Quotes About Society

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.

I see the confusion of politics and religion as one of the greatest barriers to grace.

Christians obscured the good news by their efforts to restore morality to the broader culture?

When the church has occasion to set the rules for all society, it often veers toward the extremism

in John Adams' words, "Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.

every year the church in the United States draws closer and closer to the situation faced by the New Testament church: an embattled minority living in a pluralistic, pagan society.

Democracy requires us to recognize others' rights even when we fundamentally disagree with them. It requires a civility in which I respect a person's ultimate worth and seek to persuade but not to coerce. For this reason modern democracy grew out of Christian soil. We must exercise the skill of ethical surgeons in deciding which moral principles apply to society at large and how best to apply them.

How can Christians dispense grace in a society that seems to be veering away from God?

Western powers have learned a related and painful lesson in Iraq and Afghanistan: change imposed by force rarely produces the desired results. Likewise, a faith that matters grows best from the ground up, working its way through society gradually, without coercion.

The church works best as a separate force, a conscience to society that keeps itself at arm's length from the state. The closer it gets, the less effectively it can challenge the surrounding culture and the more perilously it risks losing its central message. Jesus left his followers the command to make disciples from all nations. We have no charge to "Christianize" the United States or any other country — ?an impossible goal in any case.

The church works best as a force of resistance, a conscience to society that keeps itself at arm's length from the state. The closer it gets, the less effectively it can challenge the surrounding culture and the more perilously it risks losing its central message.

The gospel transforms culture by permeating it like yeast, and long after the people abandon belief they tend to live by habits of the soul. Once salted and yeasted, society is difficult to un-salt and un-yeast.

Our society arbitrarily defines health as the capacity for work and the capacity for enjoyment, but "true health is something quite different. True health is the strength to live, the strength to suffer, and the strength to die. Health is not a condition of my body; it is the power of my soul to cope with the varying condition of that body.

Unfortunately, most of my secular friends would agree with Bill Gates, who considers religion a waste of time: "There's a lot more I could be doing on Sunday morning," he told an interviewer. They view the church not as a change agent that can affect all of society but as a place where like-minded people go to feel better about themselves.

To gain the hearing of a post-Christian society already skeptical about religion will require careful strategy. We must, in Jesus' words, be wise as serpents and harmless as doves. I fear that our clumsy pronouncements, our name-calling, our stridency — ?in short, our lack of grace — ?has proved so damaging that society will no longer look to us for the guidance it needs.

A similar cycle has recurred throughout church history. Christians present an attractive counterculture until they become the dominant culture. Then they divert from their mission, join the power structure, and in the process turn society against them. Rejected, they retreat into a minority subculture, only to start the cycle all over again.

Según Abraham Heschel, la sociedad antigua apreciaba tres cosas por encima de todo: la sabiduría, la salud y el poder. (¿Ha cambiado algo desde entonces?) Los profetas hebreos atacaban esos tres valores, porque cualquiera de ellos podía convertirse en ídolo.

Rather than looking back nostalgically on a time when Christians wielded more power, I suggest another approach: that we regard ourselves as subversives operating within the broader culture.

No society in history has attempted to live without a belief in the sacred, not until the modern West.

For a society that seems adrift, without moorings, I know of no better place to drop an anchor of faith.

In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry. – Owen Barfield

There are women that men marry and there are women that men don't, Anne pronouned. And you are the sort of mistress a man doesn't bother to marry. Sons or no sons. Yes, Mary said. I expect your right. But there clearly is a third sort and that is the woman that men neither marry or take as their mistress. Woman that go home ...alone for Xmas. And thats seems to be you my dear sister. Good day.

never have imagined that she would imprison a woman about to give birth for doing nothing worse than marrying the young man she loves.

That's how it is for women," I said, stung into honesty. "It's not what one would choose—I grant you that. But women are the very toys of fortune.