Quotes about Doctrine

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

There has never been a philosophy, a theory or a doctrine that attacked (or "limited") reason, which did not also preach submission to the power of some authority.

Before I can preach love, mercy, and grace, I must preach sin, Law, and judgment. Preach 90% Law and 10% grace.

Three things are necessary for the salvation of man: to know what he ought to believe; to know what he ought to desire; and to know what he ought to do.

Hence was the different effect that Christ's miracles had to convince the disciples from what they had to convince the Scribes and Pharisees. Not that they had a stronger reason, or had their reason more improved; but their reason was sanctified, and those blinding prejudices, that the Scribes and Pharisees were under, were removed by the sense they had of the excellency of Christ and his doctrine. 2.

This light, and this only, has its fruit in an universal holiness of life. No merely notional or speculative understanding of the doctrines of religion will ever bring to this. But this light, as it reaches the bottom of the heart, and changes the nature, so it will effectually dispose to an universal obedience.

There seems to be the utmost danger, that the younger generation will be carried away with Arminianism as with a flood.

They (theological liberals) seemed to know what the answer was supposed to be and weren't much concerned with how to get there. They knew only that whatever answers the Fundamentalists came up with must be wrong.

The entire education of the younger generation of theologians belongs today in church cloister-like schools, in which pure doctrine, the Sermon on the Mount and worship are taken seriously—as they never are (and in present circumstances couldn't be) at the university.

Thus," he said, "the Christian message is basically amoral and irreligious, paradoxical as that may sound".

Bonhoeffer was not interested in intellectual abstraction. Theology must lead to the practical aspects of how to live as a Christian.

What he had to say was really rather elementary: basic Christianity such as was professed in the Bible and in the doctrines of the Church of England, and to which almost everyone claimed to subscribe, was practically nonexistent in British society.