Quotes about Church

Christians should emphatically be campaigning for justice for the poor - but the Church is not a campaign.

In the Church of Jesus Christ there can and should be no non-theologians.

Theology is not a private subject for theologians only. Nor is it a private subject for professors. Fortunately, there have always been pastors who have understood more about theology than most professors. Nor is theology a private subject of study for pastors. Fortunately, there have repeatedly been congregation members, and often whole congregations, who have pursued theology energetically while their pastors were theological infants or barbarians. Theology is a matter for the Church.

That the zeal for God's honor is also a dangerous passion, that the Christian must bring with him the courage to swim against the tide instead of with it... accept a good deal of loneliness, will perhaps be nowhere so clear and palpable as in the church, where he would so much like things to be different. Yet he cannot and he will not refuse to take this risk and pay this price... he belongs where the reformation of the church is underway or will again be underway.

Are you saved?" asks the fundamentalist. "I am redeemed," answers the Catholic, "and like the apostle Paul I am working out my salvation in fear and trembling, with hopeful confidence—but not with a false assurance—and I do all this as the Church has taught, unchanged, from the time of Christ.

There are not one hundred people in the United States who hate The Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they wrongly perceive the Catholic Church to be.

The confession of the church touching Jesus Christ can never be a knowledge such that, with it, the church can elevate itself above the world. It is precisely within the church that people will have to remind themselves that this knowledge is a gift and a miracle which did not arise out of flesh and blood.

The Church's objectivity is not subjectivized by the affirmation that the only framework in which the Church can remain the Church of the Lord is the framework of faith, prayer, obedience and subjection.

Faith looks away from itself to Christ ... sola fide (by faith alone) and sola gratia (by grace alone) ... mean the same thing ... let the sound of sola fide-sola gratia ring in the life of the Church. Let it be a warning against the pride of the treacherous heart.

The church's ... certainty is bound to certain norms and ... a feeling of subjective certainty does not guarantee irrefutable certainty ... it is not the certainty, but the truth in the certainty that makes us free ... there is a way of understanding Holy Scripture that does not estrange us from the gospel.

Over and over the question addressed to Jesus arises in the history of the church: 'Lord, will those who are saved be few?' Jesus' answer seems so non-committal, so evasive: 'Strive to enter by the narrow door' (Luke 13:23f.). But this evasiveness is only apparent. This is the answer to this question. As long as we see only in a mirror, in riddles, many questions will remain unanswered, But this question has been answered, once for all time.

Organized Christianity that fails to make a disturbance is dead.