Quotes about Abuses

As Pope Benedict XVI said in his address to the United Nations in April 2008, the language of rights is borrowed from the great Christian tradition, but if you cut off those Christian roots, you get all kinds of abuses, each claiming the postmodern high ground of victimhood but only succeeding in debasing the coinage of rights itself.

The apostle Paul had much to say about the immorality of individual church members, but little to say about the immorality of pagan Rome. He did not rail against the abuses in Rome—slavery, idolatry, gladiator games, political oppression, greed—even though such abuses surely offended Christians of that day every bit as much as our deteriorating society offends Christians today.

The Bible was not given to replace the supernatural or miraculous; it was given to correct abuses.

There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses.

An enormous fortress of prejudices, privileges, superstitions, lies, exactions, abuses, violences, iniquities, and darkness still stands erect in this world, with its towers of hatred. It must be cast down. This monstrous mass must be made to crumble. To conquer at Austerlitz is grand; to take the Bastille is immense.

To destroy abuses is not sufficient; customs must be modified. The mill is there no longer; the wind is still there.

I have given Him permission to take every one of my memories captive to Christ, and now I can no longer see my abuses and sins in their own accord or in the hands of Satan. Now I see them in the healing, forgiving, nail-scarred hands of Jesus where He is cleansing them and transforming them into the stuff of mercy.

The danger is that in reaction to abuses and distortions of an idea, we'll reject it completely. And in the process miss out on the good of it, the worth of it, the truth of it.

We need a generation of dissident disciples who confront and resist corruption and systemic abuses in whatever locations they are found: • corruption in the countries of the world, • our churches' complicities in these corruptions, • and the reading of Revelation as speculation, which blunts our prophetic voice.

The danger is that in reaction to abuses and distortions of an idea, we'll reject it completely. And in the process miss out on the good of it, the worth of it, the truth of it.

It is better sometimes not to follow great reformers of abuses beyond the threshold of their homes.

To the press alone, chequered as it is with abuses, the world is indebted for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression.