Theological Debates Quotes

There is this difference between the Church of Rome and the Church of England: the one professes to be infallible, the other to be never in the wrong.

I've never read 'The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe,' but his later works are about whether God is real.

How different has been the course pursued by the Unitarian party. How few of that numerous body, powerful from wealth and education, whether ministers or laymen, have placed themselves by the side of the suffering bondman. The freedom of discussion, which was fearlessly applied to metaphysical doctrines and theological subtleties, was found to be a dangerous weapon when it was used for the examination of an institution, the ramification of which entwined themselves around every altar of mammon worship

My faith, my hermeneutics does not demand that I correlate every verse. In other words, there are often verses that appear, I'm a John 3:16 Christian, I believe God so loved the world, I do believe that, and I believe that whosoever believes in Him shall not perish. But I also believe, you know, predestination from the foundation of the Earth. So to me, I'm able to hold tensions in my mind rather than having to explain them. To me, I don't fit in a real good box and I believe them both.

Islam was something like a Christian heresy. The early heresies had been full of mad reversals and evasions of the Incarnation, rescuing their Jesus from the reality of his body even at the expense of the sincerity of his soul.

"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.

In the nineteenth century, many Anglican theologians, both evangelical and catholic, embraced positively the proposal of evolution.

The theological contacts between Jews and Christians during much of the premodern period are best characterized as disputations. Even when not engaged in face-to-face argumentation, Jews and Christians spoke about each other in essentially disputational terms.

Anyone who can worship a trinity and insist that his religion is a monotheism can believe anything.

The figure of Satan and the fires of hell have been demythologized by modern Christian biblical scholars, theologians and philosophers.

I study religion because I find it fascinating and problematic. But I struggle with the idea of what religion is, what being religious means. A lot of people assume that if you write about early Christianity, you must be some kind of Sunday-school teacher.

During my academical life, and from this time forward, I was indefatigable in my search after truth. I read all the authors of greatest repute, for and against the Trinity, original sin, and the most disputed doctrines, but I was not yet of an understanding sufficiently ripe for impartial decision, and all my inquiries terminated in Calvinism.

Even the standard example of ancient nonsense - the debate about angels on pinheads - makes sense once you realize that theologians were not discussing whether five or eighteen would fit, but whether a pin could house a finite or an infinite number.

Once we got to know each other, we had such similar impulses. We saw in a similar way, and we developed a strong friendship. We would talk on the phone for hours, philosophically and theologically, about all of these issues.

The [ancient] Jews fought one another over their conflicting interpretations of their Holy Book, and their disagreements about doctrine and matters of ritual

Had Mr. Gibbon lived in France, Spain, or Italy, he might with the fame reason have ranked the doctrine of transubstantiation, and the worship of saints and angels among the essentials of Christianity, as the doctrines of the trinity and of the atonement.