Quotes About Authority

As James Madison put it, because men are not angels—because they can (and do) rob, rape, kill, and conquer—they need a government to restrain and protect them, an "institution to make people do their duty.

But since such an institution is made up of imperfect human beings with the same unruly passions as anyone else, "In framing a government of men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself."3

We often hear the Church referred to as a democracy, when in reality, instead of being a church where the body is governed by officers elected by the members, the Church is a theocracy, where God directs his church through representatives chosen by him.

Caesar's messengers didn't go round the world saying, 'Caesar is lord, so if you feel you need to have a Roman-empire kind of experience, you might want to submit to him'.

I always thought education was learning to think for yourself," Keating said. Nolan laughed. "At these boys' ages? Not on your life! Tradition John! Discipline." He patted Keating on the shoulder patronizingly. "Prepare them for college, and the rest will take care of itself.

Whenever you see, in an official lectionary, the command to omit two or three verses, you can normally be sure that they contain words of judgment. Unless, of course, they are about sex.

Traditions tell us where we have come from. Scripture itself is a better guide as to where we should now be going.

The day the church can no longer say, "We must obey God rather than human beings" (Acts 5:29), it ceases to be the church.

think about the way God rules. He doesn't do it by sending in the tanks. He does it by calling servants.

Here we have it. YHWH is in charge and will establish his own rule over the rest of the world from his throne in Zion. But he will do this through his "anointed," through the one he calls "my son.

Third, when God is king, the result is proper justice, real equity, the removal of all corruption and oppression.

the point about God's authority is that the whole Bible is about God establishing his kingdom on earth as in heaven, completing (in other words) the project begun but aborted in Genesis 1–3.

And we must not confuse the idea of God speaking, in this or any other way, with the notion of authority. Authority, particularly when we locate it within the notion of God's Kingdom, is much more than that. It is the sovereign rule of God sweeping through creation to judge and to heal. It is the powerful love of God in Jesus Christ, putting sin to death and launching new creation. It is the fresh, bracing and energizing wind of the Spirit.

This is typical of what the New Testament declares: God is king, and the kingdoms of the world are thereby demoted.

But the demonstration of the power of Jesus' name took place, not in the Temple, but outside the gate. God is on the move, not confined

Think of Oscar Wilde's wonderful scene in his play Salome, when Herod hears reports that Jesus of Nazareth has been raising the dead. "I do not wish him to do that," says Herod. "I forbid him to do that. I allow no man to raise the dead. This man must be found and told that

This emerges clearly in the gospels, where Jesus's "authority" consists both in healing power and in a different kind of teaching, all of which the gospel writers—and Jesus himself—understood as part of the breaking-in of God's Kingdom.

In what sense is the Bible authoritative in the first place? How can the Bible be appropriately understood and interpreted? How can its authority, assuming such appropriate interpretation, be brought to bear on the church itself, let alone on the world?

It has to do with Jesus's own sense of vocation and with the redefinition of power itself which he modeled, embodied, and exemplified.

The reason we commit "sins" is because, to some extent at least, we are failing to worship the one true God and are worshipping instead some feature or force within the created order. When we do that, we are abdicating our responsibilities, handing to the "powers" in question the genuine human authority that ought to be ours.

When humans sinned, they abdicated their vocation to "rule" in the way that they, as image-bearers, were supposed to. They gave away their authority to the powers of the world, which meant ultimately to death itself.

What Jesus did and said was designed to give a decisive answer, in deeds as well as words, to the question, What would it look like if God was running things?

Called to responsibility and authority within and over the creation, humans have turned their vocation upside down, giving worship and allegiance to forces and powers within creation itself. The name for this is idolatry.

The early Christians believed, on the authority of Jesus himself, that the original vision for creation, and for Human within it, had been recaptured and restored through Jesus's inauguration of God's sovereign rule. What Jesus did and said was designed to give a decisive answer, in deeds as well as words, to the question, What would it look like if God was running things?