Talk:Theology/Quotes

Quotations

• Theology is "faith seeking understanding (fides quaerens intellectum)." - Anselm of Canterbury
• "We can no more have exact religious thinking without theology, than exact mensuration and astronomy without mathematics, or exact iron-making without chemistry." - John Hall
• "An authentic theology will not allow man to be obsessed with himself." - Thomas F. Torrance in Reality and Scientific Theology
• "Theology announces not just what the Bible says but what it means." - J. Kenneth Grider in A Wesleyan-Holiness Theology (Kansas City: Beacon Hill, 1994), p. 19.
• "I have no use for cranks who despise music, because it is a gift of God. Music drives away the Devil and makes people gay; they forget thereby all wrath, unchastity, arrogance, and the like. Next after theology, I give to music the highest place and the greatest honor." — Martin Luther, quoted in Martin Marty, Martin Luther, 2004, p. 114.
• "Whatever a theologian regards as true must be false: there you have almost a criterion of truth. His profound instinct of self-preservation stands against truth ever coming into honour in any way, or even getting stated. Wherever the influence of theologians is felt there is a transvaluation of values, and the concepts "true" and "false" are forced to change places: whatever is most damaging to life is there called "true," and whatever exalts it, intensifies it, approves it, justifies it and makes it triumphant is there called "false." - Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist
• "Theology is a science of mind applied to God" - Henry Ward Beecher
• "The study of theology, as it stands in the Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds by no authority; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing; and it admits of no conclusion." - Thomas Paine , The Age of Reason
• "A theology mediates between a cultural matrix and the significance and role of a religion in that matrix." - Bernard Lonergan Method in Theology

Theology is as systematic and disciplined a study as geology or psychology. It is based on the observed facts of religious experience through the centuries. It has been worked out by some of the keenest minds that ever functioned. (One does not condescend to Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, or Reinhold Niebuhr.) On the intellectual level it can hold its own with any other mental discipline.

Theology also happens to be the most practical of all studies. [ Composition ] is useful for the person who wants to be a professional writer or prepare club reports; [Farm Management] is intended for the future farm manager. But theology is useful for everybody. It deals with problems that are life-and-death matters for everyone, every day. You can put it to work all the time, not just keep it on the reference shelf for special occasions.

To deny a student access to so essential a tool of thought and everyday living is as great a crime against him as to remove one lobe of his brain.

— Chad Walsh, Campus Gods on Trial, The Macmillan Company, 1957, page xiii

Modern man knows a great deal about the nature of the atom. But he knows almost nothing about the nature of God, almost never thinks about it, and is complacently unaware that there may be any reason to. Theology, the intellectual system whereby man sorts out his thoughts about faith and grace, enjoys much less popular appeal than astrology. With its "devolutionary theopantism" * and "axiological eschatology,"* theology is jaw-breakingly abstract. And its mood is widely felt to be about as bracing as an unaired vestry.

— "Faith for a Lenten Age" Time Magazine Cover Story (Monday, Mar. 08, 1948)