Theological Implications Quotes

If there is a God who will damn his children forever, I would rather go to hell than to go to heaven and keep the society of such an infamous tyrant.

Science brings men nearer to God.

What I believe about the young age of the earth comes out of taking the Bible as written. And I've said numerous times over the years that the age of the earth, for example, is not a salvation issue but an authority issue.

If Christ is not divine, every impulse of the Christian world falls to a lower octave, and light and love and hope decline.

The Bible... provides no guide to reading the Bible. In fact, it is full of such inconsistencies, contradictions, lacunae, obscurities, baffling tales, and poetic imagery that to quote it at all is to select from conflicting alternative passages. Every quotation is therefore necessarily an interpretation.

The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.

The statement that 'God is dead' comes from Nietzsche and has recently been trumpeted abroad by some German and American theologians. But the good Lord has not died of this; He who dwells in the heaven laughs at them.

Preachers in pulpits talked about what a great message is in the book. No matter what you do, somebody always imputes meaning into your books.

The desertion of Jesus, by his followers, furnishes an argument in support of the supposition that he attempted to be king of the Jews, rather than that he was a superior being.

Politics moves upward into ethics, and ethics ascends to theology.

If we would understand the Scientific Revolution correctly, we should always remember that its most powerful impetus was the unremitting search for hidden divinity. As such, it is a direct descendant of the breakdown of the bicameral mind.

Yet man does recognise himself [as an animal]. But I ask you and the whole world for a generic differentia between man and ape which conforms to the principles of natural history, I certainly know of none... If I were to call man ape or vice versa, I should bring down all the theologians on my head. But perhaps I should still do it according to the rules of science.

If all the animals and man had been evolved in this ascendant manner, then there had been no first parents, no Eden, and no Fall. And if there had been no fall, then the entire historical fabric of Christianity, the story of the first sin and the reason for an atonement ... collapsed like a house of cards.

'Noah' is an insult to Bible-believing Christians, an insult to the character of Noah and, most of all, an insult to the God of the Bible. As a result, I believe Hollywood will have a much harder time in marketing future biblically-themed movies to Christians.

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said wouldn't be a great moral teacher. He'd be either a lunatic on a level with a man who says he's a poached egg or else he'd be the devil of hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse.

Jesus shouldn't have died so early and then he could have got twice as much across. They killed him and then twisted so many of the best things he said. Human hands started messing it all up and now so much of religion is hogwash.

Palestinian believers have a unique experience with US foreign policy and our close ties with Israel. This alliance has many layers, but given the strong support of the US church, and the frequency of religious language surrounding these policies, Palestinian Christian friends raise important and challenging questions about how we understand the intertwining of theology and politics in the US.

What I have done is to show that it is possible for the way the universe began to be determined by the laws of science. In that case, it would not be necessary to appeal to God to decide how the universe began. This doesn't prove that there is no God, only that God is not necessary.

The creation message has matured over the past three decades, as the discernment and understanding of creationist leaders has matured. More and more, the emphasis is on the foundational issue: compromise of Genesis ultimately undermines the gospel itself.

God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous

One thing I have no worry about is whether God exists. But it has occurred to me that God has Alzheimer's and has forgotten we exist.

Language changes. If it does not change, like Latin it dies. But we need to be aware that as our language changes, so does our theology change, particularly if we are trying to manipulate language for a specific purpose. That is what is happening with our attempts at inclusive language, which thus far have been inconclusive and unsuccessful.

The Secular City, having legislated and litigated itself out of any entanglement with the City of God, would be a hell upon earth .

Few intelligent Christians can still hold to the idea that the Bible is an infallible Book, that it contains no linguistic errors, no historical discrepancies, no antiquated scientific assumptions, not even bad ethical standards. Historical investigation and literary criticism have taken the magic out of the Bible and have made it a composite human book, written by many hands in different ages.

We are altering the most basic forces of the planet's surface - the content of the sunlight, the temperature and aridity - and that brings out the most powerful questions about who is in charge. If you wanted to give a name to this theological problem, I think you could say that we are engaged in decreation.