Quotes about Theology

Theology is not superior to the Gospel. It exists to aid the preaching of salvation. Its business is to make the essential facts and principles of Christianity so simple and clear, so adequate and mighty, that all who preach or teach the Gospel, both ministers and laymen, can draw on its stores and deliver a complete and unclouded Christian message.

It is plain that complete havoc must be made of the whole system of revealed truth, unless we consent to derive our philosophy from the Bible, instead of explaining the Bible by our philosophy.

Fourth, Such is evidently the will of God. He does not teach men astronomy or chemistry, but He gives them the facts out of which those sciences are constructed. Neither does He teach us systematic theology, but He gives us in the Bible the truths which, properly understood and arranged, constitute the science of theology. As the facts of nature are all related and determined by physical laws, so the facts of the Bible are all related and determined by the nature of God and of his creatures.

If the facts of Scripture are what Augustinians believe them to be, then the Augustinian system is the only possible system of theology. If those facts be what Romanists or Remonstrants take them to be, then their system is the only true one. It is important that the theologian should know his place. He is not master of the situation. He can no more construct a system of theology to suit his fancy, than the astronomer can adjust the mechanism of the heavens according to his own good pleasure.

Theology, therefore, is the exhibition of the facts of Scripture in their proper order and relation, with the principles or general truths involved in the facts themselves, and which pervade and harmonize the whole.

There is in every department of investigation great liability to error. Almost all false theories in science and false doctrines in theology are due in a great degree to mistakes as to matters of fact.

The modesty that theology needs is the recognition that we cannot rationally comprehend God.

The primary task of theology (and let's forget here about the distinction between biblical and dogmatic theology) is not to explain the historical meaning of the text but to use the Scriptures as a means of grace in drawing the reader to Jesus Christ.

It is the proper function of the theologian to go back and forth, like the angels on Jacob's ladder, between heaven and earth and to weave continually new connections between them.

The theme, then, that will be with us throughout this study is the reciprocal relationship of God's transcendence and God's immanence;

Theology, for Maximus, is Cosmic Liturgy.

Maximus, along with the tradition reaching from Philo to Gregory of Nyssa, says we can only know God's existence—know that he is—not his essence, or what he is.