On Ideas and Faith

In a chapter concerning the "hazard of the aesthetic" Thielicke pleads:

"Every theological idea which makes an impression upon you must be regarded as a challenge to your faith. Do not assume as a matter of course that you believe whatever impresses you theologically and enlightens you intellectually. Otherwise suddenly you are believing no longer in Jesus Christ, but in Luther, or in one of your other theological teachers.

One of the most difficult experiences for a theological instructor to combat arises out of the fact that good, respectable theology - by no means only dissolute theology bristling with heresy - for the reasons I have mentioned, threatens our personal life of faith. Faith must mean more to us than a mere commodity stored in the tin cans of reflection or bottled in the lecture notebook, whence at any time it may be reproduced in the brain."

- Helmut Thielicke, An Exercise for Young Theologians (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1962).

On Scholasticism and the Church

       "Speaking figuratively, the study of theology often produces overgrown youths whose internal organs have not correspondingly developed. This is a characteristic of adolescence. There is actually something like theological puberty.... Churches must also understand it and must have it explained to them every possible way.

     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 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 this 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, An Exercise for Young Theologians (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1962).