Doctrinal Quotes

#1. Unlike the first two Critiques, which ground the doctrinal metaphysical systems of natural science and morals, the Critique of Judgment has no specific metaphysical application. It deals with the harmony of the cognitive faculties and examines the conditions for the systematization of all knowledge.

Anonymous

#2. I argue against literal interpretation of religious doctrines. Religions make progress when they emancipate themselves from literalism, and take their doctrinal statements to be metaphors or allegories.

Philip Kitcher

#3. In ancient times the ritual, mythological and doctrinal aspects of spiritual space were predominant.

Tom Turner

#4. Almost all doctrinal error is really truth perverted. Truth wrongly divided. Truth disproportionately held and taught.

Arthur W. Pink

#5. I am highly variable in my devotion. From a doctrinal point of view or a dogmatic point of view or a strictly Catholic adherent point of view, I'm first to say that I talk a good game, but I don't know how good I am about it in practice.

Stephen Colbert

#6. Jesus prescribes a doctrinal test for false prophets because a behavioral test is unreliable.

John Robbins

#7. For it is in this way that our adversaries, the bishops and the pope, talk with us in our day, while they pretend a desire for concord, and seek to bring about doctrinal harmony.

Martin Luther

#8. He that has doctrinal knowledge and speculation only, without affection, never is engaged in the business of religion.

Jonathan Edwards

#9. Children are free moral agents and have a right to be exposed to a range of beliefs well beyond the rigid doctrinal confines of their parent's faith, and we have an obligation to insist that they be so exposed, at least in public schools, if not elsewhere.

Tim Wise

#10. Its best, the church administers the sacraments by feeding, healing, forgiving, comforting, and welcoming home the people God loves. At its worst, the church withholds the sacraments in an attempt to lock God in a theology, a list of rules, a doctrinal statement, a building. But our

Rachel Held Evans

#11. The scriptures offer us so many doctrinal diamonds. And when the light of the Spirit plays upon their several facets, they sparkle with celestial sense and illuminate the path we are to follow.

Neal A. Maxwell

#12. To be like God is not to have perfect doctrinal integrity, to get the details of church "right," or to be religiously and moralistically pure. To be like God is to dirty our hands with the labor of love.

Ronnie McBrayer

#13. I have known some people of very modern views driven by their distress to the use of theological terms to which they attached no doctrinal significance, merely because a drawer was jammed tight and they could not pull it out.

G.K. Chesterton

#14. It takes practice to use one's eyes, even when God has opened them. And there are some believers who never get beyond confounding a doctrinal statement of a truth with a living exemplification of that truth.

Henry Clay Trumbull

#15. When "doctrinal integrity" (a term usually defined by those using it) trumps kindness and grace, faith has wandered out of bounds. Anything claiming to be truth that does not lead to compassion for our neighbors cannot rightfully be called the truth.

Ronnie McBrayer

#16. 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

#17. In the John Paul II days, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had the advantage of staying in his cupboard - the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith - exchanging views only with the Pope, and speaking publicly only through carefully written missives on doctrinal issues.

Carl Bernstein

#18. Scripture is our norming norm and tradition is our normed norm and that in a doctrinal controversy Scripture alone has absolute veto power while The Great Tradition (orthodox doctrine) has a vote but not a veto.

Roger E. Olson

#19. Part of the doctrinal system in the United States is the pretense that we're all a happy family, there are no class divisions, and everybody is working together in harmony. But that's radically false.

Noam Chomsky

#20. When people are uncertain about what is right and what is wrong, and anxious about being considered old-fashioned, it seems to be worse than folly that Christians are still arguing about doctrinal matters which can only bring needless distress to a number of people.

Prince Charles

#21. Mahayana Buddhism: The Doctrinal Foundations, second

J. Walsh

#22. Doctrinal preaching certainly bores the hypocrites; but it is only doctrinal preaching that will save Christ's sheep.

J.I. Packer

#23. Christian action in the world will not be sustained or carried on in an intelligent and effective manner unless it is supported by doctrinal convictions that have achieved some degree of clarity.

John Macquarrie

#24. Anger at queries about our beliefs is the body's warning signal: here lies unexamined and probably dangerous doctrinal baggage.

Carl Sagan

#25. I think it rather pathetic that so many people are looking forward to heaven to prove that their doctrinal position was correct.

Chuck Smith

#26. Sadly, the doctrinal ignorance in the pulpits of today is being replicated in the doctrinal ignorance and indifference of the pews, and the people are not even seeing the picture, much less getting it.

Albert Mohler

#27. Any denomination or church group that forsakes inerrancy will end up shipwrecked. It is impossible to prevent the surrender of other important doctrinal teachings of the Word of God when inerrancy is gone.

Francis Schaeffer

#28. There is one sure criterion of judgment as to religious faith in doctrinal matters; can you reduce it to practice? If not, have none of it.

Hosea Ballou

#29. You cannot be a conscious Christian without St. Paul. He translated the teachings of Christ into a doctrinal structure that, even with the additions of a vast number of thinkers, theologians and pastors, has resisted and still exists after two thousand years.

Pope Francis

#30. We are justified through faith in Christ, not through doctrinal precision.

Michael S. Horton

#31. It is striking that even some who clearly have solid doctrinal and spiritual convictions frequently fall into a lifestyle which leads to an attachment to financial security, or to a desire for power or human glory at all cost, rather than giving their lives to others in mission.

Pope Francis

#32. Without the new birth, all the doctrinal and liturgical work in the world is just the reorganization of dead materials, instead of what it is described in the Bible as being, which is the organization and discipleship of living materials.

Douglas Wilson

#33. Doctrinal rightness and rightness of ecclesiastical position are important, but only as a starting point to go on into a living relationship - and not as ends in themselves.

Francis Schaeffer

#34. War is to man what maternity is to a woman. From a philosophical and doctrinal viewpoint, I do not believe in perpetual peace.

Benito Mussolini

#35. Small aberrations in doctrinal teaching can lead to large and evil falsehoods.

Gordon B. Hinckley

#36. The collapse in evangelical doctrinal consensus is intimately related to the collapse in the understanding of, and role assigned to, Scripture as God's Word spoken within the church. p. 98

Carl R. Trueman

#37. Without the emotion and willingness of Spirit, our music becomes dry and dusty - without life. Without doctrinal bones as a skeleton, the Body is not enfleshed in a healthy way.

Marva Dawn

#38. Religion is not 'doctrinal knowledge,' but wisdom born of personal experience.

Martin Luther

#39. Youth in our Sunday school class can repeat almost verbatim some obscure parable we dramatized last year, and yet they forget the core doctrinal statement we taught last week. Why is this? Why does story stick with us for so long?

Sarah Arthur

#40. In 1788 Dr. Rush had told the clergy that, whatever their doctrinal differences, "you are all united in inculcating the necessity of morals," and "from the success or failure of your exertions in the cause of virtue, we anticipate the freedom or slavery of our country.

Gordon S. Wood

#41. The Protestant Reformation did not merely seek to cleanse the church and deliver it from doctrinal errors, but it also sought the restoration of the whole of life.

Henry R. Van Til

#42. A concern for doctrinal purity should always be based on love of the Lord, not a desire to express spiritual pride.

Max Anders

#43. Nothing remains intact without effort. Repetition of formulas does not assure the transmission of thought. It is not safe to entrust a doctrinal treasure to the passivity of memory. Intelligence must play a part in its conservation, rediscovering it, so to speak, in the process.

Henri De Lubac

#44. Don't turn your back upon your doctrinal doubts and difficulties. Go up to them and examine them. Perhaps the ghastly object which looks to you in the twilight like a sheeted ghost may prove to be no more than a table-cloth hanging upon a hedge.

Andrew Kennedy Hutchison Boyd

#45. Those who today always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal 'security,' those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists - they have a static and inward-directed view of things. In this way, faith becomes an ideology among other ideologies.

Pope Francis

#46. I do not believe that any two men, on what are called doctrinal points, think alike who think at all. It is only those who have not thought that appear to agree.

Thomas Paine

#47. This is one of the reasons that the organized religions do not inspire me with confidence. Which leaders of the major faiths acknowledge that their beliefs might be incomplete or erroneous and establish institutes to uncover possible doctrinal deficiencies?

Carl Sagan

#48. If the doctrine of a church is that people outside of Christ will face an eternity in hell, yet the culture is one that does not celebrate conversions or evangelistic witness, the culture of the church will contradict its doctrinal stance by continually focusing inward instead of outward.

Matt Chandler

#49. On the other side, Church spokesmen could scarcely become enthusiastic about Planck's deism, which omitted all reference to established religions and had no more doctrinal content than Einstein's Judaism.

J.L. Heilbron

#50. Does anyone really think that America today is lacking preachers, books, Bible translations, and neat doctrinal statements? What we really lack is the passion to call upon the Lord until he opens the heavens and shows himself powerful.

Jim Cymbala

#51. ... the doctrinal differences between Hinduism and Buddhism and Taoism are not anywhere near as important as doctrinal differences among Christianity and Islam and Judaism. Holy wars are not fought over them because verbalized statements about reality are never presumed to be reality itself.

Robert M. Pirsig

#52. One of my former teachers repeatedly reminded us that an imbalance in theology was the same as doctrinal insanity.

Charles C. Ryrie

#53. We're so worried about the legal details of crossing doctrinal t's and dotting sociopolitical i's that we miss the big picture. The love picture. The one thing Jesus was really clear about: LOVE. If we could just get that one thing down, I believe the details would take care of themselves.

Cathleen Falsani

#54. The claim of the Zen followers that they are transmitting the essence of Buddhism is based on their belief that Zen takes hold of the enlivening spirit of the Buddha, stripped of all its historical and doctrinal garments.

D.T. Suzuki

#55. The whole of the Targum deserves study as shewing how textual ambiguity or corruption may combine with doctrinal prepossession to modify tradition;
Chapter II, Section 2, Paragraph 1171

Edwin A. Abbott

#56. In other days people chose a church on the basis of their doctrinal convictions. Now, lacking doctrinal convictions, they choose for social reasons.

Vance Havner

#57. I condemn polygamy, yes, as a practice, because I think it is not doctrinal. It is not legal. And this church takes the position that we will abide by the law.

Gordon B. Hinckley

#58. All revolutions are doctrinal - such as the French one, or the one that introduced Christianity. For it stands to common sense that you cannot upset all existing things, customs, and compromises, unless you believe in something outside them, something positive and divine.

G.K. Chesterton