Quotes About Authority

They had one all-important goal: to ensure that church and state maintained sole monopoly over doctrine.

Indeed, the Catholic Church insisted on maintaining Latin as the sole liturgical language until the twentieth century—even though the New Testament had originally been written in Greek.)

Power, then, is the final trap, the ultimate corrupter: the closer religion becomes linked with state power, the further it drifts away from the realm of intellect and spirit and into the realm of the political—with direct implications for state power and authority. The state cannot then be indifferent to theology. When the state's official beliefs and doctrines are challenged, the state's authority itself is challenged—and the state does not look kindly upon it.

There are good men everywhere. Here. Odessa. Even Moscow. Do they count? Does anyone ever listen to them? Yes, of course they do. At the beginning, their voices matter. Without them nothing happens. But afterwards it's different. Afterwards, the only thing that matters is power.

The Emperor tells us that civilization will only achieve perfection when the last stone of the last church falls upon the last priest.

This may play well in certain extreme right- and left-wing political circles. But such unrest exacts a huge price on U.S. credibility abroad in all the challenging arenas summarized here, and in others yet to emerge. Political cannibalism at home will severely undercut the authority and credibility of America's role in the world. It will exacerbate U.S. efforts to manage a range of existing security issues and new ones yet unimagined.

The right hand in Scripture symbolizes power and authority

A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to.

We'll have a public power authority, which will also have the ability to build power or finance power. And more importantly, we'll have more power than our economy provides. All of that will give us leverage we don't have today.

The civil magistrate cannot function without some ethical guidance, without some standard of good and evil. If that standard is not to be the revealed law of God… then what will it be? In some form or expression it will have to be the law of man (or men) - the standard of self-law or autonomy. And when autonomous laws come to govern a commonwealth, the sword is certainly wielded in vain, for it represents simply the brute force of some men's will against the will of other men.

When revealed theology is reduced to an autonomous study of man, when biblical authority is replaced by an unstable human wisdom, when behavior is directed by the descriptions of social science instead of the prescriptions of God's Word, then we have returned to the situation prevailing at the time of the Book of Judges: every man will do what is right in his own eyes.

Whoever first gains the power to impose their own view decides the issue? Isn't that the definition of barbarism?

Any person who wants to govern the world is by definition the wrong person to do it.

God either rules as sovereign in interpretation over *all* areas of life or none.

If no divine law is recognized above the law of the State, then the law of man has become absolute in men's eyes--there is then no logical barrier to totalitarianism.

By starting independently of submission to the truth and direction of Christ's Word, we shall never end our arguments anywhere but independently of Christ.

Humble submission to God's word must precede man's every intellectual pursuit.

We must not defend our message (that Christ's Word is self-attesting and possessing ultimate authority from the Lord) with a method that works counter to it- by claiming an ultimate epistemological standard outside of Christ's Word of truth.

It is important for the apologist who desires to be obedient to the Word of God in defending the faith to pay special attention to the fact that throughout Scripture, God's veracity is not defended, but accepted from the outset on His authority. Unless we have more wisdom than that contained in the revelation of God, we should take the same attitude.

If we will not have inscripturated morality from God as our sociopolitical standard, we have no principle to protect us from those who wish to play god.

All the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are to be found in Christ; thus if one were to try and arrive at the truth apart from commitment to the epistemic authority of Jesus Christ he would be robbed through vain philosophy and deluded by crafty deceit (see Col. 2:3-8).

The believer and the unbeliever recognize two different final standards for living including that aspect of living known as thinking, reasoning, and arguing. They are divided by their ultimate commitments, either to Christ or to some other authority (usually themselves).

A person cannot have it both ways regarding his final standard or ultimate reference point. He presupposes and reasons either according to the authority of God or according to some other authority. Attempting to be neutral about God's ultimate authority in determining what we know is a result of a bad attitude toward God's ultimate authority. It is a way of saying that one does not really need the work of Christ to save him in his reasoning.

Christ does not settle for a part-time or restricted reign as King. He demands obedience in all things from us, and His aim is to subdue all resistance - of any nature (internal or external) - to His rule.