This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"A firm faith is the best theology; a good life is the best philosophy, a clear conscience the best law; honesty the best policy, and temperance the best physic." - Arthur Aughey
"In the end physics will replace ethics just as metaphysics displaced theology. The modern statistical view of ethics contributes towards that." - Søren Kierkegaard, fully Søren Aabye Kierkegaard
"Theology and Absolute Ethics are two famous subjects which we have realized to have no real objects." - Frank Plumpton Ramsey
"But when science, passing beyond its own limits, assumes to take the place of theology, and sets up its own conception of the order of nature as a sufficient account of its cause, it is invading a province of thought to which it has no claim, and not unreasonably provokes the hostility of its best friends." -
"Theology is Anthropology." - Paul Johann Feuerbach, fully Paul Johann Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach
"We find that the religions, whose theology has been least preoccupied with events in time and most concerned with eternity, have been consistently the least violent and most humane in political practice." - Aldous Leonard Huxley
"Make philosophy thy journey, theology thy journey’s end: philosophy is a pleasant way, but dangerous to him that either tires or retires; in this journey it is safe neither to loiter nor to rest, till thou hast attained thy journey’s end; he that sits down a philosopher rises up an atheist." - Francis Quarles
"Religion, like poetry, is not a mere idea, it is expression. The self-expression of God is in the endless variety of creation; and our attitude toward the Infinite Being must also in its expression have a variety of individuality ceaseless and unending. Those sects which jealously build their boundaries with too rigid creeds excluding all spontaneous movement of the living spirit may hoard their theology but they kill religion." -
"The best theology is rather a divine life than a divine knowledge." - Jeremy Taylor
"Romanticism is the expression of man's urge to rise above reason and common sense, just as rationalism is the expression of his urge to rise above theology and emotion." - Charles Woodruff Yost
"A theology - any theology - not based on spiritual experience is mere panting - religious breathlessness." - Leonardo and Clodovis Boff
"Most newspaper headlines are more effective examples of man’s sin writ large than any book on theology can ever hope to be." - Robert McAfee Brown
"No prophet ever sees things under the aspect of eternity. It is always partisan theology, always for the moment, always for the concrete community, satisfied to see only a piece of it all and to speak out that at the risk of contradicting the rest of it." - Walter Brueggemann
"Theology is nothing else than anthropology… The knowledge of God is nothing else than a knowledge of man." - Ludwig Feuerbach, fully Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach
"To glorify God is to be engaged in a concrete spirituality that refuses to draw marked distinctions between sacred and secular, contemplation and deed, theology and ethics." - John Douglas Hall
"The Bible is God’s anthropology rather than man’s theology." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"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 fashioning our characters in the wrong way. Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. We are spinning our own fates, good or evil." - William James
"The divine test of a man’s worth is not his theology but his life." - Morris Joseph
"If vices are diseases, they cease to be vices, and theology in sending the drunkard or the gambler to the physician, relinquishes its last connection with reality: the ethical task." - Fritz Künkel
"Truth, not in distinct and clear-cut definitions but in the limpid obscurity of a single intuition that unites all dogmas in one simple Light, shining into the soul directly from God’s eternity, without the medium of created concept, without the intervention of symbols or of language or the likeness of material things. Here the Truth is One Whom we not only know and possess but by Whom we are known and possessed. Here theology ceases to be a body of abstractions and becomes a Living Reality Who is God Himself." - Thomas Merton
"Theology is reflection upon the reality of worship and explication of it. As such it is a rational affair… faith seeking to understand." - Albert Cook Outler
"The Bible is primarily not man’s vision of God but God’s vision of man. The Bible is not man’s theology but God’s anthropology, dealing with man and what He asks of him rather than with the nature of God. God did not reveal to the prophets eternal mysteries but His knowledge and love of man. It was not the aspiration of Israel to know the Absolute but to ascertain what He asks of man; to commune with His will rather than with His essence." - Fritz A. Rothschild
"The function of civil law is not to teach theology or even the moral views of the legislator… The morality of divorce, birth control, liquor traffic and the like are one thing. Civil legislation about them is quite another." - Gustave Weigel
"Think about it. God decided for the first and last time... to reveal himself... You would expect God to give you a lecture on theology at least. After all it’s his domain... Instead... He gave you all kind of command about human relations: Thou shall not kill; Thou shall not lie;... Why did He do that? It was so simple. But this was the lesson: God can take care of Himself. What He had to give man was the dignity of man." - Elie Wiesel, fully Eliezer "Elie" Wiesel
"I do not believe in the God of theology who rewards good and punishes evil." - Albert Einstein
"The fact that astronomies change while the stars abide is a true analogy of every realm of human life and thought, religion not least of all. No existent theology can be a final formulation of spiritual truth." - Harry Emerson Fosdick
"The only theology worth doing is that which inspires and transforms lives, that which empowers us to participate in creating, liberating, and blessing the world." - Isabel Carter Heyward
"The task of theology is to show how the world is founded on something beyond transient fact, and how it issues in something beyond the perishing of occasions. The temporal world is the stage of finite accomplishment. We ask of theology to express that element in perishing lives which is undying by reason of its expression of perfection proper to our finite natures. In this way we shall understand how life includes a mode of satisfaction deeper than joy or sorrow." - Alfred North Whitehead
"Theology is an incubus that a humanist can never shake off. He may seek refuge from theism in atheism or from animism in materialism. But after each desperate twist and turn he will find himself committed to some theological position or other. Theology is inescapable, and it is dynamite." - Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
"Theology is unapologetically prescriptive. It does not claim to be value-free or neutral. Theologians draw upon the beliefs of a particular tradition to suggest a course of action, an appropriate response, a way of life commensurate with what the faith teaches. Theology can be wrong; it cannot be noncommittal." - Harvey Cox, fully Harvey Gallagher Cox, Jr.
"Economics is our contemporary theology, regardless of how we spend Sunday." - James Hillman
"To be still searching what we know not by what we know, still closing up truth to truth as we find it (for all her body is homogeneal and proportional), this is a golden rule in theology as well as in arithmetic, and makes up the best harmony in a Church; not the forced and outward union of cold and neutral, and inwardly divided minds." - John Milton
"Religion is neither theology nor a theosophy; it is more than that; it is a discipline, a law, a yoke, an indissoluble engagement." - Joseph Joubert
"The best theology would need no advocates; it would prove itself." - Karl Barth
"Sacred theology is superior to philosophy, both theoretically and practically; theoretically, because it is more perfect knowledge of God and His creatures; practically, because moral philosophy is insufficient to direct man to God as his last end." - Mortimer J. Adler, fully Mortimer Jerome Adler
"Ultimately, there can be no disagreement between history, science, philosophy, and theology. Where there is disagreement, there is either ignorance or error." - Mortimer J. Adler, fully Mortimer Jerome Adler
"Theology moves back and forth between two poles, the eternal truth of its foundations and the temporal situation in which the eternal truth must be received." - Paul Tillich, fully Paul Johannes Tillich
"Men are better than their theology. Their daily life gives it the lie." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"I consider theology to be the rhetoric of morals." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Love is the abridgment of all theology." - Saint Francis de Sales NULL
"The word God is a theology in itself, indivisibly one, inexhaustibly various, from the vastness and simplicity of its meaning. Admit a God, and you introduce among the subjects of your knowledge a fact encompassing, closing in upon, absorbing ever other fact conceivable. " - Francis William Newman
" It appears that mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent inherent in every atom. The universe as a whole is also weird, with laws of nature that make it hospitable to the growth of mind. I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension. God may be either a world-soul or a collection of world-souls. So I am thinking that atoms and humans and God may have minds that differ in degree but not in kind. We stand, in a manner of speaking, midway between the unpredictability of atoms and the unpredictability of God. Atoms are small pieces of our mental apparatus, and we are small pieces of God's mental apparatus. Our minds may receive inputs equally from atoms and from God. This view of our place in the cosmos may not be true, but it is compatible with the active nature of atoms as revealed in the experiments of modern physics. I don't say that this personal theology is supported or proved by scientific evidence. I only say that it is consistent with scientific evidence." - Freeman John Dyson
"Orthodoxy is summoned to witness. Now more than ever the Christian West stands before divergent prospects, a living question addressed also to the Orthodox world… The ‘old polemical theology' has long ago lost its inner connection with any reality. Such theology was an academic discipline, and was always elaborated according to the same western 'textbooks.' A historiosophical exegesis of the western religious tragedy must become the new 'polemical theology.' But this tragedy must be reendured and relived, precisely as one's own, and its potential catharsis must be demonstrated in the fullness of the experience of the Church and patristic tradition. In this newly sought Orthodox synthesis, the centuries-old experience of the Catholic West must be studied and diagnosed by Orthodox theology with greater care and sympathy than has been the case up to now… The Orthodox theologian must also offer his own testimony to this world—a testimony arising from the inner memory of the Church—and resolve the question with his historical findings." - Georges Florovsky, fully Georges Vasilievich Florovsky
"The Bible is primarily not man's vision of God but God's vision of man. The Bible is not man's theology but God's anthropology." - Abraham Joshua Heschel