your way, and I'll go about it in His.”.
Roger Ebert
The man who spearheaded the Hare Krishna empire, Prabhupada, espoused some very controversial views that would likely upset, and even outrage, those who are otherwise sympathetic to spiritual endeavors and theology...Even if some of his comments were taken out of context (as his defenders and apologists sometimes assert), the sheer volume and magnitude of his immense bigotry cannot be ignored nor sugar-coated. Part of Prabhupada's hatred of blacks stemmed from his deep-seated Hindu beliefs that dark-skinned peoples represent the very bottom of the hierarchy of the human race -- a direct reflection of India's ancient color-based caste system.
A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada
The German Romantics had to destroy the same bastions we do. Logocentrism and idealism, theology, all supports of the repressive society. Property's pillars. Reason which always homogenizes and reduces, represses and unifies phenomena or actuality into what can be perceived and so controlled. The subjects, us, are now stable and socializable. Reason is always in the service of the political and economic masters. It is here that literature strikes, at this base, where the concepts and actings of order impose themselves. Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified.
Kathy Acker
His conflict with the Catholic Church arose because deep in his heart Galileo was a believer. There was for him no path of compromise, no way to have separate secular and theological cosmologies. If the Copernican system was true as he believed, what else could Galileo do but fight with every weapon he had in his arsenal... to make his Church accept a new system of the universe. ...In the contrast between Galileo's heroic stand when he tried to reform the cosmological basis of orthodox theology and his humbled, kneeling surrender when he disavowed his Copernicanism, we may sense the tremendous forces attendant on the birth of modern science.
Galileo Galilei
The question is frequently asked: why there is a school of theology attached to every University? The answer is easy: It is, that the Universities may subsist, and that the instruction may not become corrupt. Originally, the Universities were only schools of theology, to which other faculties were joined, as subjects around their Queen. The edifice of public instruction, placed on such a foundation, has continued even to our day. Those who have subverted it among themselves, will repent it, in vain, for a long time to come. To burn a city, there is needed only a child or a madman; but to rebuild it, architects, materials, workmen, money, and especially time, will be required.
Joseph de Maistre
He [Nicolas Malebranche] cannot give up the principles which the Catholic Church imposes on him. He carries forward that process of rationalisation in Christian ethics which Descartes began, and which, like the attempt to restore an older theology, finds its fulfilment in Spinoza. It is Spinoza who is the first to create a wholly metaphysical ethics, free from all trace of its theological origin. Spinoza thus completes for continental ethics the separation between morality and religion which English empiricism, in spite of many relapses, had effected under the leadership of Bacon.
Baruch Spinoza
Though Dogma and theology are always intimately related and can never be separated, yet they are never entirely of the same stuff. Dogma is a vast domain which theology will never wholly exploit. There is always infinitely more in Dogma, considered in its concrete totality, that is to say, in the very Object of divine revelation, than in this "human science of revelation", in this product of analysis and rational elaboration which theology always is. The latter, in its very truth, will always-and all the more in that it will always be rationally formulated-be inadequate for Dogma; for it is indeed the explanation of it, but not the fulness. This weakness is congenital. True theology knows that. It does not confuse the orders.
Henri de Lubac
The appearance of Spinoza, however, fundamentally changes the entire religious picture in the West. He emancipated philosophy from theology and taught man to think in metaphysical and universalistic rather than in theological and individualistic terms. He distinguished between the functions of recognition and piety. The aim of philosophy he says is truth, the recognition of things in their connection with one another and with God. The aim of theology is piety obedience to God's laws. Hence, there is but little difference between the Old and the New Testaments, for both, like all theology, have a content apart from recognition. They teach certain doctrines, such as a personal God, His attributes, His relationship to the world, His moral ends, the aim of creation, etc. As practical piety, even the theological content of the Bible is acceptable, but as theoretical philosophy or as objective truth it must be rejected.
Baruch Spinoza
In a world populated by people who believe that through more and more information, paradise is attainable, the computer scientist is king. But I maintain that all of this is a monumental and dangerous waste of human talent and energy. Imagine what might be accomplished if this talent and energy were turned to philosophy, to theology, to the arts, to imaginative literature or to education? Who knows what we could learn from such people - perhaps why there are wars, and hunger, and homelessness and mental illness and anger.
Neil Postman
It is said that Louis Farrakhan's racist crackpot Nation of Islam and its sectarian gang gets young men off drugs. For all I know it does, it may, but that does not recommend it, to me, nor does it prove anything of its theology. Whereas I can tell you that of the suicide bombing population one hundred percent is faith-based. And I don't think that in itself disapproves faith, but I think it should make you skeptical of that kind of random sampling. Of the genital mutilation community the same can be said.
Christopher Hitchens
A theological system is supposed to satisfy two basic needs: the statement of the truth of the Christian message and the interpretation of this truth for every new generation. Theology moves back and forth between two poles, the eternal truth of its foundation and the temporal situation in which the eternal truth must be received. Not many theological systems have been able to balance these two demands perfectly.
Paul Tillich
I have long contended that Islam is unique among the major world religions in having a developed doctrine, theology, and legal system mandating warfare against and the subjugation of unbelievers. There is no orthodox sect or school of Islam that teaches that Muslims must coexist peacefully as equals with non-Muslims on an indefinite basis. I use the term "radical Islam” merely to distinguish those Muslims who are actively working to advance this subjugation from the many millions who are not, as well as to emphasize that the stealth jihad program is truly radical: it aims at nothing less than the transformation of American society and the imposition of Islamic law here, subjugating women and non-Muslims to the status of legal inferiors.
Robert Spencer
