Quotes about Theology

The existence of a prime mover- nothing can move itself; there must be a first mover. The first mover is called God.

To say that evil is a privation is not the same as saying that it is a mere absence or negation of good. The power of sight is found neither in a blind man nor in a rock. But it is a privation for the blind man, whereas it is a mere absence in the rock.

Surely, no one who believes in an all-good God, who wants all to do good, could consistently claim that God gave Lucifer the desire to rebel against Him. Perish the thought!

Yes, God is the author of everything, including evil, in the sense that He permits it, but not in the sense that He produces it. Evil happens in His permissive will, but He does not promote evil in His perfect will.

God can intervene in the universe he created despite what David Hume says.

Life is a mess. And theology must be lived out in the midst of that mess.

He was transfused throughout our nature, in order that our nature might by this transfusion of the Divine become itself divine, rescued as it was from death, and put beyond the reach of the caprice of the antagonist.

I do think that it is impossible to do Christian theology with integrity in America without asking the question, What has the gospel to do with the black struggle for liberation?

Luke's Gospel was clear: Jesus's ministry was essentially liberation on behalf of the poor and the oppressed. I didn't need a doctorate in theology to know that liberation defined the heart of Jesus's ministry. Black people had been preaching and singing about it for centuries.

Christian theology is for the liberation of all humanity, and it could never be neutral in the fight against oppression. That much I knew. And that was how A Black Theology of Liberation was born: with the spirit of Martin and Malcolm, Jimmy, and the black poets of the 1960s.

in 1969, I still regard Jesus Christ today as the chief focus of my perspective on God but not to the exclusion of other religious perspectives. God's reality is not bound by one manifestation of the divine in Jesus but can be found wherever people are being empowered to fight for freedom. Life-giving power for the poor and the oppressed is the primary criterion that we must use to judge the adequacy of our theology, not abstract concepts.

Whether theologians acknowledge it or not, all theologies begin with experience... We are all particular human beings, finite creatures, and we create our understanding of God out of our experience. Hopefully, our own experience points to the universal, but it is never identical with it. For when we mistake our own talk about God with ultimate reality, we turn it into ideology.