Quotes About Unity

Only in Jesus Christ are we one, only through him are we bound together.

We can never achieve this 'wholeness' simply by ourselves, but only together with others…

Where is love more glorified than where she dwells in the midst of her enemies?

In Christ we are invited to participate in the reality of God and the reality of the world at the same time, the one not without the other.

Christian brotherhood is not an ideal which we must realize; it is rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate.

Here all fear of one another, all timidity about praying freely in one's own words in the presence of others may be put aside where in all simplicity and soberness the common, brotherly prayer is lifted to God by one of the brethren. But likewise all comment and criticism must cease whenever words of prayer howsoever halting are offered in the name of Jesus Christ. It is in fact the most normal thing in the common Christian life to pray together.

Christian marriage is marked by discipline and self-denial. Christ is the Lord even of marriage.

The more clearly we learn to recognize that the ground and strength and promise of all our community is in Jesus Christ alone, the more calmly we will learn to think about our community and pray and hope for it.

How could one person pray the prayer of the community without being held up and supported in prayer by the community itself? At precisely this point every word of criticism must be transformed into more faithful intercession and mutual help. How easily a community can split apart if this is not done!

As far as we are concerned, there is no dislike, no personal tension, no disunity or strife that cannot be overcome by intercessory prayer. Intercessory prayer is the purifying bath into which the individual and the community must enter every day.

It is the voice of the church that is heard in singing together. It is not I who sing, but the church. However, as a member of the church, I may share in its song. Thus all true singing together must serve to widen our spiritual horizon. It must enable us to recognize our small community as a member of the great Christian church [Christenheit] on earth and must help us willingly and joyfully to take our place in the song of the church with our singing, be it feeble or good. God's

He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.

The purity of unison singing, unaffected by alien motives of musical techniques, the clarity, unspoiled by the attempt to give musical art an autonomy of its own apart from the words, the simplicity and frugality, the humaneness and warmth of this way of singing is the essence of all congregational singing. This

Singing together [das gemeinsame Lied] joins the praying of the Psalms and the reading of the Scriptures. In this, the voice of the church is heard in praise, thanksgiving, and intercession.

To be conformed to the one who has become human—that is what being really human means.[77.]

The Scriptures speak of three kinds of community at the table that Jesus keeps with his own: the daily breaking of bread together at meals, the breaking of bread together at the Lord's Supper, and the final breaking of bread together in the reign of God.

The believer need not feel any shame when yearning for the physical presence of other Christians, as if one were still living too much in the flesh. A human being is created as a body; the Son of God appeared on earth in the body for our sake and was raised in the body.

A Christian fellowship lives and exists by the intercession of its members for one another, or it collapses.

From this it follows that the Body of Christ is the place of acceptance, the place of atonement and peace between God and man. God finds man in the Body of Christ, and man finds himself accepted by God in that same body.

Holy Scripture is more than a watchword. It is also more than 'light for today'. It is God's revealed Word for all men, for all times. Holy Scripture does not consist of individual passages; it is a unit and is intended to be used as such.

Every attempt to save the West that excludes one of the Western peoples [Völker] is condemned to failure.[46]

The Roman church's unmistakable claim is that there is only one church and only one faith and that Christendom needs a visible head, a chief shepherd, to guide the church and to care for the faithful with fatherly care. The longing for a lost Western empire, longing for the corpus christianum in which emperor and pope together are guardians of the unity of the Christian West, cannot fade away as long as there is a papacy.

He who holds his tongue in check controls both mind and body (James 3.2ff.). Thus it must be a decisive rule of every Christian fellowship that each individual is prohibited from saying much that occurs to him.

There is only one church, the church of faith ruled by the word of Jesus Christ alone. This is the true catholic church that has never disappeared and is still concealed in the church of Rome. It is the body of Christ—corpus Christi. It is the true unity of the West.