Quotes about Church

While the church is indeed to stand under the authority of the biblical witness, it must avoid bibliolatry and read Scripture with sensitivity to its particular historical contexts and its diverse literary forms.

We can still fall into the trap of self-deceit today. It always begins through pride and arrogance, somehow thinking that our ways are superior to God's ways. In this season when the church celebrates Jesus' mighty work of redemption, let's not miss the joy of complete obedience to God's will and plans for our life.

There is so much wisdom in the straightforward words of A. W. Tozer: The church is famishing for want of his presence. The instant cure of most of our religious ills would be to enter the presence in spiritual experience, to become suddenly aware that we are in God and that God is in us. This would lift us out of our pitiful narrowness and cause our hearts to be enlarged.

Is it any wonder why church is so important? Some think they can live the Christian life without a strong local fellowship, but I'm not one of them. I know how important it is for me to unite with others to fix my mind on what is right, pure, lovely, and admirable—to think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise. What's on your mind? Is it excellent?

It must never be forgotten that Almighty God rules this world. He is not an absentee God. His hand is ever on the throttle of human affairs. He is everywhere present in the concerns of time. His eyes behold, his eyelids try the children of men. He rules the world just as He rules the church by prayer.

Discipleship in the church today has more to do with consuming and absorbing cognitive content than it has anything to do with missional action.

We first must plant the gospel in the hearts and lives of people and then see what form of ecclesia emerges from the transformed community. If we begin with the premise that we are starting a "church," it will often come loaded with intuitional and cultural assumptions. Churches should grow out of the mission, not the other way around.

Therefore, in the presence of my dear family, in the presence of my Church, and in the presence of the imagined communion of my readers, I have told this story in the hope of forgiveness, and as a promise.

Apart from the museums that anchor the great cities of Europe and America, the Roman Catholic Church is what remains of "Christendom," the generating aesthetic and intellectual tradition of Western civilization.

Indeed, by the time of the Temple destruction, which set in motion the separation of "the Jews" from "Christians," Paul was dead. That is why it is absurd to imagine that he himself caused the separation. Any imagined echo in his multifaceted writing of a distinction between "the Church" and "the Synagogue" resounds anachronistically from a future that did not yet exist—a fully ruptured Israel of which Paul knew nothing.

I had come here with my three questions. The first: How did the history of Christian antisemitism contribute to the Holocaust? The second: How did the Church abet, or oppose, the Holocaust as it unfolded? And the third: How does the Church today negotiate that layered past, both the deep past of antisemitism and the recent past of the Holocaust? With Edith Stein, that.

Christians must pioneer new ways to bind ourselves to Scripture, to our traditions, and to each other—not for mere survival, but so that the church can be the authentic light of Christ to a world lost in darkness.