Liberal Theology Quotes & Sayings

Always start out with a larger pot than what you think you need. — Julia Child

But I hate to hear you talking so like a fine gentleman, and as if women were all fine ladies, instead of rational creatures. We none of us expect to be in smooth water all our days. — Jane Austen

Dreaming of being on Moon cannot get you there. It requires a focused & intelligent effort to achieve what you Dream. — Neelesh V. Sakhardande

The No. 1 cause of preventable death for young black men is not auto accidents or accidental drowning, but homicide. — Larry Elder

We have Christians against Muslims against Jews, and no matter how liberal your theology, merely identifying yourself as a Christian or a Jew lends tacit validity to this status quo. People have morally identified with a subset of humanity rather than with humanity as a whole. — Sam Harris

Religion does a lot of good, especially the loving kind, like at Grace Church. I know people who went to a more liberal kind of Christianity and were happy with that. The problem is, for me, there was a process involved in moving from Pentecostalism to a more liberal theology, like Grace Church. What makes me different is that process didn't stop, and it took me all the way. In the end, I couldn't help feeling that all religion, even the most loving kind, is just a speed bump in the progress of the human race. — Jerry DeWitt

The gloomy theology of the orthodox
the Calvinists
I do not, I cannot believe. Many of the notions
nay, most of the notions
which orthodox people have of the divinity of the Bible, I disbelieve. I am so nearly infidel in all my views, that too, in spite of my wishes, that none but the most liberal doctrines can command my assent. — Rutherford B. Hayes

Political liberty in a citizen is that tranquillity of spirit which comes from the opinion each one has of his security, and in order for him to have this liberty the government must be such that one citizen cannot fear another citizen. — Baron De Montesquieu

A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross. — H. Richard Niebuhr

You can't make me love you. — Neil Gaiman

When I hit my 20s, I struggled to make it. I got married at 19, and my daughter, Je'Niece, was born a year later. I worked blue collar jobs during the day and comedy clubs at night, and I was earning about $25 a year doing stand-up. — Bernie Mac

Bonhoeffer's theology had always leaned toward the incarnational view that did not eschew "the world," but that saw it as God's good creation to be enjoyed and celebrated, not merely transcended. According to this view, God had redeemed mankind through Jesus Christ, had re-created us as "good." So we weren't to dismiss our humanity as something "un-spiritual." As Bonhoeffer had said before, God wanted our "yes" to him to be a "yes" to the world he had created. This was not the thin pseudohumanism of the liberal "God is dead" theologians who would claim Bonhoeffer's mantle as their own in the decades to come, nor was it the antihumanism of the pious and "religious" theologians who would abdicate Bonhoeffer's theology to the liberals. It was something else entirely: it was God's humanism, redeemed in Jesus Christ. — Eric Metaxas

Religious fanaticism is not the only clear and present danger in our world. The greatest dangers confronting human kind are still those ancient enemies of war, poverty, ignorance and disease. These create the breeding grounds in which religious extremism flourishes, because people who have been betrayed by the world's political and economic systems often seek refuge in the alternatives offered by religion.

It is often said that the most dangerous person in the world is the person with nothing to lose. The more people in our world who have nothing to lose, the greater the danger of extremism is likely to become. If we are committed to struggling against religious fanaticism, and if we really do stand in awe of human potential, then we need to cultivate a much more intelligent debate about the role religion plays in nurturing that human potential through its shaping of ideas and through the hope and meaning it gives to many millions of lives. — Tina Beattie

The seven "liberal arts": Grammar, the foundation of science; Logic, which differentiates the true from the false; Rhetoric, the source of law; Arithmetic, the foundation of order because "without numbers there is nothing"; Geometry, the science of measurement; Astronomy, the most noble of the sciences because it is connected with Divinity and Theology; and lastly Music. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Why do you always write poetry? Why do you not write prose? Prose is so much more difficult. — Walter Pater

I basically look like a lot of modern Orthodox people you know, but I work on a TV show where I sometimes have to kiss Jim Parsons. That's why I don't take on the title of modern Orthodox, but in terms of ideology and theology I pretty much sound like a liberal modern Orthodox person. — Mayim Bialik

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

Those who could - generally the well educated, wealthy, or well connected - left, leaving behind communities of poor people. These remaining folks were the "truly disadvantaged" - unable to find good jobs on their own and surrounded by communities that offered little in the way of connections or social support. Wilson's — J.D. Vance

Labels such as, 'evangelical', 'fundamental', 'charismatic', 'liberal' contribute to polarization and produce a climate of implied or outspoken distrust. Respectful dialogue becomes virtually impossible. What we desperately need to offset this disunity and distrust is a new and cleansing theology of communication. — Robert H. Schuller

unity. Evangelicals, by definition, don't care about "unity" nearly as much as they care about truth. When you say "We may differ on some issues of morality and theology, but the important thing is that we stay together in one united Church" you pre-suppose that the liberals are right and the evangelicals are wrong. Which, when you think about it, isn't very liberal at all. — Andrew Rilstone

If I have so far argued that Foucault is a kind of closet liberal and thus deeply modern, I need to be equally critical of evangelical (and especially American) Christianity's modernity and its appropriation of Enlightenment notions of the autonomous self. Indeed, many otherwise orthodox Christians, who recoil at the notion of theological liberalism, have unwittingly adopted notions of freedom and autonomy that are liberal to the core. Averse to hierarchies and control, contemporary evangelicalism thrives on autonomy: the autonomy of the nondenominational church, at a macrocosmic level, and the autonomy of the individual Christian, at the microcosmic level. And it does not seem to me that the emerging church has changed much on this score; indeed, some elements of emergent spirituality are intensifications of this affirmation of autonomy and a laissez-faire attitude with respect to institutions. — James K.A. Smith

This has led evangelicals to ethnocentrism, to asserting their historically contingent cultural values as "biblical truth." In the conservative direction, this has closed off productive dialogue between evangelicals and mainline Christians on gay marriage - because if the Bible has an obvious stance on the matter, as most evangelicals believe, the other side must be intentionally denying the truth. In the liberal direction, this has led green evangelicals to ignore the role contemporary experiences and theology have played in their reinterpretation of the Bible on environmental matters. — Jonathan Dudley

If I speak in the tongues of Reformers and of professional theologians, and I have not personal faith in Christ, my theology is nothing but the noisy beating of a snare drum. And if I have analytic powers and the gift of creating coherent conceptual systems of theology, so as to remove liberal objections, and have not personal hope in God, I am nothing. And if I give myself to resolving the debate between supra and infralapsarianism, and to defending inerrancy, and to learning the Westminster Catechism, yea, even the larger one, so as to recite it by heart backwards and forwards, and have not love, I have gained nothing. — Kevin J. Vanhoozer

Hence it's funny to read in the New York Times that liberal Catholic activists are pushing for a change in Church teaching on issues relating to -- well, let's admit it, sex. Nobody is out there demanding the popes revisit the condemnation of Jansenism (don't ask), or settle the question of whether divine grace is or isn't resistable. No, journalists want to know what the Church thinks about whether one person should poke another and, if so, where, when, and how. What liberal Catholics and the journalists who love them are really asking for isfor the Church to admit that it was teaching a set of harsh, repressive errors for nineteen centuries and that now it is very, very sorry. — John Zmirak