Theology Quotes
Peter Kreeft
We sinned for no reason but an incomprehensible lack of love, and He saved us for no reason but an incomprehensible excess of love.
3623Calvin Miller
With what dread and apprehension we entrust important jobs into the hands of others. Imagine the love of a needless God who is willing to want our work.
4760 Martin Luther King Jr.
Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.
4299 Karl Rahner
When man is with God in awe and love, then he is praying.
3506 Umberto Eco
Not bad, not bad at all," Diotallevi said. "To arrive at the truth through the painstaking reconstruction of a false text.
4248 Peter Kreeft
Only God may be adored, because only God is unlimited goodness, truth, and beauty, and thus only God deserves unlimited love.
4342 Peter Kreeft
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.
3117 Alan W. Watts
Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.
3012 Flannery O'Connor
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.
4146 Peter Kreeft
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.
1149 Peter Kreeft
If your life is Christ, then your death will be only more of Christ, forever. If your life is only Christlessness, then your death will be only more Christlessness, forever. That's not fundamentalism, that's the law of non-contradiction.
1913 H.L. Mencken
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.
4212 Scott Hahn
We...sin not because we want what is evil, but because we want what isn't good enough.
4770 Peter Kreeft
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.
4464 Peter Kreeft
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.
4511 Craig M. Mullaney
Question the answers, I repeated every class. Reevaluate your conclusions when the evidence changes.
4363 Peter Kreeft
By the way, if you get mad at your Mac laptop and wonder who designed this demonic device, notice the manufacturer's icon on top: an apple with a bite out of it.
3611 Peter Kreeft
Like apes, we breed, sleep, and die. Yet like God we say, "I am." We are ontological oxymorons.
1100 Peter Kreeft
Those who meet Jesus always experience either joy or its opposites, either foretastes of Heaven or foretastes of Hell. Not everyone who meets Jesus is pleased, and not everyone is happy, but everyone is shocked.
3410 Peter Kreeft
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.
3585 David Bentley Hart
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.
1197 Peter Kreeft
The most total opposite of pleasure is not pain but boredom, for we are willing to risk pain to make a boring life interesting.
3648 Peter Kreeft
Everything smaller than Heaven bores us because only Heaven is bigger than our hearts.
4048 Jeremy Aldana
Theology, philosophy, metaphysics, and quantum physics are merely ways for God to have his smart people believe in him
2280 Peter Kreeft
It is just as crazy not to be crazy about Christ as it is to be crazy about anything else.
4784 Peter Kreeft
It is reasonable to love the Absolute absolutely for the same reason it is reasonable to love the relative relatively.
1752 Peter Kreeft
Violence is spiritual junk food, and boredom is spiritual anorexia.
4283 Josef Pieper
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.
2146 Craig M. Mullaney
I wanted that future officer to weigh decisions with a supple mind and to be comfortable with nuance and uncertainty.
1215 Ludwig Feuerbach
To theology, ... only what it holds sacred is true, whereas to philosophy, only what holds true is sacred.
4526 Walpola Rahula
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.
1926 Soren Kierkegaard
A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil.
3263 Peter Kreeft
The connection between art and Christ is like the connection between sunlight and the sun. It is, in fact, the connection between Sonlight and the Son.
1250 Delwin Brown
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.
1721 Johann Baptist Metz
We must learn to accept ourselves in the painful experiment of living. We must embrace the spiritual adventure of becoming human, moving through the many stages that lie between birth and death.
1563 Jake Jesser
How do you give something away with the knowledge that you will get it back in three days, and then claim it to be the 'Ultimate Sacrifice'?
4137 Henri J.M. Nouwen
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.
4439 Augustine Of Hippo
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)
2452 Desmond Tutu
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.
1085 Hans Urs Von Balthasar
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.
1075 Peter Kreeft
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.
4131 Hans Urs Von Balthasar
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.
1353 Stanisław Lem
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.
3080 Alistair Begg
Prayer is an acknowledgment that our need of God's help is not partial but total.
2841 Arthur C. Clarke
They had not yet attained the stupefying boredom of omnipotence; their experiments did not always succeed.
3350 Hans Urs Von Balthasar
In Christ, for the first time, we see that in God himself there exists-within his inseparable unity-the distinction between the Father who gives and the Gift which is given (the Son), but only in the unity of the Holy Spirit.
3233 Hans Urs Von Balthasar
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.
4284 Fyodor Dostoyevsky
We degrade God too much, ascribing to him our ideas, in vexation at being unable to understand Him.
3644 Dan Phillips
How does "Let go and let God" measure up against Scripture? Remember, the test isn't what sounds deep, what sounds holy, or even what makes sense to us. For the Christian, the test is Scripture.
2838 Jacques Ellul
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.
4658 Tim Keel
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.
4955 John Piper
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.
1925 Johann Baptist Metz
Radi se mnogo više - i to isključivo - o pitanju kako uopće valja govoriti o Bogu pred neizmjernom poviješću trpljenja svijeta, 'njegovoga' svijeta. To je pitanje, kako ga ja vidim, glavno pitanje teologije; ona ga ne smije niti eliminirati niti svojim odgovorom prepuniti.
3847 Johann Baptist Metz
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.
1126 Alistair Begg
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.
4479 Roberta C. Bondi
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.
3499 Karl Rahner
The task of the theologian is to explain everything through God, and to explain God as unexplainable.
4191 John Calvin
There is no knowing that does not begin with knowing God.
3691 Desiderius Erasmus
Only a very few can be learned, but all can be Christian, all can be devout, and – I shall boldly add – all can be theologians.
4881 Thomm Quackenbush
She had experimented with Wicca eight years ago, found that her spells did not produce the desired results of making her every bully bald and fat, and threw it in the corner of her soul as effete and impractical, as she had with a series of other theological outfits.
2138 Jonathan Edwards
He that has doctrinal knowledge and speculation only, without affection, never is engaged in the business of religion.
3419 H.L. Mencken
Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
1078 Francis A. Schaeffer
We may not play with the new theology even if we may think we can turn it to our advantage.
1267 Robert G. Ingersoll
Let us account for all we see by the facts we know. If there are things for which we cannot account, let us wait for light. To account for anything by supernatural agencies is, in fact to say that we do not know. Theology is not what we know about God, but what we do not know about Nature.
3374 Paul Tillich
Religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the question of a meaning of our life." Paul Tillich
1080 Marguerite Porete
Theologians and other clerks,
You won't understand this book,
- However bright your wits -
If you do not meet it humbly,
And in this way, Love and Faith
Make you surmount Reason, for
They are the protectors of Reason's house.
4994 N.T. Wright
Unless a person can give reasons, there is, literally, no reason why anyone else should take that person seriously. But without reasons, all we are left with is emotional blackmail. We sometimes call it 'moral blackmail,' but it has nothing to do with morals, only with the implied juvenile threat of having a tantrum unless everyone else gives in.
3647 Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It's not worth the tears of that one tortured child who...prayed..with...unexpiated tears to 'dear,kind God!
3830 Alan Aldridge
Fundamentalism's strident denunciation of its opponents is a sign of its weakness, its dogmatic authoritarianism is a pathological mutation of faith.
3533 Johann Baptist Metz
Tema 'Boga' ne dispenzira teologa od njegove biografije. To ga razlikuje od stručnjaka koji se bavi znanošću o religiji.
3984 Ellis Peters
Oh, sometimes I like to put the sand of doubt into the oyster of my faith." (Br. Cadfael)
2507 Matthew Henry
No sooner was the wound given than the remedy was provided and revealed.
2719 Mark R. Trost
I write with the entire alphabet, not just the popular letters.
Readers don't want to lose themselves in the text. They want to find themselves in it.
4139 Ann Druyan
And what greater might do we possess as human beings than our capacity to question and to learn?
2149 Lee Smolin
One possibility is: God is nothing but the power of the universe to organize itself.
3562 Ann Druyan
If you are searching for sacred knowledge and not just a palliative for your fears, then you will train yourself to be a good skeptic.
3014 Ludwig Feuerbach
The task of the modern era was the realization and humanization of God – the transformation and dissolution of theology into anthropology.
4900 John Ruskin
If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses
1289 Dean Chavooshian
THESE ARE THE REASONS, THEN, FOR WHICH A MAN CAN BE CONFIDENT ABOUT THE FATE OF HIS SOUL – AS LONG AS IN LIFE HE HAS…DEVOTED HIMSELF TO THE PLEASURES OF AQUIRING KNOWLEDGE …WITH SELF CONTROL, AND GOODNESS, AND COURAGE, AND LIBERALITY, AND TRUTH…”
SOCRATES’ LAST WORDS IN PLATO’S PHAEDO
1935 Lewis N. Roe
One of the most important things I have found is that no one
school of thought has all of the answers. Sometimes history plugs a
gap that science can't fill. Often philosophy has answers that
science relies on for its discoveries. Theology needs the support of
all of these things for any of its claims to make sense.
3277 Unknown Author
Matthew 10:34
“Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.
4218 Robin R. Meyers
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)
3389 Pope John Paul II
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.
4182 Hans Urs Von Balthasar
It would be unjust toward children to introduce them to Christian teaching and existence only as little pagans and catechumens, in order to leave it up to them to choose the Faith on their own responsibility at a point in time difficult to determine.
2357 Munia Khan
Faith is the only belief which remains alive between heaven and hell.
4227 Jordan Wells
The Bible is the greatest love story ever told.
1481 Jason Versey
Our comfort in theological traditions should never usurp our desire for spiritual Truth. If we vigorously pursue the rituals rather than a relational experience with God then we've missed His message entirely.
2855 Martin Luther
Every book is a great action and every great action is a book!
3692 John Howard Yoder
Nonviolent action on behalf of justice is no automatic forumla with promise of success: but neither is war. After all, at least half of the people who go to war for some cause deemed worthy of it are defeated.
1805 Russell Kirk
If you want to have order in the commonwealth, you first have to have order in the individual soul.
4228 Johann Baptist Metz
Očevidno je da ne postoji nikakav smisao povijesti koji bi se dao spasiti leđima okrenutim prema Auschwitzu niti postoji Bog kojemu se čovjek može klanjati leđa okrenutih prema Auschwitzu. Kao teološko-politička katastrofa Auschwitz ne ostavlja pošteđenima niti kršćanstvo i njegovu teologiju niti društvo i njegovu politiku.
3578 Alistair Begg
The main things are the plain things, and the plain things are the main things.
4870 Alistair Begg
If you live in such a manner as to stand the test of the last judgment, you can depend upon it that the world will not speak well of you.
2519 Alistair Begg
Hold material goods and wealth on a flat palm and not in a clenched fist.
2241 Henry Martyn
The spirit of Christ is the spirit of missions. The nearer we get to Him, the more intensely missionary we become.
3771 Wesley Miller
God did create a world without sin. We just screwed it up.
1848 Hans Urs Von Balthasar
It is to the Cross that the Christian is challenged to follow his Master: no path of redemption can make a detour around it.
4617 Hans Urs Von Balthasar
Only the Christian religion, which in its essence is communicated by the eternal child of God, keeps alive in its believers the lifelong awareness of their being children, and therefore of having to ask and give thanks for things.
3945 
