Quotes about Theology

Absolute sovereignty is what I love to ascribe to God. But my first conviction was not so.

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

Arminian notion of Liberty of the Will, consisting in the will's Self-determination, is repugnant to itself, and shuts itself wholly out of the world.

The gods can either take away evil from the world and will not, or, being willing to do so cannot; or they neither can nor will, or lastly, they are able and willing. If they have the will to remove evil and cannot, then they are not omnipotent. If they can but will not, then they are not benevolent. If they are neither able nor willing, they are neither omnipotent nor benevolent. Lastly, if they are both able and willing to annihilate evil, why does it exist?

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.

Little did these theologically ignorant Nazis know that the man with whom they were dealing had worked out a theological defense of deception against the likes of them. In some ways he was their worst nightmare. He was not a "worldly" or "compromised" pastor, but a pastor whose very devotion to God depended on his deceiving the evil powers ranged against him. He was serving God by taking them all for a long ride.

philosophy was man's search for truth apart from God. It was a type of Barth's "religion," in which man himself tried to reach heaven or truth or God. But theology begins and ends with faith in Christ, who reveals himself to man; apart from such revelation, there could be no such thing as truth.

The questions that are seriously put to us today by young theologians are: How do I learn to pray? How do I learn to read the Bible? If we cannot help them there we cannot help them at all.

Bonhoeffer's interest was not only in teaching them as a university lecturer. He wished to "disciple" them in the true life of the Christian. This ran the gamut, from understanding current events through a biblical lens to reading the Bible not just as a theology student but as a disciple of Jesus Christ.

In his famous Letters and Papers from Prison, the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote: how wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don't know.

The events of the past year had drawn him out into lonelier and more dangerous theological territory, but there was a newfound freedom and a faith that bloomed in this situation. He knew that God was with him in a way he couldn't have known before, so his fear of Rome, if ever any had existed, had vanished.

if we appeal to Mary and the other saints before we appeal to Jesus himself, are we not effectively denying the Incarnation itself?