Quotes about Dogma

What's up is faith what's down is heresy.

There is not one redeeming feature in our superstition of Christianity. It has made one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.

Creeds have been the bane of the Christian church ... made of Christendom a slaughter-house.

A man is accepted into church for what he believes--and turned out for what he knows.

Faith must trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding.

here where we are concerned not with the dogma of Scripture and the Corycian cavern only, but in very truth with the awful secrets of the Divine Majesty (namely, why he works in the way we have said), here you smash bolts and bars and rush in all but blaspheming, as indignant as possible with God because you are not allowed to see the meaning and purpose of such a judgment of his.

Nothing is more familiar or characteristic among Christians than assertion. Take away assertions, and you take away Christianity.

Like the Hindu in Belfast who was asked whether he was a Catholic Hindu or a Protestant Hindu, those of us who follow this fresh reading of the New Testament want to say to our critics right and left, 'Don't imagine that because we don't check all your fundamentalist boxes, we must be modernists, or that because we don't check all your modernist boxes, we must be fundamentalists.

It is an interesting observation on today's religious climate that many people now get every bit as steamed up about insisting that 'all religions are just the same' as the older dogmaticians did about insisting on particular formulations and interpretations. The dogma that all dogmas are wrong, the monolithic insistence that all monolithic systems are to be rejected, has taken hold of the popular imagination at a level far beyond rational or logical discourse.

Faith involves believing that certain things are true, of course. But (here's another caricature we have to put firmly to bed) this isn't about odd, detached dogmas. It's about certain things in the light of which everything else at last comes into focus.

As Schaeffer once wrote, there is nothing uglier than theological orthodoxy without understanding or compassion.

One who claims to be a skeptic of one set of beliefs is actually a true believer in another set of beliefs.