Quotes About Church

the church is to find its identity and vocation by recognizing its role within the cosmic drama of God's reconciliation of the world to himself.

One consequence of this hermeneutical guideline is that interpretation of the New Testament cannot be performed by isolated individuals; the embodiment of the Word happens in the body of Christ, the church. Hermeneutics is necessarily a communal activity.29

For the church, it is perhaps important to know that the obedience of faith was lived out in history by the flesh-and-blood man Jesus, for his example teaches us that to trust in the power of God over history is not to trust in vain.

There can be no understanding of the church as community in New Testament terms apart from the prior reality of God's election of a covenant people, as narrated in the Old Testament.

All actions, however ostensibly spiritual, must meet the criterion of constructive impact on the church community.

Rarely, however, has the church fundamentally questioned whether military service is consistent with Christian service

One reason that the church has become so bitterly divided over moral issues is that the community of faith has uncritically accepted the categories of popular U.S. discourse about these topics, without subjecting them to sustained critical scrutiny in light of a close reading of the Bible.

To be sure, Paul hopes for the ultimate triumph of God's grace over all human unbelief and disobedience (Rom. 11:32, Phil. 2:9–11). Until that eschatological consummation, however, Paul speaks only to the community of faith. He articulates no basis for a general ethic applicable to those outside the church.

The question that Luke-Acts puts to the church—then and now—is not "Are you reforming society?" but rather "Is the power of the resurrection at work among you?

The church embodies the power of the resurrection in the midst of a not-yet-redeemed world.

When the identity of the community is understood in these terms, participation in any form of ethnic division or hatred becomes unthinkable, and ethnic division within the church becomes nothing other than a denial of the truth of the gospel. 'That is why racism is a heresy. One of the church's most urgent pragmatic tasks in the 1990s is to form communities that seek reconciliation across ethnic and racial lines.

Where Christ erecteth his church, the devil in the same churchyard will have his chapel.

Many false prophets are gone out. Are gone out, that is, are manifest. Before, they lay hid in the Church, but now, by their schisms, they have made themselves known.

Touching the causes why false prophets, with so great danger of their souls, do depart from the Church: if we respect them as they are indeed, I can say nothing, but as it is contained in the old distinction: "they were in the Church, but not of the Church."

Nay, in my opinion, you ought to be ashamed to open your mouths ever hereafter against the present government of the Church, and for the new platform, until you can be contented to be so far from coveting the goods of the Church, as that you are both willing and ready to deliver out of your hand such spoils and preys thereof as you have already.

True it is that Almighty God, if it had stood with His good pleasure, could easily have brought it to pass, in spite of the Devil, that there should never have been any such false prophets or heresies amongst us. But He saw it not to be expedient; for, as the Apostle saith, by His directions, "There must be heresies in the Church ... that faith, by having temptation, might also have probation."

We are members of the world and of the church, and must labour to do good to many; and therefore we have greater work to do on earth, than merely securing our own salvation.

We are members of the world and of the church, and must labour to do good to many; and therefore we have greater work to do on earth, than merely securing our own salvation. We are intrusted with our Master's talents for his service, to do our best in our places, to propagate his truth and grace, to edify his church, honour his cause, and promote the salvation of as many souls as we can. All this is to be done on earth, if we would secure the end of all in heaven.

The door of the visible church is incomparably wider than the door of heaven (522)[.]

If only preaching be necessary, let us have none but preachers. What needs there, then, such a stir about government? But if discipline (in its place) be necessary too, what is it but enmity to men's salvation to exclude it?

Esteem the church fathers and other writers, but value none of them as equivalent to the word of God.

The universal church of Christ must consist of individual churches guided by their own overseers, and every Christian must be a member of one of these churches (except those who are away on business or travel or are in other similar cases of necessity). Though a minister is an officer in the universal church, yet in a special manner he is the overseer of that particular church committed to his charge.

If our rest was here, most of God's providences must be useless. Should God lose the glory of his church's miraculous deliverances, and of the fall of his enemies, that men may have their happiness here?

I know necessity may cause the Church to tolerate the weak; but woe to us if we tolerate and indulge our own weakness.