#theology

"God gives us not only the truth but also the ability to believe it; not only the new thing to see but also the new eye to see it with."

"Christ is the Lesson as well as the Teacher."

"Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing."

"If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now."

"God's pleasure--the beauty creation possesses in his regard--underlies the distinct being of creation, and so beauty is the first and truest word concerning all that appears within being; beauty is the showing of what is; God looked upon what he had wrought and saw that it was good."

"Go to heaven for the climate and hell for the company."

"Theological formation is the gradual and often painful discovery of God's incomprehensibility. You can be competent in many things, but you cannot be competent in God."

"Like apes, we breed, sleep, and die. Yet like God we say, "I am."We are ontological oxymorons."

"Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun."

"What gave you this idea of an imperfect god?''I don't know. It seems quite feasible to me. That is the only god I could imagine believing in, a god whose passion is not a redemption, who saves nothing, fulfills no purpose--a god who simply is."

"Protestants believe that the sacraments are like ladders that God gave to us by which we can climb up to Him. Catholics believe that they are like ladders that God gave to Himself by which He climbs down to us."

"It's not about whether or not someone is a bigot, but whether or not the argument which that someone is arguing is worth being a bigot about."

"All religions are based on obsolete terminology."

"Not bad, not bad at all,"Diotallevi said. "To arrive at the truth through the painstaking reconstruction of a false text."

"Question the answers, I repeated every class. Reevaluate your conclusions when the evidence changes."

"One possibility is: God is nothing but the power of the universe to organize itself."

"We...sin not because we want what is evil, but because we want what isn't good enough."

"Matthew 10:34“Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword."

"It is just as crazy not to be crazy about Christ as it is to be crazy about anything else."

"Everything smaller than Heaven bores us because only Heaven is bigger than our hearts."