All Quotes By Tag: Theology

“Space is cold and stiff, but Time is alive. Space divides, but Time brings everything to everything else. It does not course outside of you and you do not swim upon it like a drifting log. Time flows through you: you yourself are in flow. You are the river. Are you grieving? Trust Time: soon you will be laughing. Are you laughing? You cannot hold fast your laughing, for soon you will be weeping. You are blown from mood to mood, from one state to another, from waking to sleeping and from sleeping again to waking. You cannot go on wandering for long. You come to a halt, you are tired, you are hungry, you must sit down, you eat, you stand again, you begin anew to wander. You suffer: from the distance unattainable, you glimpse the Deed which you long. But the stream is constantly moving you and one morning the hour of action has arrived. You are a child, and never (so you think) will you escape the helplessness of childhood, which locks you into four windowless walls. But look: your wall itself movable and yielding, and your whole being becomes re-fashioned into a youth. From within yourself there rise hidden springs that leap up to yourself. Posibilities open up before you like flowers, and one day the world has grown all around you. Softly, Time transports you from one curve to another. New vistas and horizons unfold at your side as you pass by. You begin to love the change: you’ve discovered an extraordinary adventure is afoot. You sense a direction, you feel a new impulse, you can smell the sea. And you see that what changes in you changes also in everything around you. Every point you hurriedly pass by is itself in movement. Every point is being whirled in some direction: its own long history is following its course: but each point knows the ending of its history no more than you know that of yours. You glance up to heaven, Sublime is the rotation of its suns, but these are each heavily laden with their planetary systems as with grapes, and they dash away from one another into already-prepared distances and unfathomable spaces. You smash atoms and they swarm about in more confusion that if you had stamped your foot on an anthill. You seek a mainstay and a temperament law in the temperate mid-region of our earth, but here, too, there is nothing but constant event changing history, and no one can forecast for you even next week’s clouds.”

“Fuel for religious violence comes from the creeds of the religious organizations that fundamentally depict that there is only one absolute and undeniable truth, and all others even mildly different truths are expendable.”

“To be preoccupied with getting theological knowledge as an end to itself, to approach Bible study with no higher motive than a desire to know all the answers, is the direct route to a state of self-satisfied deception.”

“The medieval European, who shared the fundamental assumptions of his Muslim contemporary, would have agreed with him in ascribing religious movements to religious causes, and would have sought no further for an explanation. But when Europeans ceased to accord first place to religion in their thoughts, sentiments, interests, and loyalties, they also ceased to admit that other men, in other times and places, could have done so. To a rationalistic and materialistic generation, it was inconceivable that such great debates and mighty conflicts could have involved no more than ‘merely’ religious issues. And so historians, once they had passed the stage of amused contempt, devised a series of explanations, setting forth for what they described as the ‘real’ or ‘ultimate’ significance ‘underlying’ religious movements and differences. The clashes and squabbles of the early churches, the great Schism, the Reformation, all were reinterpreted in terms of motives and interests reasonable by the standards of the day—and for religious movements of Islam too explanations were found that tallied with the outlook and interests of the finders.”

“We forgot that there are some things that we cannot get hold of with our minds. The mind is good — God put it there. He gave us our heads, and it was not His intention that our heads would function just as a place to hang a hat. He gave us our heads, and He put brains in our heads, and that faculty we call the intellect has its own work to do. But that work is not the apprehending of divine things — that is of the Holy Spirit. Let me remind you now that modern orthodoxy has make a great blunder in the erroneous assumption that spiritual truth can be intellectually perceived. There have been far-reaching conditions resulting from this concept — and they are showing in our preaching, our praying, our singing, our activity and our thinking.”

“Tema ‘Boga’ ne dispenzira teologa od njegove biografije. To ga razlikuje od stručnjaka koji se bavi znanošću o religiji.”

“The abiding western dominology can with religion sanction identify anything dark, profound, or fluid with a revolting chaos, an evil to be mastered, a nothing to be ignored. ‘God had made us master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has made us adept in government that we may administer government among savages and senile peoples.’ From the vantage point of the colonizing episteme, the evil is always disorder rather than unjust order; anarchy rather than control, darkness rather than pallor. To plead otherwise is to write ‘carte blanche for chaos.’ Yet those who wear the mark of chaos, the skins of darkness, the genders of unspeakable openings — those Others of Order keep finding voice. But they continue to be muted by the bellowing of the dominant discourse.”

“Fundamentalism’s strident denunciation of its opponents is a sign of its weakness, its dogmatic authoritarianism is a pathological mutation of faith.”

“I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It’s not worth the tears of that one tortured child who…prayed..with…unexpiated tears to ‘dear,kind God!”

“Unless a person can give reasons, there is, literally, no reason why anyone else should take that person seriously. But without reasons, all we are left with is emotional blackmail. We sometimes call it ‘moral blackmail,’ but it has nothing to do with morals, only with the implied juvenile threat of having a tantrum unless everyone else gives in.”

“Theologians and other clerks, You won’t understand this book, — However bright your wits — If you do not meet it humbly, And in this way, Love and Faith Make you surmount Reason, for They are the protectors of Reason’s house. ”

“Religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the question of a meaning of our life.” Paul Tillich”

“There is a thought among some brands of theology that souls are waiting up in heaven to be born. Now how in the world anybody comes up with that is beyond me, and how you can be so sure of that is also beyond me. I always like to go back to Snoopy’s theological writings, which he called, “Has It Ever Occurred to You That You Might Be Wrong.” And that’s the way I feel. These things fascinate me, and I like to talk about them with other people, and hear what they think. But I’m always a little bit leery of people who are sure that they’re right about things that nobody’s ever been able to prove, and never will be able to prove.”

“Let us account for all we see by the facts we know. If there are things for which we cannot account, let us wait for light. To account for anything by supernatural agencies is, in fact to say that we do not know. Theology is not what we know about God, but what we do not know about Nature.”

“Holy Faith is fear for God.”