Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I don't think I've been to any country where everybody was supportive - there's always churches or groups who don't like my theology or that we associate with this group or that group.
Theology is in disrepute among most Western intellectuals. The word is taken to mean a passe form of religious thinking that embraces irrationality and dogmatism. So too, Scholasticism.
My theology is such that the God who loves Israel and will not forsake Israel - which is why I want to see Israel have a secure nation with secure borders - also loves the Palestinians.
With a background in science I am extremely interested in the meeting ground of science, theology, and philosophy, especially the ethical questions at the border of science and theology.
I didn't write much until I turned 40. Up until then I felt constrained by a sense of the discipline of New Testament studies and a sense of the ruling elite in theology and biblical studies.
Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is 'The Book of British Birds,' and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.
Me and my father went through a war period where we wasn't talking. He wanted me to go to theology school - I didn't want to go. I wanted to do music. I told him I was a minister through music.
At graduate school in 1999, I finally had the chance to examine why I believe what I believe. I realised that I'd had no period in my life where I'd consciously tried to develop my own theology.
Well, it's because I gladly acknowledge some ideas that are part of process theology, but which I think are not tied to all the details of process thought, and are very illuminating and helpful.
I was famous in our college for calm and impassionate discussion; for one whole summer, I rose at five and went to bed at midnight, that I might have sufficient time for theology and metaphysics.
I haven't studied theology in any systematic way. I don't think I'd find certain subjects - canon law, for instance - terribly interesting. But I'm always picking around and finding different things.
The treatment of women in Muslim communities throughout the world is unconscionable. All civilized nations must unite in condemnation of a theology that now threatens to destabilize much of the Earth.
Regardless of theology or however you see life or relate to worshiping God, as an artist, my job is to tell the truth and then try to connect with these characters and people as honestly and deeply as possible.
We talk about predestination because the Bible talks about predestination. If we desire to build our theology on the Bible, we run head on into this concept. We soon discover that John Calvin did not invent it.
What has 'theology' ever said that is of the smallest use to anybody? When has 'theology' ever said anything that is demonstrably true and is not obvious? What makes you think that 'theology' is a subject at all?
For many decades now - and certainly during my adult life in academe - the Western intellectual world has not been convinced that theology is a pursuit that can be engaged in with intellectual honesty and integrity.
To be Biblically balanced is to let our theology and preaching be proportioned by the Bible's radically disproportionate focus on God's saving love for sinners seen and accomplished in the crucified and risen Christ.
When theology erodes and organization crumbles, when the institutional framework of religion begins to break up, the search for a direct experience which people can feel to be religious facilitates the rise of cults.
Science cannot tell theology how to construct a doctrine of creation, but you can't construct a doctrine of creation without taking account of the age of the universe and the evolutionary character of cosmic history.
What I think I have in common with the school of deconstruction is the mode of negative thinking or negative awareness, in the technical, philosophical sense of the negative, but which comes to me through negative theology.
It is not history, theology or mythology that interest me. It is the fact that history, theology or mythology could have alternative interpretations or explanations. I try to connect the dots between the past and the present.
I feel that the Christian experience and the Jewish one have much to give each other. If this open society continues and there is no return to political anti-Semitism, then this encounter, deeper than any theology, may happen.
In one sense, I wanted to study philosophy and theology, getting into the history of the Bible. I went through that for, like, two years while I took a desk job at Warners. It was very depressing but exhilarating at the same time.
I would support peaceful co-existence between religion and science because they concern different domains. Anyone who takes theology seriously knows that it's not a matter of using it to explain things that scientists are mystified by.
Those who read the Scriptures and judge for themselves, not resting satisfied with the perverted application of the text, do not find the distinction that theology and ecclesiastical authorities have made in the condition of the sexes.
Back when the natural sciences, philosophy, and theology were one great intellectual hodgepodge, proving the existence of God was a relatively commonplace exercise. To the modern mind, however, science and religion talk past each other.
When religious believers invoke miracles and acts of creation ex nihilo, that is the end of the search for them, whereas for scientists, the identification of such mysteries is only the beginning. Science picks up where theology leaves off.
The result has been that although few conservative Presbyterian churches actually worship in the Puritan way, the Puritan theology of worship remains the standard orthodoxy among them. This discrepancy sometimes leads to guilty consciences.
I like major theology. I like Karl Barth, and I like John Calvin, and I like Martin Luther. The scale of thinking and the power of integration that they're capable of from thinking in that scale is something that's really unique to theology.
Obviously, you're trying to peel through 20 centuries of theology, speculations, church doctrine and storytelling. I'm trying to get back to the absolute basic story of who was Jesus, what did he say, what was he teaching, and what did he do.
I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.
It seems obvious to me that the notion of God has never been anything but a kind of ideal projection, a reflection upward of the human personality, and that theology never has been and never can be anything but a more and more purified mythology.
Bad Religion has never been about criticizing people who are Christian. But we've always been about pointing out the irony and contradictions in Christian theology and the more extreme versions of Christians that seek to challenge modern secularism.
Before Vatican II, in theology, as in other areas, the discipline was fixed. After the council there has been a revolution - a chaotic revolution - with free discussion on everything. There is now no common theology or philosophy as there was before.
I read things like theology, and I read about science, 'Scientific American' and publications like that, because they stimulate again and again my sense of the almost arbitrary given-ness of experience, the fact that nothing can be taken for granted.
If atheism is to be used to express the state of mind in which God is identified with the unknowable, and theology is pronounced to be a collection of meaningless words about unintelligible chimeras, then I have no doubt, and I think few people doubt.
Over the centuries, and even today, the Bible and Christian theology have helped justify the Crusades, slavery, violence against gays, and the murder of doctors who perform abortions. The words themselves are latent, inert, harmless - until they aren't.
I don't claim to be knowledgeable about theology. Most of my knowledge comes out of my experience and the lessons in the Bible. Every Sunday I'm home I teach 45 minutes and we boiled them down to one page for the new book, 'Through the Year with Jimmy Carter.'
I also think we need to maintain distinctions - the doctrine of creation is different from a scientific cosmology, and we should resist the temptation, which sometimes scientists give in to, to try to assimilate the concepts of theology to the concepts of science.
Theology is endlessly interesting in that you can study it without believing in anything. I do believe, but you don't have to. I got very caught up in the 11th-century monasticism and the Cistercians. My dissertation was about Aelred of Rievaulx and one of his books.
We have Christians against Muslims against Jews, and no matter how liberal your theology, merely identifying yourself as a Christian or a Jew lends tacit validity to this status quo. People have morally identified with a subset of humanity rather than with humanity as a whole.
I'm not sure that Liberation Theology has ever satisfactorily resolved the tensions between Marxism's 'social naturalism' (the claim that all beliefs have their origins in social practice) and religion's supernaturalism (the claims that its beliefs are underwritten by divine will).
I basically look like a lot of modern Orthodox people you know, but I work on a TV show where I sometimes have to kiss Jim Parsons. That's why I don't take on the title of modern Orthodox, but in terms of ideology and theology I pretty much sound like a liberal modern Orthodox person.
People of different faiths, like yours and mine, sometimes wonder where we can meet in common purpose, when there are so many differences in creed and theology. Surely the answer is that we can meet in service, in shared moral convictions about our nation stemming from a common worldview.
Oddly enough, my favorite genre is not fiction. I'm attracted by primary sources that are relevant to historical questions of interest to me, by famous old books on philosophy or theology that I want to see with my own eyes, by essays on contemporary science, by the literatures of antiquity.
In my experience, many Americans think of religion as important and want to do whatever they can to support it. But if you ask them what they themselves believe, you'll find they're very uncertain about their religious beliefs. They don't actually accept the theology of their official church.
No Christian can avoid theology. Every Christian is a theologian. Perhaps not a theologian in the technical or professional sense, but a theologian nevertheless. The issue for Christians is not whether we are going to be theologians but whether we are going to be good theologians or bad ones.
Systematic theology - be careful how you tie down the Word to fit your set and final creeds, systems, dogmas, and organized theistic philosophies! The Word of God is not bound! It's free to say what it will to the individual, and no one can outline it into dispensations which cannot be broken.
There are some who invoke separation of church and state - to try to get the government out of the business of morality - but this is antithetical to what the founders wanted. The founders wanted to keep theology out of government so that government could focus on the proper business of morality.
If you look at Mormonism, it's a very appealing community. It takes care of itself; there are active charities. It's got a successful work ethic. Whatever you might think about the authenticity of their theology or their history, it's immaterial in terms of how the religion itself actually functions.