Theology Quotes
More Theology Quotes
Philosophy ... finds itself to be no longer anything but the heir to a fabulous mystical theology, but missing a God and wiping the slate clean.
georges bataille— p. 9 (L’Expérience Intérieure (1943))
Believe it or not, after the Second Vatican Council anticlericalism is a Catholic virtue. In elaborating a theology of laity, as many call it, and speaking of a hierarchy of service rather than of domination in the Church, Vatican II implicitly endorsed opposition to clericalism, which is a policy of maintaining or increasing the power of a religious hierarchy. Clearly, this sort of anticlericalism has nothing to do with the other anticlericalism.
leon bertoletti— The A-Word, Hic Sunt Leones, 22/10/2008
There are approximately 100,000 clerics in Iran and over 60,000 of them are in Qom. Most of them are theology students who have been studying there for many years, between 10-25 years on average.... Every student has to study a minimum of 25 years before he can attain the status of ‘ayatollah’, however most students spend 10 years studying in the hawza.
— Inside Iran: Hujjat al Islam Mohsen Kadivar April 2007
Never shall we apprehend the nature of true divinity nor the true divineness of Jesus of Nazareth, the Carpenter's Son, till we learn to moralize our theology, training ourselves to lay less stress on "Almighty" :;an epithet characteristic of the silver age of Hebrew literature and of our Anglican Prayer Book, but never once used as an epithet of God by Him who knew Him as He is. By way of compensation, we must lay far more stress on " Wise " and " Good ."
edwin abbot— Paradosis : Or "In the Night in Which He Was (?) Betrayed" (1904), "Introduction : Paradosis or Delivering Up the Soul", p. 7
The best theology would need no advocates; it would prove itself.
Karl Barth— As quoted in Quotations from the Wayside (1998) by Brenda Wong, p. 78
There is a notion that complete impartiality is the most fitting and indeed the normal disposition for true exegesis , because it guarantees complete absence of prejudice. For a short time, around 1910, this idea threatened to achieve almost a canonical status in Protestant theology. But now, we can quite calmly describe it as merely comical.
Karl Barth— 1:2
I think the opportunity to deal with students and getting them properly oriented on science and theology and the relation between those is going to be important because science has been such an instrument used by the materialists to undermine the Christian faith and religious belief generally.
william a. dembski— Robinson, Jeff (16 September 2004), "Dembski to head seminary's new science & theology center", Baptist Press, retrieved on 2011-10-23
You see, my Lord Archbishop, what is "dubious" about my theology is not that it contradicts particular doctrinal teachings, things are much worse or better: what I want, is no more and no less than a fundamental change in the whole way that theology is done today; but I want this out of faith, not out of faithlessness.
eugen drewermann— Letter to Archbishop J J Degenhardt, printed on rear cover of Eugen Drewermann, Worum es eigentlich geht. Protokoll einer Verurteilung (1992)
We see in the 20th Century an unfortunate trench warfare, in which psychoanalysis, in a struggle against the internalized compulsion and superstition of a particular doctrine, has expressed itself atheistically. By contrast, theology is not merely under suspicion of talking soullessly about God. Both theology and psychology, in striving for human health, need one another like the right and the left hand.
eugen drewermann— "Heil und Heilung - Theologie und Psychoanalyse," speech at a conference of therapists in Basel, Switzerland (1977-05-21)
In my eyes, concepts of theology have only as much value as they are able to interpret experience. It seems to me that we have long reached the point where we theologians only talk to ourselves and debate with our own history of concepts.
eugen drewermann— Wort des Heils, Wort der Heilung. p 149 (1989)
He took particular delight in neutralizing those who desperately needed to be neutralized, those overblown, self-important, arrogant half-wits who were always running about dictating behavior, morals, and theology to everyone else. And he never looked back.
jack mcdevitt— Chapter 11 (p. 180)
It was morality that burned the books of the ancient sages, and morality that halted the free inquiry of the Golden Age and substituted for it the credulous imbecility of the Age of Faith. It was a fixed moral code and a fixed theology which robbed the human race of a thousand years by wasting them upon alchemy, heretic-burning, witchcraft and sacerdotalism .
h. l. mencken— The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1908/1913)
And yet when I read him, I realize again that "sophisticated theology" is but a thin veneer of fine words applied over the rickety plywood of unevidenced faith.
alvin plantinga— Coyne, Jerry (13 December 2011), "Alvin Plantinga: sophisticated theologian?", Why Evolution Is True, retrieved on 2013-02-19
If Protestant theology has reached the point where it is closed to the challenge of atheism, then it has ceased to be the intellectual vanguard of Christianity.
Thomas J. J. Altizer— Toward a New Christianity (1967), p. 7
Contemporary Christian proclamation is faced with the question whether, when it demands faith from men and women, it expects them to acknowledge this mythical world picture from the past. If this is impossible, it has to face the question whether the New Testament proclamation has a truth that is independent of the mythical world picture, in which case it would be the task of theology to demythologize the Christian proclamation.
rudolf bultmann— Rudolf Bultmann, New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings (1984), p. 3
The capacity for the accomplishment of religious virtuosos the “intellectual sacrifice” is the decisive characteristic of the positively religious man. That this is so is shown by the fact that in spite of (or rather in consequence) of theology (which unveils it) the tension between the value-spheres of “science” and the sphere of “the holy” is unbridgeable.
— As quoted in Basit Bilal Koshu's The Postmodern Significance of Max Weber's Legacy, p. 62.
The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way. Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic, because in arithmetic there is knowledge, but in theology there is only opinion.
— Bertrand Russell (1950) Unpopular Essays. p. 136.
I'll describe religious naturalism as a theology, a religion, an ethics, and a spiritual transformation
— P. Roger Gillette I Theology Of, By, & For Religious Naturalism [
Contemporary Christian proclamation is faced with the question whether, when it demands faith from men and women, it expects them to acknowledge this mythical world picture from the past. If this is impossible, it has to face the question whether the New Testament proclamation has a truth that is independent of the mythical world picture, in which case it would be the task of theology to demythologize the Christian proclamation.
rudolf bultmann— Rudolf Bultmann, New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings (1984), p. 3
. . . the mysteries , on belief in which theology would hang the destinies of mankind , are cunningly devised fables whose origin and growth are traceable to the age of Ignorance , the mother of credulity.
— Edward Clodd in: The Wit and Blasphemy of Atheists: 500 Greatest Quips and Quotes from Freethinkers, Non-Believers and the Happily Damned, Ulysses Press, 1 March 2011, p.27
Aristotle especially, both by speculation and observation... reached something like the modern idea of a succession of higher organizations from lower, and made the fruitful suggestion of "a perfecting principle" in Nature. With the coming in of Christian theology this tendency toward a yet truer theory of evolution was mainly stopped, but the old crude view remained...
Andrew Dickson White— Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, Ch. 1 (1896)
Vedanta had attracted Westerners to Indian philosophy and theology or religious study. ISKCON drew them to the path of personal devotion (bhakthi) to a Hindu deity, Krishna , and to a guru , Swami Prabhupada.
— Gurinder Singh Mann, in "Buddhists, Hindus and Sikhs in America : A Short History", P.56
The antagonism between science and religion , about which we hear so much, appears to me to be purely factitious fabricated, 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 .
— Thomas Huxley, The interpreters of Genesis and the interpreters of Nature (1885)
The Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter.
— Pope Pius XII, Encyclical on Humani Generis, 12 August 1950
theology is the post hoc rationalization of what you want to believe.
jerry coyne— "Quote of the week: William James on theology" June 4, 2012
Damn, but science is just a constant feed of cool new facts and theories. theology doesn’t come close.
jerry coyne— "A huge water geyser on Saturn’s moon helps make the rings, and a bonus eclipse from Mars" September 17, 2012
The sceptics end in the infidelity which asserts the problem to be insoluble, or in the atheism which denies the existence of any orderly progress and governance of things: the men of genius propound solutions which grow into systems of theology or of Philosophy, or veiled in musical language which suggests more than it asserts, take the shape of the Poetry of an epoch.
thomas henry huxley— Ch.2, p.72
theology , sir, is a fortress; no crack in a fortress may be accounted small.
Arthur Miller— John Hale (The Crucible (1953))
