Theological Interpretations Quotes

Catholicism is a wide tent in terms of political and legal positions. We could have nine Catholics on the Supreme Court and a great deal of diversity toward the law.

One of the threats to Christianity in the 21st century is this idea that religion is best understood as a kind of aesthetic experience, and that you can get all your morality from that.

The statement that 'God is dead' comes from Nietzsche and has recently been trumpeted abroad by some German and American theologians. But the good Lord has not died of this; He who dwells in the heaven laughs at them.

If we believe that he [Jesus Christ]really countenanced the follies, the falsehoods, and the charlatanisms, which his biographers [writers of the New Testament]father upon him, and admit the misconstructions, interpolations, and theorizations of the fathers of the early and the fanatics of the latter ages, the conclusion would be irresistible by every sound mind that he was an impostor.

All bibles are man-made.

Whether religion is man-made is a question for philosophers or theologians. But the forms are man-made. They are a human response to something. As a historian of religions, I am interested in those expressions.

Be assured, there is nothing new in theology except that which is false.

[Recent evidence regarding quantum mechanics is] sufficient to rule out all theological options but one - the Bible's.

I've read the Bible. I think the Bible's a great book, but it's a novel. It's beautifully written and la-di-da, but people really took it the wrong way.

Great scientific minds, from Claudius Ptolemy of the second century to Isaac Newton of the seventeenth, invested their formidable intellects in attempts to deduce the nature of the universe from the statements and philosophies contained in religious writings.... Had any of these efforts worked, science and religion today might be one and the same. But they are not.

In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs.

The Bible is such a gargantuan collection of conflicting values that anyone can prove anything from it.

Religions are conclusions for which the facts of nature supply no major premises.