theology quotes

Since God created the world, He also created reality.

Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.

Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.

Christ managed to boil down an awful lot of commandments to a few very simple rules for living. It’s when you go backwards through the ‚begats‘ and the Garden of Eden, and you start thinking, ‚Hang on, that’s a big punishment for eating one lousy apple… There’s a human-rights issue.‘

It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods.

Sincere Christians can disagree about the details of Scripture and theology – absolutely.

Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived.

The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.

I tell you the solemn truth, that the doctrine of the Trinity is not so difficult to accept for a working proposition as any one of the axioms of physics.

It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that he should not exist.

It’s always interesting about God because it’s like all of the religions in the world say that they pray to the same God, and yet they ask that same one God to divide itself up and agree with this one and fight against that one.

Religion is not going to come up with any new arguments.

Is man one of God’s blunders? Or is God one of man’s blunders?

The Old Testament God is a person with body parts and passions. The Church of England God has neither body, parts nor passions, and is therefore not a person.

I don’t claim to be knowledgeable about theology. Most of my knowledge comes out of my experience and the lessons in the Bible. Every Sunday I’m home I teach 45 minutes and we boiled them down to one page for the new book, ‚Through the Year with Jimmy Carter.‘

All religions have been made by men.

There is in general good reason to suppose that in several respects the gods could all benefit from instruction by us human beings. We humans are – more humane.

In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.

You hear a lot about God these days: God, the beneficent; God, the all-great; God, the Almighty; God, the most powerful; God, the giver of life; God, the creator of death. I mean, we’re hearing about God all the time, so we better learn how to deal with it. But if we know anything about God, God is arbitrary.

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.

What was God doing before the divine creation?

Satan, the leader or dictator of devils, is the opposite, not of God, but of Michael.

There are many levels of Christianity. There are many notions about God. To believe that God is a person is just one of the notions of God that you can find in Christianity. So, we should not say that there is one Christianity. There are many Christianities.

The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioned our characters in the wrong way.

Theology is unnecessary.

A God without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but fate and nature.

There is no uncreated being except God. God has no opposite.

I believe that nothing happens apart from divine determination and decree. We shall never be able to escape from the doctrine of divine predestination – the doctrine that God has foreordained certain people unto eternal life.

It is impossible to reason without arriving at a Supreme Being.

But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.

I do not believe in the God of theology who rewards good and punishes evil.

God is the name people give to the reason we are here. But I think that reason is the laws of physics rather than someone with whom one can have a personal relationship. An impersonal God.

If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated.

There is no conflict between the ideal of religion and the ideal of science, but science is opposed to theological dogmas because science is founded on fact. To me, the universe is simply a great machine which never came into being and never will end. The human being is no exception to the natural order. Man, like the universe, is a machine.

Surely God would not have created such a being as man, with an ability to grasp the infinite, to exist only for a day! No, no, man was made for immortality.