Theological Complexity Quotes

I have never united myself to any church because I found difficulty in giving my assent without mental reservation to the long, complicated statements of Christian doctrine which characterize the articles of belief and the usual confession of faith.

God seems to be an unwilling participant in our efforts to pigeonhole Him.

Often the Jesus-focused churches are leaning towards a 'social gospel' interpretation of the kingdom, and the 'Paul' churches are talking about being saved from sin and going to heaven. But when we understand both Jesus and Paul in their historical contexts within the first-century Jewish world, the issues become both more complex and ultimately (I believe) more clear.

Where did God come from? It's certainly more complicated than trying to figure out where, say, Barry Manilow was born.

The Bible contains some of the most sublime passages in English literature, but is also full of contradictions, inconsistencies, and absurdities.

We can't say what God is, and until the modern period, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians in the three God religions all knew that. They insisted that we have no idea what we meant when we said that God was good, or wise, or intelligent.

God's blessing is not always to be distinguished from His wrath.

The further we advance in knowledge, the more simplicity shall we discover in those primary rules that regulate all the apparently endless, complicated, and multiform operations of the Godhead.

...she wanted God to make sense. He doesn't. He will make no more sense to me than I will make sense to an ant.

God exists outside of time, and since we are within time, there is no way we will ever totally grasp that concept.

We know God easily, if we do not constrain ourselves to define him.

If there were a reason for preferring the Christian religion to natural religion, it would be because the former offers us, on the nature of God and man, enlightenment that the latter lacks. Now, this is not at all the case; for Christianity, instead of clarifying, gives rise to an infinite multitude of obscurities and difficulties.

I should have been glad to acquire some sort of idea of Hindu theology, ... but the difficulties were too great.

I don't like to talk about it in those terms; it's impossible to describe who or what God "is." Suppose you were a horse, and you were asked to describe what a human being was like. You couldn't do it.

As so often happens Christianity as expressed in the Sermon on the Mount is simplicity itself, but through the ages human beings have rendered it more and more complicated. "The church" does not exist, numerous churches exist, always controlled by human beings.

Biblical higher criticism is preserved in the particular enclave of academic Christian scholarship and is thought to be too unfruitful to share with the average pew-sitter, for it raises more questions than the church can adequately answer. So the leaders of the church would protect the simple believers from concepts they were not trained to understand. In this way that ever-widening gap between academic Christians and the average pew-sitter made its first appearance.

The greatest single distinguishing feature of the omnipotence of God is that our imagination gets lost thinking about it.

That in these times every serious person should not in his heart have felt some difliculty with the doctrines of the incarnation, I cannot helieve. We are not as we were. When Christianity was first published, the imagination of mankind presented the relation of heaven to earth very differently from what it does now.

The gods of the realms are many and varied -- or they are the many and varied names and identities tagged onto the same being. I know not -- and care not -- which.

God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining.

There are innumerable definitions of God because his manifestations are innumerable.

It's a pretty crazy task to try to describe God "quickly." Everything starts with a healthy fear of Him.

I tell you the solemn truth, that the doctrine of the Trinity is not so difficult to accept for a working proposition as any one of the axioms of physics.

The nature of Christ is, I grant it, from one end to another, a web of mysteries; but this mysteriousness does not correspond to the difficulties which all existence contains. Let it be rejected, and the whole world is an enigma; let it be accepted, and we possess a wonderful explanation of the history of man.

The angels laugh at old Karl. They laugh at him because he tries to grasp the truth about God in a book of Dogmatics. They laugh at the fact that volume follows volume, and each is thicker than the previous ones. As they laugh, they say to one another, ‘Look! Here he comes now with his little pushcart full of volumes of the Dogmatics!’—and they laugh about the persons who write so much about Karl Barth instead of writing about the things he is trying to write about. Truly, the angels laugh.