A Quote by John D. Caputo

Orthodoxy is idolatry if it means holding the 'correct opinions about God' - 'fundamentalism' is the most extreme and salient example of such idolatry - but not if it means holding faith in the right way, that is, not holding it at all but being held by God, in love and service. Theology is idolatry if it means what we say about God instead of letting ourselves be addressed by what God has to say to us. Faith is idolatrous if it is rigidly self-certain but not if it is softened in the waters of 'doubt.

John D. Caputo

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About Being Certain Correct Doubt Example Extreme Faith Fundamentalism God Held Holding Idolatry Instead Letting Love Means Most Opinions Orthodoxy Ourselves Right Right Way Say Self Service Theology Us Waters Way

Quote Author

John D. Caputo
American - Philosopher
Born: October 26, 1940

True faith means holding nothing back. It means putting every hope in God's fidelity to His Promises.

Francis Chan

To have a faith, therefore, or a trust in anything, where God hath not promised, is plain idolatry, and a worshipping of thine own imagination instead of God.

William Tyndale

The ultimate goal of theology isn't knowledge, but worship. If our learning and knowledge of God do not lead to the joyful praise of God, we have failed. We learn only that we might laud, which is to say that theology without doxology is idolatry. The only theology worth studying is a theology that can be sung!

Sam Storms

Loving God means rejoicing in God, being eager to think of and pray to God. It means being glad to be in God's presence and to be with God alone. It means not grieving God, but rejoicing in God simply because it is God who is involved, and because we are permitted to know and have God, and to speak with and live with God.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Idolatry is not simply worshiping a stone image; idolatry is any concept of God that reduces Him to less than who He really is.

Ron Carlson

Much of the Christian religion has largely become “holding on” instead of letting go. But God, it seems to me, does the holding on (to us!), and we must learn the letting go (of everything else).

Richard Rohr

To glorify God means to think and act in such a way that the goodness, greatness, and beauty of God are constantly obvious to ourselves and all those around us. It means to live in such a way that when people see us they think, Thank God for God, if God would create such a life.

Dallas Willard

Given the sin of impiety through which they [the Romans] sinned against the divine nature [by idolatry], the punishment that led them to sin against their own nature followed.... I say, therefore, that since they changed into lies [by idolatry] the truth about God, He brought them to ignominious passions, that is, to sins against nature; not that God led them to evil, but only that he abandoned them to evil.

Thomas Aquinas

The heart clings to collected treasure. Stored-up possessions get between me and God. Where my treasure is, there is my trust, my security, my comfort, my God. Treasure means idolatry.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Faith is a state of openness or trust...In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all. Instead they are holding tight. But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to the truth, whatever it might turn out to be.

Shunryu Suzuki

I won't put my ignorance on an altar and call it God. It feels like idolatry, like the worst kind of idolatry.

Robert Charles Wilson

Faith is not merely you holding on to God- it is God holding on to you

E. Stanley Jones

Sunday morning in America is the greatest hour of idolatry in the whole week. Why? Because most people who are even worshiping God, are worshiping a God they don't know. They're worshiping a god that looks more like Santa Claus than the God of Scripture. They're worshiping a god that is a figment of their own imagination. They created a god in their own likeness and they worship the god they've made.

Paul Washer

When the Pleiadians speak of letting go, they transmit a letting go energy through our energetic field. As a human being, we've been holding on for lifetimes, really holding on to the illusion strongly, holding on to the shame, the guilt, the sadness, all the things we've lived through, all the experiences we have allowed ourselves to create for ourselves in order to learn. We've held on to the pieces of us - the anger, the frustration and the pain.

Christine McCormick Day

Enoch predicted that "the demons and the spirits of the angelic apostates would turn into idolatry all the elements, all the adornment of the universe, and all things contained in the heaven, the sea, and the earth, that they might be consecrated as God in opposition to God." All things, therefore, does human error worship, except the Founder of all himself. The images of those things are idols; the consecration of the images is idolatry.