Top 55 Theological Quotes

Of course, nobody would deny the importance of human beings for theological thinking, but the time span of history that theologians think about is a few thousand years of human culture rather than the fifteen billion years of the history of the universe.

To explain the unknown by the known is a logical procedure; to explain the known by the unknown is a form of theological lunacy.

Extremists often derive their inspiration from literal interpretations of texts that should rightly be read not as Associated Press reports from the ancient world, but as theological and literary enterprises requiring independent intellectual assessment.

I came from a tradition where souls were a theological reality, not a faith reality. Souls were for saving, not for communing. Souls were for converting and, once they were converted, they were to be left alone. Souls were too mystical, too subjective, too ambiguous, too risky, too… well, you know – New Age-ish.

The people that usually have the most trouble with my books are the ones that pick them apart from a theological point of view.

Perhaps the main stumbling block to a better, and more fruitful, theological relationship with Judaism and the Jewish people has been the tendency of many Christian theologians to see the Christ event as the end of history.

Religious relativism is not the answer to disagreement between faiths; yet relativism, and a blurring of religious distinctions, all too often result when two deeply believing faith communities engage each other in the public arena on theological issues.

I enjoy ritual and ceremony. What I don’t like is when it’s badly done or sloppily done. This is actually a theological issue – the forms we adopt, the actions we take, the way we do things, are, as it were, a sacrament.

People don’t do theology in a vacuum but in a community with other theological thinkers, where there’s jealousy, vanity, hurt pride, all those things.

The theological virtue of hope is the patient and trustful willingness to live without closure, without resolution, and still be content and even happy because our Satisfaction is now at another level, and our Source is beyond ourselves.

Theological reflection takes place within history, but the history within which it takes place is an ongoing, open-ended process.

The work with which we embark on this first volume of a series of theological studies is a work with which the philosophical person does not begin, but rather concludes.

And then I met Jerry and he’s such a creative fiction writer, and I don’t know if there’s ever been a team put together the way we are – where one person does the theological way out and suggestions, and the other person goes into the cave and does the fiction writing.

A religious commitment coupled with theological awareness gives Jews a much better way to answer the claims made upon us by missionaries representing other religions than do the rather weak political and cultural arguments of the secularists.

Authors as diverse as Rudyard Kipling, E. Nesbit, and J. R. R. Tolkien have shaped modern paganism as greatly as any theological underpinnings.

Theologians have a great problem because they’re seeking to speak about God. Since God is the ground of everything that is, there’s a sense in which every human inquiry is grist to the theological mill. Obviously, no theologian can know everything.

You can latch onto theological ideas that are, in fact, not accurate, and refuse to let them go. I think we’ve seen this a few times in church history.

My main source for faith-based stuff is mostly the Bible, and a childhood with a much, much higher-than-median exposure to theological thought.

It was in the early 1960s that my late revered teacher, Professor Abraham Joshua Heschel, became the first major Jewish theologian in America to enter into dialogue with Christian theologians on a high theological level.

I want to be able to still surprise myself, even shock myself, whether it be sexual content, whether it be about the theological content, whatever. I want to be able to knock myself sideways. Otherwise, what a waste of a life that would be.

There are dozens of references to God in the Scriptures for every one to the figure of Satan. This reflects a sometimes forgotten theological truth that the devil is by no means God’s counterpart. He is a creature, not the Creator.

The fact that monasticism preceded the identification of greed as a primal sin is an important reminder that our very ability to name sin is a theological achievement.

I had a longing for ritual, something I could cling to, a routine to make me feel well and contented. I hoped that reading Bible commentaries and theological critiques would nudge me closer to some kind of absolute that I could hold up as a torch to light my way.

In deciding among theological views, one should be something of a consequentialist: the choice of one theological position over another should be, if not actually determined, at least heavily conditioned by the fact that it implies a better ethical outcome than the alternatives.

I think one of the most important directions to be pursued in the ‘sciences of human action’ is to develop a natural-law ethics based on nature rather than, or at least to supplement, ethics based on theological revelation.

As liberty and intelligence have increased the people have more and more revolted against the theological dogmas that contradict common sense and wound the tenderest sensibilities of the soul.

Our own theological Church, as we know, has scorned and vilified the body till it has seemed almost a reproach and a shame to have one, yet at the same time has credited it with power to drag the soul to perdition.

We’re one of the only bands that get censored for theological commentary.

A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.

The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves.

I was never close to Jerry Falwell because he had his ministry, I had mine. And we came from different theological training and from a different psychological education.

The first reason for the preponderant influence of those Evangelicals who define themselves as advocates of Religious Right theological and political ideologies is that they have both the financial means and technological know-how to make widespread use of modern electronic forms of communication.

I think that technology is essentially a continuation of a divestment of theological power that’s been happening since The Enlightenment. It’s the idea that God can see and hear everything.

Many readers fail to realize this, but ‘The Color Purple’ is a theological text. It is about the reclamation of one’s original God: the earth and nature.

The issue of the environment as seen by Pope Francis is not a matter of purely scientific or, indeed, theological debate: it involves economic and political views on how the world’s poor can be brought out of poverty while protecting the environment.

But now it’s kind of a given that a 15-year-old would have a record deal and sell a quarter of a million records. No one’s expecting her to answer any deep theological questions. And I’ll tell you, I was asked some deep theological questions from the git-go.

Theological writing is usually done in essays or books, but I hope to show that if we concentrate on sentences, we may well learn something we might otherwise miss.

The search for the Torah codes is rooted in the unfathomable theological premise that the Torah – itself a set of five books of limited length – contains literally all truth.

I first came to Jewish-Catholic relations in 1963, while studying for the rabbinate at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.

I perceive two things in Scotland of the most fearful omen: ignorance of theological truth, and a readiness to pride themselves in and boast of it.

When we think about global warming at all, the arguments tend to be ideological, theological and economic.

Given that sexual orientation is innate and that we are all, in theological terms, children of God, to deny access to some sacraments based on sexuality is as wrong as denying access to some sacraments based on race or gender.

All theological lore is growing distasteful to me. All my recent excursions into such fields proves it to be a shifting, hypothetical, doubt-fostering, dusty, and unprofitable study.

Each department of knowledge passes through three stages. The theoretic stage; the theological stage and the metaphysical or abstract stage.

Every dogma, every philosophic or theological creed, was at its inception a statement in terms of the intellect of a certain inner experience.

Evangelicalism as a movement is rushing headlong toward theological ambiguity, which is another way of saying apostasy.

At present, too much theological thinking is very human-centered.

We establish no religion in this country, nor will we ever. But we poison our society when we remove its theological underpinnings. We court corruption when we leave society devoid of belief.