Theologian Quotes - Page 12

• "Did God have a mother?" Children, when told that God made the heavens and the earth, innocently ask whether God had a mother. This deceptively simple question has stumped the elders of the church and embarrassed the finest theologians, precipitating some of the thorniest theological debates over the centuries. All the great religions have elaborate mythologies surrounding the divine act of Creation, but none of them adequately confronts the logical paradoxes inherent in the question that even children ask.

  Michio Kaku

  Mother, Children, Simple

  Michio Kaku (1995). “Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the Tenth Dimension”, p.191, OUP Oxford

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• A theologian of the cross says what a thing is. In modern parlance: a theologian of the cross calls a spade a spade. One who ‘looks on all things through suffering and the cross’ is constrained to speak the truth…it will see precisely that the cross and the resurrection itself is the only answer to that problem, not erasure or neglect.

  Gerhard

  Suffering, Looks, Answers

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• A theologian is a person who makes bold to speak about God because he speaks out of God and through God. To profess theology is to do holy work. It is a priestly ministration in the house of the Lord. It is itself a service of worship, a consecration of mind and heart to the honour of His name.

  Herman Bavinck

  Heart, Speaks Out, Names

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• When I say God it is poetry and not theology. Nothing that any theologian has written about God has helped me much, but everything the poets have written about flowers and birds and skies and seas and saviors of the race, and God - whoever He may be - has at one time or another reached my soul!...The theologians gather dust upon the shelves of my library but the poets are stained with my fingers and blotted by my tears.

  John Haynes Holmes

  Flower, Race, Dust

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• So-called professional mathematicians have, in their reliance on the relative incapacity of the rest of mankind, acquired for themselves a reputation for profundity very similar to the reputation for sanctity possessed by theologians.

  Georg C. Lichtenberg

  Math, Reputation, Sanctity

  "Aphorisms". Book by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Notebook K 52, 1799.

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• Yet man does recognise himself [as an animal]. But I ask you and the whole world for a generic differentia between man and ape which conforms to the principles of natural history, I certainly know of none... If I were to call man ape or vice versa, I should bring down all the theologians on my head. But perhaps I should still do it according to the rules of science.

  Carl Linnaeus

  Science, Animal, Men

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• On what does the Christian argument for Immortality really rest? It stands upon the pedestal on which the theologian rests the whole of historical Christianity-the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

  William Henry Drummond

  Christian, Jesus, Easter

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• The Holy Apostle John the Theologian says that the commandments of God are not difficult, but easy (I John, 5:3). But they are only easy because of love, while they are all difficult if there is no love.

  Silouan the Athonite

  Inspirational, Christian, Religious

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• I'm honestly not sure that I've ever tried to talk as a theologian about "homosexual acts," per se. My disagreement with the current teaching of the Roman Congregations is about what I consider to be their fundamentally flawed premise of the objectively disordered nature of the inclination.

  James Alison

  Teaching, Currents, Homosexual

  Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

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• The nature of God is something that is of serious interest to believers, to theologians, and to philosophers. And yet we can't come to the nature of God, unless we also have some knowledge of the nature of the universe as having come from God.

  George Coyne

  Serious, Philosopher, Interest

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• All biblical exegetes and theologians have a theory of language, whether they acknowledge it or not.

  Kevin Vanhoozer

  Biblical, Language, Theory

  Source: exiledpreacher.blogspot.com

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• All fundamentalist theologians make the ordinances of creation an essential part of creation and absolutize them. Women belong at home, fulfil their life through motherhood, by caring for their husbands and serving them. The fixed role pattern of one particular economic and family order is transformed into an order willed by God and given by creation. With a methodologically similar logic, slaves were understood as those elected by God to serve the whites.

  Dorothee Solle

  Husband, Home, Caring

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• You can't relate to an absolute or it wouldn't be absolute, it would be relative. On an intellectual level, that's easy. However, you hear theologians in the theistic traditions talk about absolute God, and I saw God, or God spoke; speaking, being seen, these are all relational things. So what is absolute about such a being, wouldn't actually be absolute.

  Robert Thurman

  Intellectual, Would Be, Levels

  Source: theindiespiritualist.com

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• The most wonderful thing of all is that the distinguished Lutheran and Calvinist theologians who belong to our order really believe that they see in it (Illuminati) the true and genuine sense of Christian Religion. Oh mortal man, is there anything you cannot be made to believe?

  Adam Weishaupt

  Christian, Believe, Men

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• King thought he understood the white Southerner, having been born and reared in Georgia and trained a theologian.

  Constance Baker Motley

  Kings, White, Georgia

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• Lovers are the ones who know most about God; the theologian must listen to them.

  Hans Urs von Balthasar

  Lovers, Knows

  Hans Urs von Balthasar (2004). “Love Alone is Credible”, p.10, Ignatius Press

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• Today the West is awakening to its wants; and the "true self of man and spirit" is the watchword of the advanced school of Western theologians. The student of Sanskrit philosophy knows where the wind is blowing from, but it matters not whence the power comes so longs as it brings new life.

  Swami Vivekananda

  Philosophy, School, Men

  Swami Vivekananda (2015). “The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda”, p.1743, Manonmani Publishers

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• Indeed Christianity passes. Passes - it has gone! It has littered the beaches of life with churches, cathedrals, shrines and crucifixes, prejudices and intolerances, like the sea urchin and starfish and empty shells and lumps of stinging jelly upon the sands here after a tide. A tidal wave out of Egypt. And it has left a multitude of little wriggling theologians and confessors and apologists hopping and burrowing in the warm nutritious sand. But in the hearts of living men, what remains of it now? Doubtful scraps of Arianism. Phrases. Sentiments. Habits.

  H. G. Wells

  Beach, Heart, Men

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• A sour religion is the devil's religion.

  John Wesley

  Devil, Sour

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• According to some liberation theologians atheism is not the cause of the conflict between Christianity and Marxism, but is rather the link between them.

  Ernesto Cardenal

  Atheism, Links, Causes

  Source: www.crisismagazine.com

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• The white tails of rabbits, according to some theologians, have a purpose, namely to make it easier for sportsmen to shoot them.

  Bertrand Russell

  White, Rabbits, Tails

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell”, p.53, Routledge

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• Satan is an astute theologian.

  John Calvin

  Satan, Astute

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• I think nobody alive today is a more powerful agent of conversion than someone like Mother Teresa. You can refute arguments but not her life. When she came to the National Prayer Breakfast and lectured President Clinton about abortion, he had nothing to say to her. He can't argue with a saint. It's too bad there isn't an easier way, because becoming a saint is not the easiest thing in the world. It's much easier to become an apologist or a philosopher or a theologian.

  Peter Kreeft

  Mother, Powerful, Prayer

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• The impediment to scientific thinking is not, I think, the difficulty of the subject. Complex intellectual feats have been mainstays even of oppressed cultures. Shamans, magicians and theologians are highly skilled in their intricate and arcane arts. No, the impediment is political and hierarchical.

  Carl Sagan

  Art, Thinking, Political

  Carl Sagan (2011). “Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark”, p.398, Ballantine Books

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• Nowadays theologians aren't quite so straightforward as Paley. They don't point to complex living mechanisms and say that they are self-evidently designed by a creator, just like a watch. But there is a tendency to point to them and say 'It is impossible to believe' that such complexity, or such perfection, could have evolved by natural selection. Whenever I read such a remark, I always feel like writing 'Speak for yourself' in the margin.

  Richard Dawkins

  Believe, Writing, Self

  Richard Dawkins (2015). “The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design”, p.46, W. W. Norton & Company

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