Quotes about Authority

The early Christians believed, on the authority of Jesus himself, that the original vision for creation, and for Human within it, had been recaptured and restored through Jesus's inauguration of God's sovereign rule. What Jesus did and said was designed to give a decisive answer, in deeds as well as words, to the question, What would it look like if God was running things?

The church must, in short, learn from Jesus before Pilate how to speak the truth to power rather than for power or merely against power.

the church has unhesitatingly privileged the creed and let the canon fend for itself—

Who, after all, was it who didn't want the dead to be raised? Not simply the intellectually timid or the rationalists. It was, and is, those in power, the social and intellectual tyrants and bullies; the Caesars who would be threatened by a Lord of the world who had defeated the tyrant's last weapon, death itself; the Herods who would be horrified at the postmortem validation of the true King of the Jews.18

This makes the rather obvious logical mistake analogous to that of a soldier who, receiving orders through the mail, concludes that the letter carrier is his commanding officer. Those who transmit, collect and distribute the message are not in the same league as those who write it in the first place.

Victory over the powers, once more, is accomplished through the forgiveness of sins.

For the early Christians, the revolution had happened on the first Good Friday. The "rulers and authorities" really had been dealt their death blow. This didn't mean, "So we can escape this world and go to heaven," but "Jesus is now Lord of this world, and we must live under his lordship and announce his kingdom.

We humans have thus, by abrogating our own vocation, handed our power and authority to nondivine and nonhuman forces, which have then run rampant, spoiling human lives, ravaging the beautiful creation, and doing their best to turn God's world into a hell

Since these are themselves "scriptural" statements, that means that scripture itself points—authoritatively, if it does indeed possess authority!—away from itself and to the fact that final and true authority belongs to God himself, now delegated to Jesus Christ.

Put tradition first, and scripture will be muzzled and faded. Put scripture first, and tradition will come to new life. Better

What would happen if we were to take seriously our stated belief that Jesus Christ is already the Lord of the world and that at his name, one day, every knee would bow?

Whenever you see, in an official lectionary, the command to omit two or three verses, you can normally be sure that they contain words of judgment. Unless, of course, they are about sex. But