Top 98 A Theologian Quotes
#1. In Heaven all reviews will be favorable; here on earth, the publisher realizes, plausibility demands an occasional bad one, some convincing lump in all that leaven, and he accepts it somewhat as a theologian accepts Evil.
Randall Jarrell
#2. Bentham was an atheist and in no sense of the word could he be described as a theologian.
James E. Crimmins
#3. I am not a theologian, nor am I a priest or a minister, but I think building walls is fundamentally contrary to what made this country what it is. We're a pluralistic society in its functions.
Joe Biden
#4. King thought he understood the white Southerner, having been born and reared in Georgia and trained a theologian.
Constance Baker Motley
#5. A theologian's epistemology controls his interpretation of the Bible. If his epistemology is not Christian, his exegesis will be systematically distorted. If he has no epistemology at all, his exegesis will be unsystematically distorted.
Gordon H. Clark
#6. A theologian is born by living, nay dying and being damned, not by thinking, reading, or speculating.
Martin Luther
#7. The theologian who labours without joy is not a theologian at all.
Karl Barth
#8. If theology means knowledge of God, every woman, serious about her faith, young or old, must be a theologian, must move beyond that 'simple spirit of worship' to the 'complexities of dogma,' dogma being the principles and beliefs forming the core of biblical faith, the only reliable guides for life.
Rosalie De Rosset
#10. The definition of a philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black hat, which isn't really there. And the definition of a theologian is he's somebody who finds it.
Michael Ruse
#11. I am not a theologian or a philosopher. I am a story teller.
William Golding
#12. The Pashtun tribes are always engaged in private or public war. Every man is a warrior, a politician and a theologian Every large house is a real feudal fortress ... Eve ry family cultivates its vendetta; every clan, its feud ... Nothing is ever forgotten and very few debts are left unpaid.
Winston Churchill
#13. Whoever is so stupid as to imagine God to be either masculine or feminine openly shows that he is as bad a philosopher as a theologian.
Marie De Gournay
#14. Everyone is a theologian, either conscious or unconscious, in the sense that everyone has some conception of the nature of reality, of the demands of reality, and of those elements in reality that support or threaten meaningful existence.
James Luther Adams
#17. I am not a theologian or a historian, and I feel no call to become a defender of the faith, so in my case, the search for what remains valuable focuses on language itself: Catholic prayer, ritual, the naming of things.
Alice McDermott
#18. Wandering in a vast forest at night, I have only a faint light to guide me. A stranger appears and says to me: 'My friend, you should blow out your candle in order to find your way more clearly.' This stranger is a theologian.
Denis Diderot
#19. The Bible is shallow enough for a new believer to wade in, but deep enough for a theologian to drown in.
Steven J. Lawson
#20. The theologian who labors without joy is not a theologian at all. Sulky faces, morose thoughts and boring ways of speaking are intolerable in this field.
Karl Barth
#21. If you don't know the difference between theology and religious
studies, then you're a theologian.
Brian Bocking
#22. I am not a theologian or a scholar, but I am very aware of the fact that pain is necessary to all of us. In my own life, I think I can honestly say that out of the deepest pain has come the strongest conviction of the presence of God and the love of God.
Elisabeth Elliot
#23. A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there. A theologian is the man who finds it.
Laurence J. Peter
#24. I confess I take perverse delight as a theologian in the controversies surrounding postmodernism.
Stanley Hauerwas
#25. For a long time I wanted to become a theologian ... now, however, behold how through my efforts God is being debated in astronomy.
Johannes Kepler
#26. I find it as difficult to understand a scientist who does not acknowledge the presence of a superior rationality behind the existence of the universe as it is to comprehend a theologian who would deny the advances of science.
Wernher Von Braun
#27. Someone once defined a theologian as a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that was not there.
Darius Brasher
#28. There isn't a theologian in the world who can argue with me on this. God has no gender. If that's the case, then everything needs to be rewritten now, right now.
Susan Powter
#29. Cosmopolitanism has offered me an ethical perspective and a conceptual framework with which to read the signs of our times as a theologian and intellectual who has a public responsibility for constantly offering a way to engage in this rapidly changing public world.
Namsoon Kang
#30. Bonhoeffer's permanent legacy as a theologian has been to show that in the modern world, as in Josiah's and Huldah's Jerusalem, fostering the discomfiting yet life-giving practice of reading the Bible against ourselves is a major public responsibility of the Christian teacher and theologian.
Ellen F. Davis
#31. Man, without a saving touch of woman in him, is too doltish, too naive and romantic, too easily deluded and lulled to sleep by his imagination to be anything above a cavalryman, a theologian or a corporation director.
H.L. Mencken
#32. Whatever a theologian regards as true must be false: there you have almost a criterion of truth.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#33. My goal as a theologian is to move beyond the acquisition of knowledge to its application in real life: in a word, I want to get wisdom.
Kevin Vanhoozer
#34. A Theologian has nothing on a man who has experienced God
Paul Washer
#35. One becomes a theologian by living, by dying, and by being damned, not by understanding, reading, and speculation.
Martin Luther
#36. Who ever heard a theologian preface his creed, or a politician conclude his speech with an estimate of the probable error of his opinion?
Bertrand Russell
#37. No one can become and remain a theologian unless he is compelled again and again to be astonished at himself.
Karl Barth
#38. 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
#39. Do transports of rage make a religion any truer? A man shot in a battle does not lose his temper, but argue with a theologian and he becomes implacable.
Voltaire
#40. No one believes more strongly than I do that every Christian should be a theologian. In that sense, we all need to work it out. I want all Christians who can read, to read their Bibles and to read beyond the Bible - to read the history and theology.
D. A. Carson
#41. He [Omar Khayyam] is an atheist, but knows how to interpret in orthodox style the most difficult passages of the Koran; for every educated man is a theologian and faith is not a requisite.
Jorge Luis Borges
#42. 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
#43. A theologian who does not love art, poetry, music and nature can be dangerous. Blindness and deafness toward the beautiful are not incidental; they necessarily are reflected in his theology.
Pope Benedict XVI
#44. I'm a scientist, not a theologian. I don't know if there is a God or not. Religion requires certainty. Revere and respect Gaia. Have trust in Gaia. But not faith.
James Lovelock
#45. Science and vivisection make no appeal to a theological idea, much less a political one. You can argue with a theologian or a politician, but doctors are sacrosanct. They know; you do not. Science has its mystique much more powerful than any religion active today.
Brenda Ueland
#46. Shave a gorilla and it would be almost impossible, at twenty paces, to distinguish him from a heavyweight champion of the world. Skin a chimpanzee, and it would take an autopsy to prove he was not a theologian.
H.L. Mencken
#47. I don't trust a theologian who dismisses the beauty of science or a scientist who doesn't believe in the power of mystery.
Brene Brown
#49. Parenthood is a school for humility. We can't choose the precise traits of our children, and that is morally important. It teaches us what William May, a theologian whom I greatly admire, calls "an openness to the unbidden."
Michael Sandel
#50. To be a Christian is to be a theologian - a student of God and his will. The church is where believers should be nurtured in the practice of correct theology. The contemporary disdain for theological content and emphasis on self-image and emotions were not shared by the apostolic church.
R.C. Sproul
#51. I had the intention of becoming a theologian ... but now I see how God is, by my endeavors, also glorified in astronomy, for 'the heavens declare the glory of God.'
Johannes Kepler
#52. I have only a small flickering light to guide me in the darkness of a thick forest. Up comes a theologian and blows it out.
Denis Diderot
#53. My father was a better bricklayer than I am a theologian. I am still in too much of a hurry. But if the work I have done in theology is of any use, it is because of what I learned on the job, that is, you can lay only one brick at a time.
Stanley Hauerwas
#54. There is an old, old story about a theologian who was asked to reconcile the Doctrine of Divine Mercy with the doctrine of infant damnation. 'The Almighty,' he explained, 'finds it necessary to do things in His official and public capacity which in His private and personal capacity He deplores.
Robert A. Heinlein
#55. It is a mystery to me how a theologian can be praised for having brought himself to disbelieve dogmas. I've always thought that those who have brought themselves to believe in dogmas merit the true recognition owing a heroic deed.
Karl Kraus
#56. Spirituality is not a function of occupation or calling. A scientist may be more spiritual than a theologian; a teacher may be more spiritual than an officer. Spirituality is determined by personal outlook and priorities. It is evident in our words and actions.
Dallin H. Oaks
#57. Not everyone can be a theologian, but everyone should know some theology.
Carl E. Olson
#58. The old lady who said there must be a devil, else how could they make pictures that looked exactly like him, reasoned like a trained theologian - like a doctor of divinity.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#59. The horse had a fly-net over its head and ears. It looked down on the paving-stones with the empty disappointed expression of an old moral theologian. Whenever the guide spat between his shoes, the horse shook his head in disapproval.
Wolfgang Koeppen
#60. One is sometimes glad not to be a great theologian; one might easily mistake it for being a good Christian.
C.S. Lewis
#62. A sour religion is the devil's religion.
John Wesley
#63. My job as a pastor and theologian is to tease out the nature and the necessity of the gospel in meticulous ways, in everything I say, in everything I like. I want desperately for the church in America to rediscover the power and the beauty and the nature and the necessity of the gospel.
Tullian Tchividjian
#65. I have decided, it is fruitless. For I am no longer sure of anything concerning my existance. A philosopher is a dead poet and a dying theologian.
Roger Zelazny
#66. The theologian is interested specifically in the modern novel because there he sees reflected the man of our time, the unbeliever, who is nevertheless grappling in a desperate and usually honest way with intense problems of the spirit.
Flannery O'Connor
#67. Theologians have a great problem because they're seeking to speak about God. Since God is the ground of everything that is, there's a sense in which every human inquiry is grist to the theological mill. Obviously, no theologian can know everything.
John Polkinghorne
#68. Haldane was engaged in discussion with an eminent theologian. "What inference," asked the latter, "might one draw about the nature of God from a study of his works?" Haldane replied: "An inordinate fondness for beetles."
John B. S. Haldane
#69. I do not believe in the God of the theologians; but that there is a Supreme Intelligence I do not doubt.
Thomas A. Edison
#70. If there is a God, it's going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed.
Richard Dawkins
#71. I am no theologian. I would not be surprised, however, if Heaven proved to be a cozy kitchen, where delicious treats appeared in the oven and in the refrigerator whenever you wanted them, and where the cupboards were full of good books.
Dean Koontz
#72. God will not take shelter behind a jugglery of logic or metaphysics. He is neither a schoolman nor theologian, but our Father in Heaven.
George MacDonald
#73. When I prayed I was new," wrote a great theologian of Christian antiquity, "but when I stopped praying I became old." Prayer is the way to renewal and spiritual life. Prayer is aliveness to God. Prayer is strength, refreshment, and joy.
Greek Orthodox Archdiocese Of America
#74.
A priest? I said.
A monk or some such. One of those worker guys. Liberation theowhateveritis.
Theologian, said the other.
One of those guys who thinks that Jesus was on welfare.
Colum McCann
#75. His (the theologian) basic instinct of self preservation forbids him to respect reality at any point or even to let it get a word in.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#76. The mode in which that glory is to be seen in the present is praise. "I will sing praise to my God while I have being." The glory of God, said the theologian Irenaeus, is a human being fully alive.
N. T. Wright
#78. I am not a great theologian. I know there is a theological concept called invincible ignorance in which a strong enough faith binds you to any facts to the contrary.
Barney Frank
#79. When jumbled up, the letters contained in the name Taarak Vakil now spelt out a name that every theologian in India would be familiar with. Kalki avatar - the tenth incarnation of Vishnu.
Ashwin Sanghi
#80. He who is well acquainted with the text of scripture, is a distinguished theologian. For a Bible passage or text is of more value than the comments of four authors.
Martin Luther
#81. A gentle sense of humor will be alert to detect anything that savors of a pious 'act' on the part of the penitent.
Thomas Merton
#82. The theologian Meric Casaubon argued - in his 1668 book, Of Credulity and Incredulity - that witches must exist because, after all, everyone believes in them. Anything that a large number of people believe must be true.
Carl Sagan
#83. Being a systematic theologian allows me to indulge all my interests - in literature, film, art, music - by relating them all to God.
Kevin Vanhoozer
#84. The pious and learned Jesuit, Suarez, Justus Lipsius, a devout and erudite theologian of Louvain, and many others have proved incontestably that devotion to our Blessed Lady is necessary to attain salvation.
Louis De Montfort
#85. Norwegian theologian O. Hallesby is "to loosen to some degree the ties which bind us to the world or material surroundings as a whole in order that we may concentrate all our spiritual powers upon the unseen and eternal things."The
William Thrasher
#86. If you want to be a radical theologian, you have to be able to say, "I have no idea what is going on." That's being a radical theologian.
Art Hochberg
#87. There seems to be a human instinct for prayer. Swiss theologian Karl Barth calls it our 'incurable God-sickness.'
Timothy Keller
#88. The devil is a better theologian than any of us and is a devil still.
Aiden Wilson Tozer
#89. God is just!' said a carping theologian to me the other day. 'Yes,' I answered, 'and he cannot be pleased that you should call that justice which is injustice, and attribute it to him!
George MacDonald
#90. It was in the early 1960s that my late revered teacher, Professor Abraham Joshua Heschel, became the first major Jewish theologian in America to enter into dialogue with Christian theologians on a high theological level.
David Novak
#91. The theologian can ask far profounder questions because he knows more about God; by that same knowledge he knows that there are depths that he will never know. But to see why one cannot know more is itself a real seeing; there is a way of seeing the darkness which is a kind of light.
Frank Sheed
#93. Only a very bad theologian would confuse the certainty that follows revelation with the truths that are revealed. They are entirely different things.
Denis Diderot
#94. No honest theologian therefore can deny that his acceptance of Jesus as Christ logically binds every Christian to a belief in reincarnation - in Elias case (who was later John the Baptist) at least.
Robert Graves
#95. The author says that theologian operates with windows open to the interest of the world, but also with a skylight that allows full awareness of prayer.
Karl Barth
#96. There is a very well-defined procedure that allows the Vatican to raise issues with a particular theologian about something that does not appear in conformity with the Catholic faith. It is not always easy to make this determination.
Godfried Danneels
#97. I learned a lot from both, initially Jewish and Muslim theologians that had been missing, perhaps from my rather parochial Catholic upbringing.
Karen Armstrong
#98. To a thrifty theologian, bent on redemption with economy, there are few points of ethics too fine-spun for splitting.
Ellen Glasgow
