Top 100 Theologian Quotes
#1. What is your theologian's ecstasy but Mahomet's houri in the dark?
H.G.Wells
#2. Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?
[Lutheran theologian Abraham Calovius illustrating his objection to heliocentrism due to the Bible's support of geocentrism]
Abraham Calovius
#3. As Aquinas, the quintessential theologian, says: "The notion of form is most fully realized in existence itself. And in God existence is not acquired by anything, but God is existence itself subsistent. It is clear, then, that God himself is both limitless and perfect."28
Rudy Rucker
#4. Whatever a theologian regards as true must be false: there you have almost a criterion of truth.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#6. 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
#7. A Theologian has nothing on a man who has experienced God
Paul Washer
#8. One becomes a theologian by living, by dying, and by being damned, not by understanding, reading, and speculation.
Martin Luther
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. No one can become and remain a theologian unless he is compelled again and again to be astonished at himself.
Karl Barth
#15. An educated theologian: someone who's better at rationalizing what they're pretending to know.
Peter Boghossian
#16. Theologian Stephen Crites says sacred stories are like dwelling places - like booths or tabernacles. We don't tell these stories as much as we inhabit them.
Sarah Arthur
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. Being a systematic theologian allows me to indulge all my interests - in literature, film, art, music - by relating them all to God.
Kevin Vanhoozer
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. Any theologian understands martyrdom, but only the martyr experiences the fire.
Robertson Davies
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. The task of the theologian is to explain everything through God, and to explain God as unexplainable.
Karl Rahner
#31. The great Christian theologian Rudolf Bultmann liked to say that the quest for the historical Jesus is ultimately an internal quest. Scholars tend to see the Jesus they want to see. Too often they see themselves - their own reflection - in the image of Jesus they have constructed.
Reza Aslan
#32. 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
#33. Not everyone can be a theologian, but everyone should know some theology.
Carl E. Olson
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. Where the theologian is forced to rescue an incompetent spirit who has, for one imaginative reason or another, lost total control of his creation, the gospel of the malevolent hand stands unchaste, uncontaminated, and inviolable.
John Zande
#37. After chiding the theologian for his reliance on myth and miracle, science found itself in the unenviable position of having to create mythology of its own: namely, the assumption that what, after long effort, could not be proved to take place today had, in truth, taken place in the primeval past.
Loren Eiseley
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. Over the years, I've realized that I have as much in common with the performance artist, the standup comedian, the screenwriter, as I do with the theologian. I'm in an odd world where I make things and share them with people.
Rob Bell
#43. The Holy Apostle John the Theologian says that the commandments of God are not difficult, but easy (I John, 5:3). But they are only easy because of love, while they are all difficult if there is no love.
Silouan The Athonite
#44. 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
#45. I cannot be the only reader who has wondered why God, having given him [St. Paul] so many gifts, withheld from him (what would seem so necessary for the first Christian theologian) that of lucidity and orderly exposition.
C.S. Lewis
#46. There seems to be a human instinct for prayer. Swiss theologian Karl Barth calls it our 'incurable God-sickness.'
Timothy Keller
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. The devil is a better theologian than any of us and is a devil still.
Aiden Wilson Tozer
#51. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. Bentham was an atheist and in no sense of the word could he be described as a theologian.
James E. Crimmins
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. And he wanted more than anything else, deeply and compassionately, to be of help; and he could be of help in this age, and was of help, because artist and philosopher as well as theologian, he cared for culture as well as for Christ.6
Paul Tillich
#61. 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
#62. Is no love which does not become help, taught the theologian Paul Tillich.)
Elizabeth Gilbert
#63. King thought he understood the white Southerner, having been born and reared in Georgia and trained a theologian.
Constance Baker Motley
#64. 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
#65. Pala is probably the only country in which an animal theologian would have no reason for believing in devils. For animals everywhere else, Satan, quite obviously, is Homo sapiens." They
Aldous Huxley
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. The theologian remembers for the sake of hope.
Craig Keen
#70. Probably no theologian in English language has ever rivaled Owen stressing the absolute centrality of Christ's penal substitution and therefore his as Priest ... For that reason alone The Priesthood of Christ is worth all the time it takes to read it with humility, care, and reflection.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#71. To a thrifty theologian, bent on redemption with economy, there are few points of ethics too fine-spun for splitting.
Ellen Glasgow
#73. A theologian is born by living, nay dying and being damned, not by thinking, reading, or speculating.
Martin Luther
#74. 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
#75. At Vatican Council II, one dissenting Roman Catholic theologian declared: "Yes, the Bible says "Be fruitful and multiply," but that was when the population was two per square world.
Israel Shenker
#76. The theologian who labours without joy is not a theologian at all.
Karl Barth
#77. 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
#78. On what does the Christian argument for Immortality really rest? It stands upon the pedestal on which the theologian rests the whole of historical Christianity-the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
William Henry Drummond
#79. 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
#80. The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.
George Santayana
#81. The beauty of science and the nature of scientific revelations constitute part of the modern theologian's perspective and toolbox.
Joseph Silk
#82. Miracles do not happen in contradiction to nature, but only in contradiction to what is known in nature. - St. AUGUSTINE, LATIN PHILOSOPHER AND THEOLOGIAN
Pam Grout
#84. 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
#85. over the centuries Dante has been variously "constructed" - as lover, statesman, neo-Platonist, proto-Protestant, Romantic visionary, Byronic hero, Pre-Raphaelite, father of his country, theologian in verse, precursor of the modern novel, and, finally, altissimo poeta, the consummate poet.
Peter S. Hawkins
#86. 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
#87. I am not a theologian or a philosopher. I am a story teller.
William Golding
#88. The philosopher is not an apologist; apologetic concern, as Karl Barth (the one living theologian of unquestionable genius) has rightly insisted, is the death of serious theologizing, and I would add, equally of serious work in the philosophy of religion.
Donald M. MacKinnon
#89. 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
#90. The fourth-century Greek theologian St. John Chrysostom said that Job's greatest trial was that his wife was not taken. (pg. 125)
Ellen F. Davis
#91. One is sometimes glad not to be a great theologian; one might easily mistake it for being a good Christian.
C.S. Lewis
#92. 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
#93. The theologian considers sin mainly as an offence against God; the moral philosopher as contrary to reasonableness.
Thomas Aquinas
#94. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
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