Seminary Quotes

“One of the most amazing and perplexing features of mainstream Christianity is that seminarians who learn the historical-critical method in their Bible classes appear to forget all about it when it comes time for them to be pastors. They are taught critical approaches to Scripture, they learn about the discrepancies and contradictions, they discover all sorts of historical errors and mistakes, they come to realize that it is difficult to know whether Moses existed or what Jesus actually said and did, they find that there are other books that were at one time considered canonical but that ultimately did not become part of Scripture (for example, other Gospels and Apocalypses), they come to recognize that a good number of the books of the Bible are pseudonymous (for example, written in the name of an apostle by someone else), that in fact we don't have the original copies of any of the biblical books but only copies made centuries later, all of which have been altered. They learn all of this, and yet when they enter church ministry they appear to put it back on the shelf. For reasons I will explore in the conclusion, pastors are, as a rule, reluctant to teach what they learned about the Bible in seminary.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible & Why We Don't Know About Them

“It is also possible to say precisely why. Truth seduces us very easily into a kind of joy of possession: I have comprehended this and that, learned it, understood it. Knowledge is power. I am therefore more than the other man who does not know this and that. I have greater possibilities and also greater temptations. Anyone who deals with truth - as we theologians certainly do - succumbs all too easily to the psychology of the possessor. But love is the opposite of the will to possess. It is self-giving. It boasteth not itself, but humbleth itself.”
― Helmut Thielicke, A Little Exercise for Young Theologians

“If you want progress, take up running. If you want meaning, run a church.”
― Kate Bowler, No Cure for Being Human: And Other Truths I Need to Hear

“From my father I heard only these words: "But you were born for such a day as this." He closed the book and my mother joined him in embracing me. They prayed over me and they gave me a blessing. And some blessings, like the one my conservative Christian parents gave to their soon-to-be-Lutheran pastor daughter who had put them through hell, are the kind of blessings that stay with you for the rest of your life. The kind you can't speak of without crying all over again.”
― Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint

“Followers of Jesus do well to spend more time engaging him than explaining him.”
― Ron Brackin

“And so they easily suppose that this truce, owing to helplessness, is victory and that they have convinced the other man. But in fact, instead of winning him over, they have merely applied a kind of shock therapy — only it was never 'therapy.' They have smothered the first little flame of a man’s own spiritual life and a first shy question with the fire extinguisher of their erudition. By such performances a person can really be smothered and strangled!”
― Helmut Thielicke, A Little Exercise for Young Theologians

“It is a mistake for anyone who is just in this stage to appear before a church as a teacher. He has outgrown the naivete with which in young people’s work he might by all means have taken this part. He has not yet come to that maturity which would permit him to absorb into his own life and reproduce out of the freshness of his own personal faith the things which he imagines intellectually and which are accessible to him through reflection. We must have patience here and be able to wait. For the reasons I have mentioned I do not tolerate sermons by first-semester young theological students swaddled in their gowns. One ought to be able to keep still. During the period when the voice is changing we do not sing, and during this formative period in the life of the theological student he does not preach.”
― Helmut Thielicke, A Little Exercise for Young Theologians

“In my seminary teaching I appeared to be relatively orthodox, if by that one means using an orthodoxy vocabulary. I could still speak of God, sin and salvation, but always only in mythologized, secularized and worldly wise terms. God became the Liberator, sin became oppression and salvation became human effort. The trick was to learn to sound Christian while undermining traditional Christianity.”
― Thomas C. Oden, A Change of Heart: A Personal and Theological Memoir

“a gradual leaking away of all conviction”
― Mike McCormack, Solar Bones

“Here truth is employed as a means to personal triumph and at the same time as a means to kill. It produces a few years later that sort of minister who operates not to instruct but to destroy his church. And if the elders, the church, and the young people begin to groan, if they protest to the church authorities, and finally stay away from worship, this young man is still Pharisaical enough not to listen one bit.”
― Helmut Thielicke, A Little Exercise for Young Theologians

“Theologians should study in a seminary and before graduating they should make a visit to heaven and hell after which they should submit their thesis and graduate.”
― Bangambiki Habyarimana, Pearls Of Eternity

“True Christianity have no business in seminary schools or theological enclave, it it the modern hood of satan where real Jesus type of Christianity is toyed with and consequently relegated to the background.”
― Oluseyi Akinbami

“Followers of Christ are not called to be merely tolerant of others. We are called to love those who disagree with us. Abnormal communication - blessing those who curse us - establishes the relational level of our communication and demonstrates our concern for others.”
― Tim Muehlhoff, Authentic Communication: Christian Speech Engaging Culture

“Without the knowledge of God ,we perish.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“If there is to be reform in religion, the practitioners of religion - priests, preachers, nuns, monks and every such individual, must come forward, before everyone else, and set an example as advocates of harmony and growth.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Vatican Virus: The Forbidden Fiction

“Amidst the sea of medieval bigots dominating the domain of religion, there are also priests and preachers who are bringing in a whiff of fresh air.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Vatican Virus: The Forbidden Fiction

“It is this people, then, the priestly people, the body of Christ and the community of Christ, who are the ‘subject’ of liturgical celebrations. In other words, it is they who celebrate the liturgy, and the form of the liturgy must be of such sort as to make this possible. The Christian liturgy by its nature cannot be the monologue of a single participant. It is the action of a whole community. On the other hand, it is not an unstructured community. Each member, and indeed each group of members (e.g. the choir), has its role to fulfil and all by these funcitons are exercising the priesthood that they share with Christ and Chruches, an indispensable part of this structure is the priesthood, which is a ministry...of the priesthood of Christ and is in no way opposed to the priesthood of the people but is complementary to it. There is but one priesthood, that of Christ, which the whole Church exists to seve and make actual in the here and now. In the liturgical assembly the ministers of Christ have a special role of leading, of presiding, of preaching of uniting all in self-offering with Christ. For their part, the people not only act and offer through the priest-celebrant, they act and offer with him. By virtue of their baptism, they share in the priesthood of Christ and...they have their various roles to perform.”
― J.D. Crichton

“[The Eucharist] is neither simply intellectual, addressing itself to disincarnated reason, nor moralistic, exhorting men to do better, though it contains both these elements, but deriving as it does from Christ, who is both divine and human and who is the invisible priest of the visible Church, the liturgy addresses itself to the whole man and seeks to draw him into union with God by means that are consonant with human nature.”
― J.D. Crichton

“Through [the Eucharist's] celebration Christ makes himself present and that presence, it is interesting to note, is largely made through words which may be those of holy scripture or those of the poets who, together with the music that their words have evoked, have enriched our worship throughout the centuries. These patterns of words, music, gesture, and movement, sometimes of great beauty, have formed the setting of the eucharistic action on whose content in one way and another they have thrown light. Together they have manifested the Christ who makes himself present. Likewise, the prayer of the Church, whether it is called the Divine Office or Mattins and Evensong, which are so largely scriptural, recalls the past, speaks through Christ who is present, and constantly looks on to the end.”
― J.D. Crichton

“Divinity is uncanonable.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Dervis Vadisi: 100 Promissory Sonnets