Quotes about Systems

When God does the big things, the little people get drawn in too. Human systems often forget that, but God doesn't.

The point is that the resurrection, if it had occurred, would undermine not only the Enlightenment's vision of a split world but also the Enlightenment's self-congratulatory dream of world history reaching its destiny in our own day and our own systems.

The great enemy to the Lord Jesus Christ in the present day is the conception of practical work that has not come from the New Testament, but from the systems of the world in which endless energy and activities are insisted upon, but no private life with God.

We have the most generous immigration policy, but what is a concern is when illegal immigrants come and undermine a variety of the systems that work in order to make our society function.

I can say pretty assuredly that most churches don't set out to control or hurt people. And most don't. But it does happen. Over time, churches can change and begin to place a higher value on their systems and programs than on the people they are called to serve.

The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it. The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development.

The 'last issue of history' will be a conflict between 'Atheism and its countless forms and Calvinism. The other systems will be crushed as the half-rotten ice between two great bergs.

This impotence of "systems" is a main reason why Jesus did not send his students out to start governments or even churches as we know them today, which always strongly convey some elements of a human system. They were, instead, to establish beachheads of his person, word, and power in the midst of a failing and futile humanity. They were to bring the presence of the kingdom and its King into every corner of human life simply by fully living in the kingdom with him.

Christian spiritual formation is inescapably a matter of recognizing in ourselves the idea systems of evil that govern the present age and respective culture, as well as those that constitute life away from God.

It is very difficult to evolve by altering the deep fabric of life; any change there is likely to be lethal. But fundamental change can be accomplished by the addition of new systems on top of old ones…Thus evolution by addition and the functional preservation of the preexisting structure must occur for one of two reasons-either the old function is required as well as the new one, or there is no way of bypassing the old system that is consistent with survival.

Many pseudoscientific and New Age belief systems emerge out of dissatisfaction with conventional values and perspectives—and are therefore themselves a kind of skepticism.

Never in all history has man had to face such terrible dangers. He is at the point where he is no longer sure of being able to control the situation. The economic, political, and military systems he has established have turned against him and imposed themselves upon him.