Quotes About Church

A great boob he is to pit himself against a holy Father and a bishop of the Church, with the very House of God next door. The nerve of him!

Elizabeth is a good model for those of us who have inherited a church that's rich in wisdom but feeling spent. Can we who are older greet emergent experimenters with attentiveness and zeal? This is not a matter of ceding spiritual ground to the young, but of joining our vitality to theirs. Elizabeth was just as pregnant as Mary with something new.

How one in the modern world views Jesus's miraculous actions is irrelevant. All that can be known is how the people of his time viewed them. And therein lies the historical evidence. For while debates raged within the early church over who Jesus was—a rabbi? the messiah? God incarnate?—there was never any debate, either among his followers or his detractors, about his role as an exorcist and miracle worker.

Three centuries of early Christian and Jewish documentation, not to mention the nearly unanimous opinion of contemporary scholars, recognize James the brother of Jesus as the head of the first Christian community.... Why then has James been almost wholly excised from the New Testament and his role in the early church displaced by Peter and Paul in the imaginations of most modern Christians?

Because the concept of the Trinity is not explicitly mentioned in the New Testament (the term was coined by one of the oldest and most formidable church fathers, Tertullian of Carthage, early in the third century C.E.), it was neither widely adopted nor universally construed by the early Christian communities.

there is no mistaking the tension that exists in the gospels between how the early church viewed Jesus and how Jesus seems to view himself.

The choice for the early church was clear: either Jesus was just another failed messiah, or what the Jews of Jesus's time expected of the messiah was wrong and had to be adjusted

plan yet, Jaynes." She grimaced. Probably because she hadn't had one. "Just get as far away from the church as you can," she instructed grimly, her satin gown hissing against the leather as she shifted into a move comfortable position. Eyes darting nervously between the road and the rearview mirror, her timid driver

Oh golly, Brer Fox, your forthright assertion—that evolutionary biology disproves the idea of a creator God—jeopardises the teaching of biology in science class, since teaching that would violate the separation of church and state!' Right. You also ought to soft-pedal physiology, since it declares virgin birth impossible

The history-deniers themselves are among those I am trying to reach in this book. But, perhaps more importantly, I aspire to arm those are not history-deniers but know some - perhaps members of their own family or church - and find themselves inadequately prepared to argue the case.

By the way, it had to happen – a Great Schism has already occurred, resulting in the Reformed Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.35

A colleague points out to me that immigrants, uprooted from the stability and comfort of an extended family in Europe, could well have embraced a church as a kind of kin-substitute on alien soil. It is an interesting idea, worth researching further.

Imagine members of an art appreciation society pleading in court that they 'believe' they need a hallucinogenic drug in order to enhance their understanding of Impressionist or Surrealist paintings. Yet, when a church claims an equivalent need, it is backed by the highest court in the land. Such is the power of religion as a talisman.

I'm kind of grateful to the Anglican tradition for its benign tolerance... I suppose I'm a cultural Anglican and I see evensong in a country church through much the same eyes as I see a village cricket match on the village green. I have a certain love for it.

Why at the beginning of things is there always light? Dorrigo Evans' earliest memories were of sun flooding a church hall in which he sat with his mother and grandmother. A wooden church hall. Blinding light and him toddling back and forth, in and out of its transcendent welcome, into the arms of women. Women who loved him. Like entering the sea and returning to the beach. Over and over.

He didn't go to church. He read The Times and the Telegraph. He had been friendly and polite with me, but also sarcastic and rude; mainly, I would say, indifferent. He seemed to be cross with life.

Oh, there was a wedding all right. Did I mention that my sister didn't show up at the church either, Mr. Clayborne?

One of the characteristics of early modern thought was a tendency to assume binary contrasts. In an attempt to define phenomena more exactly, categories of experience that had once co-inhered were now set off against each other: faith and reason, intellect and emotion, and church and state.

the religion of compassion is followed only by a minority; most religious people are content with decorous worship in synagogue, church, temple and mosque.

Do unto others' is an unnatural, inhuman behavior. You can understand why so many churches and churchgoers say it but so few achieve it. It goes against something fundamental in our natures. And this, then, is the human tragedy—that the common humanity we share is fundamentally based on the denial of a common shared humanity.

Church Parking Only. Violaters will be baptized.

the Church should be the place where a word reverberates right into the world.

The Christian Church does not exist in Heaven, but on earth and in time.

The church speaks finally in that it prays for the world.