#theology

When theology erodes and organization crumbles, when the institutional framework of religion begins to break up, the search for a direct experience which people can feel to be religious facilitates the rise of cults. ↗

— Daniel Bell

#break #break up #crumbles #cults #direct

It seems obvious to me that the notion of God has never been anything but a kind of ideal projection, a reflection upward of the human personality, and that theology never has been and never can be anything but a more and more purified mythology. ↗

— Alfred Loisy

#been #god #human #human personality #ideal

Conservative New Testament studies could also provide an intellectually satisfying alternative to German biblical criticism and to the liberal theology that accompanied it. ↗

— John Gresham Machen

#also #alternative #conservative #could #criticism

Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is. Missions exists because worship doesn't. ↗

— John Piper

#reformed #theology #goals

My body kills me, so I kill it. ↗

— Dorotheus the Theban

#death #desert-father #dying #holy-father #monastic

Only God may be adored, because only God is unlimited goodness, truth, and beauty, and thus only God deserves unlimited love. ↗

— Peter Kreeft

#beauty #catholicism #christianity #god #goodness

To an even moderately sophisticated and well-read person it should come as no surprise that any religion at all has its hidden as well as its obvious beauties and is capable of profound and impressive interpretations. What is deeply objectionable about most of these interpretations is that they allow the believer to say Yes while evading any No. ↗

— Walter Kaufmann

#religion #theology #beauty

God structures his authority based on how he operates internally—that is, how each member of the trinity sees and interacts with each other. God never asks us to function in our obedience outside his personal examples. ↗

— Reid A. Ashbaucher

#nature-of-god #theology #change

One great idea of the biblical revelation is that God is manifest in the ordinary, in the actual, in the daily, in the now, in the concrete incarnations of life, and not through purity codes and moral achievement contests, which are seldom achieved anyway… We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking… The most courageous thing we will ever do is to bear humbly the mystery of our own reality. ↗

— Richard Rohr

#culture #theology #courage

God impressed me with this a long time ago: 'Roddy, I will never do anything through you until I have done it to you!'." ~R. Alan Woods [1998] ↗

— R. Alan Woods

#experience #r-alan-woods #theology #experience