Benjamin Wittes Quotes

The quickest way to detect a cult is to sniff for doublethink. The cult seeks control over its membership not by providing a coherent theological system but by providing the opposite: an unstable theology infinitely malleable to the needs of the cult's top echelon and uninterpretable at all times to anyone below that level.

Benjamin Wittes

• Theology
• Cult
• Doublethink

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Quotes to Explore

• I didn't write much until I turned 40. Up until then I felt constrained by a sense of the discipline of New Testament studies and a sense of the ruling elite in theology and biblical studies.

  

  N. T. Wright
  • Up
  • Discipline
  • New

• There's no point in lying saying I am doing really, really well because I'm not; I'm cult level.

  

  Gary Numan
  • Lying
  • Level
  • Cult

• When I was 21, I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for 'The Simpsons' who'd briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life.

  

  Zadie Smith
  • Life
  • Religious
  • Editor

• Realizing our society as it is, without theology dogmatically telling us how we should react to it, and being humane toward that society, that is all that we're sure of.

  

  Vidal Sassoon
  • Society
  • Without
  • Theology

• We have to determine our theology from the Word of God, not from what we feel.

  

  R. C. Sproul
  • God
  • Determine
  • Theology

• Maybe that is what marriage is: Two people creating a cult together.

  

  Danielle Trussoni
  • People
  • Together
  • Marriage

• At the end of the day, when I am lying in bed and I know the chances of any of our theology being exactly right are a million to one, I need to know that God has things figured out, that if my math is wrong we are still going to be okay. And wonder is that feeling we get when we let go of our silly answers, our mapped out rules that we want God to follow. I don't think there is any better worship than wonder.

  

  Donald Miller
  • God
  • Feeling
  • Wonder

• Theology is a science of mind applied to God.

  

  Henry Ward Beecher
  • God
  • Mind
  • Science

• Classical theology has erred in its insistence that theology be 'God-centered,' not 'man-centered'.

  

  Robert H. Schuller
  • Theology
  • Insistence
  • God-centered

• What we need is a theology of salvation that begins and ends with a recognition of every person's hunger for glory.

  

  Robert H. Schuller
  • Ends
  • Salvation
  • Theology

• Historical theology has too often failed to interpret repentance as a positive creative force. ... Essentially, if Christianity is to succeed in the next millennium, it must cease to be a negative religion and must become positive.

  

  Robert H. Schuller
  • Force
  • Theology
  • Failed

• Intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory.

  

  William A. Dembski
  • Design
  • Intelligent
  • Theology

• Theology is the doctrine or teaching of living to God.

  

  William Ames
  • Teaching
  • Doctrine
  • Theology

• I am persuaded that without knowledge of literature pure theology cannot at all endure. . . . When letters have declined and lain prostrate, theology, too, has wretchedly fallen and lain prostrate. . . . It is my desire that there shall be as many poets and rhetoricians as possible, because I see that by these studies as by no other means, people are wonderfully fitted for the grasping of sacred truth and for handling it skillfully and happily.

  

  Martin Luther
  • Knowledge
  • Desire
  • Literature

• And the greatest praise to India is this: not only are her people beautiful; not only are her daily life and cult beautiful; but, in the midst of the utilitarian, humanitarian, dogmatic world of the present day, she keeps on proclaiming the outstanding value of Beauty for the sake of Beauty, through her very conception of Godhead, of religion and of life.

  

  Savitri Devi
  • People
  • World
  • Beautiful

• It seems that all revolutions end up with a personality cult - even the Chinese seem to need a father-figure.

  

  John Lennon The Beatles
  • Chinese
  • Revolutions
  • Cult

• Human paleontology shares a peculiar trait with such disparate subjects as theology and extraterrestrial biology: it contains more practitioners than objects for study.

  

  David Pilbeam
  • Study
  • Theology
  • Biology

• The sooner the doctrine of original sin disappears, the better it is for theology.

  

  Georgia Harkness
  • Doctrine
  • Theology
  • Disappears

• Shame, it comes in every size, touches many lives, knocks on many doors.

  

  Neil Diamond
  • Philosophy
  • Doors
  • Shame

• Our natural egoism leads us to judge people by their relations to ourselves. We want them to be certain things to us, and for us that is what they are; because the rest of them is no good to us, we ignore it.

  

  W. Somerset Maugham
  • People
  • Good
  • Rest

• The truth is that literature, particularly fiction, is not the pure medium we sometimes assume it to be. Response to it is affected by things other than its own intrinsic quality; by a curiosity or lack of it about the people it deals with, their outlook, their way of life.

  

  Vance Palmer
  • People
  • Life
  • Book

• A book has but one voice, but it does not instruct everyone alike.

  

  Thomas à Kempis
  • Book
  • Alike
  • Instruct

• I asked my grandmother how a Hungarian Jewish person can experience being Jewish. My grandmother answered was the only choice was to "keep quiet." I can understand her because she was a Holocaust survivor, and for her survival, she had to keep quiet. But I didn't obey my grandmother when I was a child, and in this case, I don't obey her either.

  

  Csanad Szegedi
  • Grandmother
  • Holocaust
  • Jewish

• The quickest way to detect a cult is to sniff for doublethink. The cult seeks control over its membership not by providing a coherent theological system but by providing the opposite: an unstable theology infinitely malleable to the needs of the cult's top echelon and uninterpretable at all times to anyone below that level.

  

  Benjamin Wittes
  • Theology
  • Cult
  • Doublethink