Theological Diversity Quotes

In the past 10,000 years, humans have devised roughly 100,000 religions based on roughly 2,500 gods. So the only difference between myself and the believers is that I am skeptical of 2,500 gods whereas they are skeptical of 2,499 gods. We're only one God away from total agreement.

I am a reformed Taoist, part-time Buddhist, Hindu, animist, pagan, Jewish mystic, and Christian. I always got along great with priests and rabbis and mullahs and gurus, even though I spend most of my life constructively criticizing them.

I've said this before, and I know this raises questions in the minds of some evangelicals. I do not believe that my mother, who never formally embraced Christianity as far as I know ... I do not believe she went to hell.

Most men indeed as well as most sects in Religion, think themselves in possession of all truth, and that wherever others differ from them it is so far error… the only difference between our Churches in their opinions of the certainty of their doctrines is, the Church of Rome is infallible and the Church of England is never in the wrong.

Protestantism, of course, is much more explicitly divided into different traditions - the Pentecostals, the Anglicans. But there is the main tradition of Protestantism that comes out of the Reformation and that produced people like Kant and Hegel and so on, who are not normally thought of as being people writing in a theological tradition, although Hegel, of course, wrote theology his whole life.

Liberal Catholics are the worst enemies of the Church.

Nothing does more to activate Christian divisions than talk about Christian unity.

I am a Congregationalist with Catholic sensibilities. Which probably explains how I ended up in a Episcopal church.

If the universalists are correct in saying that everyone is going to be in heaven regardless of what they believe, or the pluralists are correct that all religions lead to the same god, then the horrific death of Jesus Christ was completely unnecessary.

I have to try to remind people on both sides of the barque of Peter that there is room for us all and that we are not the first generation of Catholics to experience serious theological and pastoral differences of opinion. In fact, from the New Testament, strong leaders within the church disagreed openly. Eventually, the truly great ones found ways to heal conflicts and keep the Lord's flock united.

There are many levels of Christianity. There are many notions about God. To believe that God is a person is just one of the notions of God that you can find in Christianity. So, we should not say that there is one Christianity. There are many Christianities.

People who are comfortable with very clear boundaries and group definitions don't like the instability and ambiguity of people who say they are more advanced Christians, or they don't have to do what the bishop says.

It is time to cease to argue about God , and instead to unite in the unmasking of contemporary forms of idolatry.

There are some kinds of Christianity that insist you have to believe literally in doctrine. The Gnostic gospels open out the complexity and multiplicity of approaches to this. If you think the story of the virgin birth is mistranslated, for instance, it doesn't mean you have to throw out the whole thing.

Well, today, the diocese is more than ever a microcosm.

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'm not going to get into a debate over the non-essentials. I won't try to change other denominations. Why be divisive?

The Bible unites its interpreters as a shared focus of attention, but it does not demand consensus. On the contrary, it invites and prods us to make responsible choices, to take responsibility for the choices that we have made... It was always like that, and our holy scripture grows over the centuries, gets thicker and thicker, with more texts around, which need/have to be looked into, referred to, considered.

Jehovah, Allah, the Trinity, Jesus, Buddha, are names for a great variety of human virtues, human mystical experiences, human remorses, human compensatory fantasies, human terrors, human cruelties. If all men were alike, all the world would worship the same God.

Study Bibles tend to circulate widely, so they play a disproportionate role in helping Christians and others understand holy Scripture. Further, many of our members have long used one or two other Study Bibles, and it is important that Christians not be tied too tightly to only one option, however good it may be.

Sincere Christians can disagree about the details of Scripture and theology - absolutely.

American Protestants do not have to believe in God because they believe in belief. That is why we have never been able to produce an interesting atheist in America.

At the universities I visit, the exclusivity of Christ is challenged in every open forum - "How can you possibly talk about one God or one way when there are so many good options?"

Because I was suspicious of the traditional Christian church, I tended to tar them all with the same brush. That was a mistake, because there are righteous people working in a whole rainbow of belief systems - from Hasidic Jews to right-wing Bible Belters to charismatic Catholics.