Christianity Theology Quotes

#1. The bare knowledge of God's will is inefficacious, it doth not better the heart. Knowledge alone is like a winter sun, which hath no heat or influence; it doth not warm the affections, or purify the conscience. Judas was a great luminary, he knew God's will, but he was a traitor.

Thomas Watson

#2. Matthew 10:34
Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.

Anonymous

#3. Here I stand, so help me God, I can do no other. With the greater consciousness of the issues involved comes a lesser assurance that an alternative is possible.

Gordon H. Clark

#4. The peace of the celestial city is the perfectly ordered and harmonious enjoyment of God, and of one another in God. (City of God, Book 19)

Augustine Of Hippo

#5. The classical error of historical Christianity is that we have never started with the value of the person. Rather, we have started from the 'unworthiness of the sinner,' and that starting point has set the stage for the glorification of human shame in Christian theology.

Robert H. Schuller

#6. Jesus responds to almost every question he's asked with ... a question.
"What do you think? How do you read it?" he asks, again and again and again.

Rob Bell

#7. You don't need a Master's in Theology to love people.

D.R. Silva

#8. We can know God, we can understand God to the extent that we as humans are able, and we can experience God in our own theology and faith development; this is absolute truth.

Sanejo I. Leonard

#9. Sacraments are like hoses. They are the channels of the living water of God's grace. Our faith is like opening the faucet. We can open it a lot, a little, or not at all.

Peter Kreeft

#10. Cosmopolitanism starts from the _singular_ individual rather than the _faceless_ collective

Namsoon Kang

#11. Violence is spiritual junk food, and boredom is spiritual anorexia.

Peter Kreeft

#12. Cosmopolitan theology affirms and radicalizes the belief that the Divine creates each and every human being as equal to every one else as a _citizen-of-the-cosmos and that no one is either superior or inferior to the other.

Namsoon Kang

#13. We live in a day of abounding vagueness and indistinctness on doctrinal subjects in religion. Now, if ever, it is the duty of all advocates of clear, well-defined, sharply-cut theology, to supply proof that their views are thoroughly borne out by Scripture.

J.C. Ryle

#14. Faith without reason produces a mindless Christianity which is less than useless; the focus on justice in this world produces a theology that chases its own tail."

~R. Alan Woods [2013]

R. Alan Woods

#15. True Christianity, which will last forever, comes from the gospel words of Christ not from the epistles of Paul. The writings of Paul have been a danger and a hidden rock, the causes of the principal defects of Christian theology.

Ernest Renan

#16. It is not opinions that man needs: it is TRUTH. It is not theology; it is God. It is not religion: it is Christ. It is not literature and science; but the knowledge of the free love of God in the gift of His only-begotten Son.

Horatius Bonar

#17. Surely no rebel can expect the King to pardon his treason while he remains in open revolt. No one can be so foolish as to imagine that the Judge of all the earth will put away our sins if we refuse to put them away ourselves.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

#18. We may not play with the new theology even if we may think we can turn it to our advantage.

Francis A. Schaeffer

#19. Jesus is God is the unified field theory of Christianity.

R. Alan Woods

#20. Cosmopolitan discourse is in a way a response to the issue of solidarity. Although the precondition for solidarity can be a _community_, solidarity requires more intentional commitment and performance than does community.

Namsoon Kang

#21. I don't think the biggest threat to our theology is humanism or the host of world religions. Our biggest threat is cut-and-paste Christianity. If man places his faith in a god he has recreated in his own image, has he placed his faith in God at all? And if not, how can such a man be saved?

Beth Moore

#22. Our culture has filled our heads but emptied our hearts, stuffed our wallets but starved our wonder. It has fed our thirst for facts but not for meaning or mystery. It produces "nice" people, not heroes.

Peter Kreeft

#23. Suffering provides the gym equipment on which my faith can be exercised.

Joni Eareckson Tada

#24. Our comfort in theological traditions should never usurp our desire for spiritual Truth. If we vigorously pursue the rituals rather than a relational experience with God then we've missed His message entirely.

Jason Versey

#25. Most theists are deists most of the time, in practice if not in theory. They practice the absence of God instead of the presence of God.

Peter Kreeft

#26. Do not try to make the Bible relevant. Its relevance is axiomatic. Do not defend God's word, but testify to it. Trust to the Word. It is a ship loaded to the very limits of its capacity. -Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Eric Metaxas

#27. _For what ends_ does one claim cosmopolitanism? _Whose interest_ does it serve?

Namsoon Kang

#28. How do you know yourself to be a son of God in fact as well as in name?"
Answer: "Because I am baptized in the name of God the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." - John Calvin (from his catechism)

John Calvin

#29. Have you by any chance an edition of St. Ignatius's treatise against the Gnostics?" he asked in a low clear voice.
The young assistant looked gravely back. "Not for sale, I'm afraid," he said. "Nor, if it comes to that, the Gnostic treatises against St. Ignatius."
"Quite," Anthony answered.

Charles Williams

#30. Pilate's skeptical sneer "What is truth?" was addressed to Truth Himself, standing there right in front of his face. The world's stupidest question was three words; God's profoundest answer was one Word.

Peter Kreeft

#31. In religious belief as elsewhere, we must take our chances, recognizing that we could be wrong, dreadfully wrong. There are no guarantees; the religious life is a venture; foolish and debilitating error is a permanent possibility. (If we can be wrong, however, we can also be right.)

Alvin Plantinga

#32. A time will come in your life, William, where your faith will be tested ... and you must stay faithful to the word and vision that the All-Father has given to you.

M.J. Chrisman

#33. I want to affirm that thinking and living, knowing and doing, theory and practice intersect.

Namsoon Kang

#34. Cosmopolitan discourse ... provides one with a _public gaze_ with which one can relate oneself to others in a different way.

Namsoon Kang

#35. When I was a child, Mama had the best voice of all the members of the church. She had loved to sing. Her words had soared like an angel's over the swells of the organ. In fact, I now suspected, her entire theology had been taken from the hymnal.

Siri Mitchell

#36. I don't care what problem you face; it has no power to defeat the cross of Christ.

Jay E. Adams

#37. Theology being the work of males, original sin was traced to the female.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#38. The heart is like a woman, and the head is like a man, and although man is the head of woman, woman is the heart of man, and she turns man's head because she turns his heart.

Peter Kreeft

#39. The connection between art and Christ is like the connection between sunlight and the sun. It is, in fact, the connection between Sonlight and the Son.

Peter Kreeft

#40. The speculative thinker makes Christianity into theology, instead of recognizing that a living relationship to Christ involves passion, struggle, decision, personal appropriation, and inner transformation.' (Moore's summary of Kierkegaard)

Charles E. Moore

#41. Jesus Christ, a Nazarene, lived in Nazareth.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#42. If you live in such a manner as to stand the test of the last judgment, you can depend upon it that the world will not speak well of you.

Alistair Begg

#43. To say on the authority of the Bible that God does a thing no honourable man would do, is to lie against God; to say that it is therefore right, is to lie against the very spirit of God.

George MacDonald

#44. 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

#45. Walking in close fellowship with God is a spiritual self.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#46. No man that ever lived, not John Calvin himself, ever asserted either original sin, or justification by faith, in more strong, more clear and express terms, than Arminius has done.

John Wesley

#47. Peruse all the sermons of Jesus and you will be sure to find parables, and sometimes allegory. What you will always find, however, is something of keeping our hearts in order.

Jerome Strong

#48. So when the ruling ideology enjoins us to enjoy sex, not to feel guilty about it, since we are not bound by any prohibitions whose violations should make us feel guilty, the price we pay for this absence of guilt is anxiety.

Slavoj Zizek

#49. A theology that cannot be sung is not worth having ... Authentic Christian faith is not merely believed. Nor is it merely acted upon. It is sung - with utter joy sometimes, in uncontrollable tears sometimes, but it is sung.

Reggie M. Kidd

#50. I consider Christianity to be one of the great disasters of the human race ... It would be impossible to imagine anything more un - Christianlike than theology.

Alfred North Whitehead

#51. How do you give something away with the knowledge that you will get it back in three days, and then claim it to be the 'Ultimate Sacrifice'?

Jake Jesser

#52. Thank God you have got a Father that can be angry, but that loves you as much when He is angry as when He smiles upon you.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

#53. We ought to know the Lord and fullness of His great grace.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#54. I fear that much of the Christianity that surrounds us assumes our task is to save appearances by protecting God from Job-like anguish. But if God is the God of Jesus Christ, then God does not need our protection. What God demands is not protection, but truth.

Stanley Hauerwas

#55. And the more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.

G.K. Chesterton

#56. Cosmopolitanism emphasizes and is grounded in a _singular relationality between and among people

Namsoon Kang

#57. We sinned for no reason but an incomprehensible lack of love, and He saved us for no reason but an incomprehensible excess of love.

Peter Kreeft

#58. When man is with God in awe and love, then he is praying.

Karl Rahner

#59. The spirit of Christ is the spirit of missions. The nearer we get to Him, the more intensely missionary we become.

Henry Martyn

#60. It would be unjust toward children to introduce them to Christian teaching and existence only as little pagans and catechumens, in order to leave it up to them to choose the Faith on their own responsibility at a point in time difficult to determine.

Hans Urs Von Balthasar

#61. Theological discourse can be, in and of itself, a form of identity and solidarity.

Namsoon Kang

#62. To be a child means to owe one's existence to another, and even in our adult life we never quite reach the point where we no longer have to give thanks for being the person we are.

Hans Urs Von Balthasar

#63. Church history has repeatedly and clearly proven one thing: Once the highest view of Scripture is abandoned by any theologian, group, denomination, or church, the downhill slide in both its theology and practice is inevitable.

James R. White

#64. Is any man skillful enough to have fashioned himself?

Augustine Of Hippo

#65. Its helpful to know the reasons for our faith ... it helps us not be so vulnerable to doubt, and it helps us not be so vulnerable to false doctrine.

Holly Ordway

#66. Historical theology has too often failed to interpret repentance as a positive creative force ... Essentially, if Christianity is to succeed in the next millennium, it must cease to be a negative religion and must become positive.

Robert H. Schuller

#67. Our true wisdom is to embrace with meek docility, and without reservation, whatever the holy scriptures have delivered.

John Calvin

#68. It is closer to the truth to say that God is crazy than that God is reasonable. I suspect God merely smiles when someone calls him crazy, but shakes His head and frowns when someone calls Him reasonable.

Peter Kreeft

#69. The Church does not dispense the sacrament of baptism in order to acquire for herself an increase in membership but in order to consecrate a human being to God and to communicate to that person the divine gift of birth from God.

Hans Urs Von Balthasar

#70. The most blessed result of prayer would be to rise thinking "But I never knew before. I never dreamed ... " I suppose it was at such a moment that Thomas Aquinas said of all his own theology, "It reminds me of straw.

C.S. Lewis

#71. The politics of trans-identity seeks to move from the _politics of singular identity_ to the _politics of multiple solidarities_ across various identities without abandoning one's personal attachments and commitments to the group that one finds significant.

Namsoon Kang

#72. No one book of scripture can be understood by itself, any more than any one part of a tree or member of the body can be understood without reference to the whole of which it is a part.

Charles Hodge

#73. At best we are but clay, animated dust; but viewed as sinners, we are monsters indeed. Let it be published in heaven as a miracle that the Lord Jesus should set His heart's love upon people like us.

Alistair Begg

#74. Every single Biblical doctrine of theology, directly or indirectly, ultimately has its basis in the book of Genesis.

Ken Ham

#75. The cosmopolitan gaze of planetary love and hospitality _is_ what constitutes being _religious_.

Namsoon Kang

#76. I believe the discussion itself is divine.

Rob Bell

#77. We no longer find out identity or value in having the right theology or being a part of the right denomination.

Brandan Roberston

#78. In any theological struggle, the first thousand years are always the bitterest.

Philip Jenkins

#79. When we reduce Christianity to a negative system where fasting becomes more sacred than feasting, law wins out over grace, and correct theology becomes more important than divine encounter, we in effect become the modern-day Pharisees - whose ministry Jesus was set against.

Debra Hirsch

#80. I believe _cosmopolitanism_ can be an effective discourse with which to advocate a politics of _transidentity_ of overlapping interests and heterogeneous or hybrid subjects in order to challenge conventional notions of exclusive belonging, identity and citizenship.

Namsoon Kang

#81. Like apes, we breed, sleep, and die. Yet like God we say, "I am." We are ontological oxymorons.

Peter Kreeft

#82. Just as the church needs members with different skills, our world must have various forms of labor, interdependent and thus valuable. A world full of ministers would be without churches, bread for the Lord's Supper, and printed Bibles to read.

R.C. Sproul Jr.

#83. Moreover God hath ordained man in this world, as it were, the very image of himself, to the intent, that he, as it were a god on earth, should provide for the wealth of all creatures.

Desiderius Erasmus

#84. What the Father gives is the capacity to be a self, freedom, and thus autonomy, but an autonomy which can be understood only as a surrender of self to the other.

Hans Urs Von Balthasar

#85. When I realize that God makes his gifts fit each person, there's no way I can covet what you got because it just wouldn't fit me.

William P. Smith

#86. Only the Christian religion, which in its essence is communicated by the eternal child of God, keeps alive in its believers the lifelong awareness of their being children, and therefore of having to ask and give thanks for things.

Hans Urs Von Balthasar

#87. The main things are the plain things, and the plain things are the main things.

Alistair Begg

#88. The question is not, therefore, _whether_ a theory is grand or small, or whether it is universal/global or particular/local, but _what function_ a theory plays and _whose interest_ it serves.

Namsoon Kang

#89. We aim for the practice of Christianity in their everyday life and dealings, and not merely the profession of its theology on Sundays.

Robert Baden-Powell

#90. In Christ, for the first time, we see that in God himself there exists
within his inseparable unity
the distinction between the Father who gives and the Gift which is given (the Son), but only in the unity of the Holy Spirit.

Hans Urs Von Balthasar

#91. Evil is powerful, but good is more powerful. In fact, evil is so powerful that only good has the power to overcome evil. Darkness can be driven away only by light.

Jay E. Adams

#92. You contribute nothing to your salvation except the sin that made it necessary.

Jonathan Edwards

#93. Christianity tells us we have free will. God has provided man with a choice whether to believe in Him or not. If God's existence were logically inescapable, there would be no free will to choose whether or not to believe in Him.

Stephen McAndrew

#94. I haven't even read everything I wrote.

Karl Barth

#95. God did create a world without sin. We just screwed it up.

Wesley Miller

#96. God gives us not only the truth but also the ability to believe it; not only the new thing to see but also the new eye to see it with.

Peter Kreeft

#97. Christianity ... that musty old theology, which already has its grave clothes on, and is about to be buried ... A wall of Bible, brimstone, church and corruption has hitherto hemmed women into nothingness.

Lucy Stone

#98. We can have a friendly and intimate relationship with God.

Stefan Emunds

#99. Prayer is an acknowledgment that our need of God's help is not partial but total.

Alistair Begg

#100. Religion is about hospitality, solidarity, and responsibility or it is nothing at all.

Namsoon Kang