Quotes About Church

The feudal system was the most perfect social system in history. It even had a safety valve, to release any pressure of energy in it. An exceptional, ambitious, and gifted boy might get his master's permission to learn to read and write, and enter The Church. Church discipline was strict, but The Church represented the spiritual world, and in it, all men were equal. Any priest might become the Pope. A serf's son did become a Pope.

Social reform held a sacred quality for the women involved; it equaled practical Christianity, the living out of the ethics of Jesus. Most reformers saw Christianity as the foundation of, not an impediment to, their work. Some also felt led to critique the church so that its message and its practice would be brought more closely together.

I have never quite managed to see how we can make sense of the sacramental life of the Church without a theology of the risen body; and I have never managed to see how to put together such a theology without belief in the empty tomb. If a corpse clearly marked 'Jesus of Nazareth' turned up, I should save myself a lot of trouble and become a Quaker.

Then, too, revival is not something that God does firstly among the unconverted, but among His people.

If anything is to be done, one must try to introduce Christianity into Christendom.

Most Christians have at some point faced the question, "Which church should I attend?" After reading Attack Upon Christendom the question becomes, "Is it OK for a Christian to go to church?

If a pastor's activity in the church is merely a once-a-week attempt to tow the congregation's cargo ship a little closer to eternity, the whole thing comes to nothing. A human life, unlike a cargo ship, cannot lie in the same place until the next Sunday.

Later that morning the memorial service for his friend Bruce Chatwin was to be held at the Orthodox church on Moscow Road in Bayswater.

An average Christian, in an average church, listen to an average Sunday sermon has achieved a level of arrogance simply unimaginable in scientific discourse -- and there have been some extraordinary arrogant scientists.

When we consider that so few generations had passed since the church left off disemboweling innocent men before the eyes of their families, burning old women alive in public squares, and torturing scholars to the point of madness for merely speculating about the nature of the stars, it is perhaps little wonder that it failed to think anything had gone terribly amiss in Germany during the war years.

secularism is simply a commitment to keeping religion out of politics and public policy. Your religion is your business, and my religion, or lack of one, is mine. A willingness to build a wall of separation between church and state is what defines secularism—but, as you point out, behind that wall one may be a full-blown religious fanatic, so long as one doesn't try to impose the fruits of one's fanaticism on others.

All those books…which the church regards as sacred and canonical were written with all their parts under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Now, far from admitting the coexistence of error, Divine inspiration by itself excludes all error, and that also of necessity, since God, the Supreme Truth, must be incapable of teaching error.

Until Jesus comes, his resurrection glory in the church is a matter of strength made perfect in suffering.

The strength of the church is not the strength of its institutions but the authenticity of its witness.

Neglect of private prayer is the locust which devours the strength of the church.

To be a leader in the Church has always required strength and faith beyond the merely human.

The Church is like a great ship being pounded by the waves of life's different stresses. Our duty is not to abandon ship, but to keep her on her course.

There are pockets of the church that will "give up," and reap a bountiful harvest. They are going to have huge success, like the church has never experienced since the Book of Acts.

The absolutely highest stage of intercourse with God is the indwelling of the Holy Ghost in the New Testament Church, when man's individuality is not superseded nor suppressed, but transformed, and thus conformed to Him in spiritual fellowship.

So this was all which these Pharisees and Scribes could see in the miracle of Christ's feeding the Multitude--that it had not been done according to Law! Most strange as it may seem, yet in the past history of the Church, and, perhaps, sometimes also in the present, this has been the only thing which some men have seen in the miraculous working of the Christ!

Humanae Vitae, or our own bishops

It would be a different Church if I were running it." And so lifted the burden of that terrible morning with some laughter.

They're all in church," he said and saw the flush of guilt, or of wind, on her broad cheeks. The wind lifted his own thinning hair—those long strands he combed back over his crown—made it stand, briefly, on end. Something done right—at least so far—this suggestion of his, whispered to the ceiling this morning, his hand on her thigh. That they skip Mass just this once and head to the beach. Some weeks ago, a tropical wave had slipped off

Sister St. Saviour did, of course. But the woman, childless, stubborn, coming to the close of her life, had a mad heart. Mad for mercy, perhaps, mad for her own authority in all things—a trait Annie had come to love and admire—but mad nonetheless. Riding home from the cemetery, Sister St. Saviour had said, "It would be a different Church if I were running it.