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Posts in "Quotes and Notes"

Your Yes to God demands your No to all injustice, to all evil, to all lies, to all oppression and violation of the weak and the poor, to all godlessness and mocking of the holy. Your Yes to God demands a brave No to everything that will ever hinder you from serving God alone, whether it be your profession, your property, your house, your honor before the world. Faith means decision.

  • Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Gift of Faith, 1938

Diving into this text seems appropriate at this point in calendar…

Currently reading: America’s God by Mark A. Noll 📚

I am going to be writing through some things from this book, The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt 📚.

I think Haidt has much to say to help us understand the moment we find ourselves in.

A century later, Christian teacher Origen challenged the Caesarean Christians of his time not to blur the powers. "For you who are redeemed by Christ... a physical sword has been removed from your hands... In its place the 'sword of the Spirit' has been given and you must seize it." For Origen, Christians are to fight the evil powers by means of *prayers and fasts, justice and piety, gentleness, chastity and all the virtues of self control."

Currently reading: Reckoning with Power by David E. Fitch 📚

“Failure is the mark of a life well lived. In turn, the only way to live without failure is to be of no use to anyone.”

Currently reading: Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson 📚

I just finished reading Jesus and the Powers by NT Wright and Michael Bird it was challenging and encouraging in all the right ways. I am going to do a little write up on it soon.

Finished reading: Jesus and the Powers by N. T. Wright 📚

Do you ever read a book so timely it is almost overwhelming? Something that grabs you by the soul and says, “LOOK!”

I am experiencing that right now with this little book.

Currently reading: The Tears of Things by Richard Rohr 📚

Currently reading: Jesus and the Powers by N. T. Wright 📚

“Perhaps the single greatest threat is not the rise of secularism or the emptying of churches, but the apathy and indifference of the churches that are still here.”

I just bumped into this quote:

“When the Greeks got the gospel, they turned it into a philosophy;

when the Romans got it, they turned it into a government;

when the Europeans got it, they turned it into a culture;

and when the Americans got it, they turned it into a business.” Richard Halverson

During the 1933 Prussian Synod Dietrich Bonhoeffer offered multiple theses to challenge the “Aryan Paragraph.” The “German Christians” were those aligning with the Nazi party, “We,” was the nascent Confessing Church.

Currently reading: The Bonhoeffer Reader by Michael P. DeJonge 📚

The German Christians say: The German church people can no longer endure communion with Jews, who have done them so much harm politically. We answer: This is the very point where it must be made crystal clear: here is where we are tested as to whether we know what the church is. Here, where the Jewish Christian whom I don't like is sitting next to me among the faithful, this is precisely where the church is. If that is not understood, then those who think they cannot bear it should themselves go and form their own church, but never, ever, can they be allowed to exclude someone else. The continuity of the church is in the church where the Jewish Christians remain.&10;Michael P. DeJonge, Clifford J. Green&10;The Bonhoeffer Reader&10;#kindlequotes

Here’s the second of the theses that Bonhoeffer penned to challenge the Aryan Paragraph in 1933. Again, it reads as very timely for our moment in history.

Currently reading: The Bonhoeffer Reader by Michael P. DeJonge 📚

A quote by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “The German Christians say:&10;We don't want to take away from Jewish Christians the right to be Christians, but they should organize their own churches. 6 It is only a matter of the outward form of the church.” M A quote by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “We answer: (1) The issue of belonging to the Christian community is never an outward, organizational matter, but is of the very substance of the church.&10;Church is the congregation that is called together by the Word.&10;Membership in a congregation is a question not of organization but of the essence of the church.”A quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “(2) To make such a basic distinction between Christianity and the church, or between Christ and the church, is wrong. There is no such thing as the idea of the church, on one hand, and its outward appearance, on the other, but rather the empirically experienced church is the church of Christ itself. Thus to exclude people forcibly from the church-community at the empirical level means excluding them from Christ's church itself. That part of the church that excludes another is, of course, the one that is truly shut out-that is the particular danger of the German Christians' undertaking.”A quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “(3) When the church's organizers exclude anyone, they are interfering with the authority of the sacraments. Here in our church, Jewish Christians have been accepted, by the will of God, through the sacrament of baptism. Through baptism they are joined together with our church, and our church with them, by indissoluble ties. If the church that has baptized Jewish Christians now throws them out, it makes baptism into a ceremony, which implies no obligation on its part.”