Quotes about Concepts

Any idea, plan, or purpose may be placed in the mind through repetition of thought.

so many theological terms, words like 'monotheism' are late constructs, convenient shorthands for sentences with verbs in them, and that sentences with verbs in them are the real stuff of theology

The most shameful and embarrassing chapters in church history were not the result of anything Jesus or the apostle Paul taught. Our most embarrassing, indefensible moments resulted from Christians leveraging the old covenant concepts.

Any ideas, plan, or purpose may be placed in the mind through repetition of thought.

Religion idolizes concepts and avoids personal experience.

Religion idolizes concepts and avoids personal experience.

What is dangerous is not ideas but the academic mind that abstracts both things and people from particular relationships into concepts. And what is dangerous is not programs but the programmatic mind that routinely sets aside the personal in order to more efficiently achieve an impersonal cause.

Since (1) charity is supernatural, and comes only from the real presence of God in the soul (St. Thomas' paragraph 3), and since (2) all men, and not only Christians, are capable of charity (as has been proved in the paragraph above), it follows that (3) all men are capable of accepting the real presence of God in their souls, even if they have defective or mistaken concepts of God.

We must learn how to handle words effectively; but at the same time we must preserve and, if necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world directly and not through that half opaque medium of concepts, which distorts every given fact into the all too familiar likeness of some generic label or explanatory abstraction.

Concepts create idols; only wonder understands anything.

Teaching the Bible involves far more than simply giving out information about the Bible. Bible teaching is ministering to people, liberating them from their inadequate concepts of God, expanding their notion of what it means to live faithfully before God, helping them cast aside old self-defeating habits and replace them with habits of holiness.

Words are but the signs of ideas.