Theology Quotes

“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.”
― peter kreeft, Jesus-Shock

“Easter was when Hope in person surprised the whole world by coming forward from the future into the present.”
― N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church

“I believe that many who find that "nothing happens" when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand.”
― C.S. Lewis, On the Incarnation

“God judges men from the inside out; men judge men from the outside in. Perhaps to God, an extreme mental patient is doing quite well in going a month without murder, for he fought his chemical imbalance and succeeded; oppositely, perhaps the healthy, able and stable man who has never murdered in his life yet went a lifetime consciously, willingly never loving anyone but himself may then be subject to harsher judgment than the extreme mental patient. It might be so that God will stand for the weak and question the strong.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“In the Church of Jesus Christ there can and should be no non-theologians.”
― Karl Barth

“The spirit of Christ is the spirit of missions. The nearer we get to Him, the more intensely missionary we become.”
― Henry Martyn

“Learning to think rigorously, so as to act rightly and to serve humanity better.”
― Pope John Paul II

“One great idea of the biblical revelation is that God is manifest in the ordinary, in the actual, in the daily, in the now, in the concrete incarnations of life, and not through purity codes and moral achievement contests, which are seldom achieved anyway… We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking… The most courageous thing we will ever do is to bear humbly the mystery of our own reality.”
― Richard Rohr

“Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.”
― H.L. Mencken

“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.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Unless You Become Like This Child

“We must never underestimate our power to be wrong when talking about God, when thinking about God, when imagining God, whether in prose or in poetry. A generous orthodoxy, in contrast to the tense, narrow, or controlling orthodoxies of so much of Christian history, doesn't take itself too seriously. It is humble. It doesn't claim too much. It admits it walks with a limp.”
― Brian D. McLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy

“Trying to figure out God is like trying to catch a fish in the Pacific Ocean with an inch of dental floss.”
― Matt Chandler, The Explicit Gospel

“Conformity is deformity”
― Sharon Desruisseaux

“Every book is a great action and every great action is a book!”
― Martin Luther

“I am not very impressed with theological arguments whatever they may be used to support. Such arguments have often been found unsatisfactory in the past. In the time of Galileo it was argued that the texts, 'And the sun stood still... and hasted not to go down about a whole day' (Joshua x. 13) and 'He laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not move at any time' (Psalm cv. 5) were an adequate refutation of the Copernican theory.”
― Alan Turing, Computing machinery and intelligence

“Is it faith to understand nothing, and merely submit your convictions implicitly to the Church?
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― John Calvin

“Kindness consents very readily to the removal of its object – we have all met people whose kindness to animals is constantly leading them to kill animals lest they should suffer. Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

“Nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

“The priest therefore saw what the anchorite could not. That God needs no witness. Neither to himself nor against. The truth is rather that if there were no God then there could be no witness for there could be no identity to the world but only each man's opinion of it. The priest saw that there is no man who is elect because there is no man who is not. To God every man is a heretic.”
― Cormac McCarthy

“Question the answers, I repeated every class. Reevaluate your conclusions when the evidence changes.”
― Craig M. Mullaney, The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education

“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.”
― Pope John Paul II, Blessed are the Pure of Heart: Catechesis on the Sermon on the Mount and Writings of St. Paul

“Like apes, we breed, sleep, and die. Yet like God we say, "I am." We are ontological oxymorons.”
― Peter Kreeft, Jesus-Shock

“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.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“The task of the modern era was the realization and humanization of God – the transformation and dissolution of theology into anthropology.”
― Ludwig Feuerbach, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future

“Not bad, not bad at all," Diotallevi said. "To arrive at the truth through the painstaking reconstruction of a false text.”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum

“Democracy will prevail when men believe the vote of Judas as good as that of Jesus Christ”
― Thomas Carlyle

“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.”
― Peter Kreeft, Jesus-Shock

“Me? You are laughing at me. Put your hand here. This has no theology.' I mocked myself while I made love. I flung myself into pleasure like a suicide on to a pavement.”
― Graham Greene, The Comedians

“Eccentric and secret genius that he was, Bosch not only moved the heart, but scandalized it into full awareness. The sinister and monstrous things that he brought forth are the hidden creatures of our inward self-love: he externalizes the ugliness within, and so his misshapen demons have an effect beyond curiosity. We feel a hateful kinship with them. The Ship of Fools is not about other people. It is about us.”
― Wendy Beckett, The Story of Painting

“Whether we admit it or not, as people of faith, we sift our theology through Scripture, Church history and tradition, our reason, and our own experience. Most Christians, even the most committed of the sola scriptura crowd, use these four pillars—at varying degrees of importance and strength—to figure out the ways of God in our world and what it means here and now for our walking-around lives. And taking this a bit further into postmodern territory, we can also admit that we are relying on our own imperfect and subjective interpretations of those pillars, too.”
― Sarah Bessey, Jesus Feminist: An Invitation to Revisit the Bible's View of Women