Sentences with phrase «ecclesiastical christians»

Irony besets every action of that strange creature man, and we can only wonder that the ecclesiastical Christian should have ceased to speak about damnation in a century in which guilt and damnation have become an overwhelming motif in so many of the most creative expressions of consciousness and experience.

While the religious or the ecclesiastical Christian has increasingly become incapable of speaking about damnation, the radical Christian, who has been willing to confront the totally alien form of God which has been manifest in our time, has known the horror of Satan and Hell, and can all too readily speak the language of guilt and damnation.

This is precisely the path of the religious or ecclesiastical Christian today, and we might add that this is also the price which now must be paid for choosing the Christian God.

I have written a good bit on what it means to be an «ecclesiastical Christian,» and some say they are puzzled by the phrase.

Whitehead is not, we have admitted, an ecclesiastical Christian, and not a confessional Christian.

Not exact matches

Martyrs and Martyrologies edited by Diana Wood Blackwell, 497 pages, $ 64.95 The story of Christian martyrs of the twentieth century is yet to be told, and one of the merits of this collection of learned essays, consisting of papers read at the Summer 1992 and Winter 1993 meetings of the Ecclesiastical History Society, is that they not only deal with early, medieval, and early - modern martyrs (and ideas about martyrdom), but include several original essays on latter - day martyrs.

Maybe it's a good idea for American Christians to take a sabbatical from traditional church for a few years and focus on how how each individual relates to the teachings and example of Jesus outdisde the influence of ecclesiastical thought control.

It is true that cultural prejudice and human sin has at times in history limited women's place in ecclesiastical life, and Christian civilization has made significant strides in this regard.

The Christian West polarised even further into a moderate form of fundamentalism at one end and, at the other, into a Christian humanism which showed decreasing interest in supporting the ecclesiastical institution.

This also is the reason that every Christian must of necessity be «high church,» not in any denominational sense, not with any ecclesiastical overtones, but simply because to be a Christian at all — as we have defined it — means to be a member of that great community of Christian life and worship and faith which has come to be known as «the church.»

It is of course true that the expressly Christian and ecclesiastical elements are of irreplaceable importance as objective expressions of a grace which is incarnational in structure, and as a source of strength to endure the secular world as a Christian vocation.

For it can hardly be imagined that in the Church parties will come between the lay committees and the individual Christians which will enable the latter to form an opinion on ecclesiastical matters and to select their representatives accordingly.

By means of ecclesiastical history it is possible to prove that there was always a Christian Church with a certain clearly defined doctrine.

Some Christians who are quite sure that they are not Catholics may view that claim as an instance of outrageous ecclesiastical cheekiness, of recruiting by definition people who do not want to be Catholics.

In The Christian Century for October 6, 1971, I hazarded some guesses about «The Shape of the Coming Renewal,» suggesting that the growing awakening among young people was only the leading edge of a glacier that would continue to move in steadily until it dominated the American ecclesiastical landscape.

That the Christian idea of God (reputedly drawn after the pattern of the man who suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried) has all too often been recast in the shape of human dreams of power and glory is a fact of ecclesiastical history which it would be hypocritical to pretend were otherwise.

They assume not only a settled ecclesiastical system in the Church, but also an established body of orthodox beliefs against which to judge heresy and, what is most significant, a collection of Christian Scriptures.

The manner in which «fulfillment theology» has been developed by the Christian church has frequently led to ecclesiastical triumphalism and, in many cases, to anti-Judaism.

It was the explicit belief and claim of each of these presidents, as it had been of White and Gilman at Cornell and Johns Hopkins — and as it would be of Kirkland at Vanderbilt — that the absence of ecclesiastical governance rendered their universities and colleges nondenominational but Christian: indeed, they were freed to be more authentically (and surely more wisely) Christian than before.

Dalit Christians within the church were discriminated against and were denied powers within the ecclesiastical structure.

For American Christians, theology had been redefined as an academic discipline with only tenuous relations to their individual or ecclesiastical experience.

This of course is spoken out of Altizer's conviction that all the Christian past — historical, theological, ecclesiastical, ethical — must be obliterated if incarnation is to be perfectly fulfilled.

Have leaders and congregants become so programmed by ecclesiastical tradition as to be sincere yet misguided in a way that makes Christian community and worship unattractive or even repulsive and not just to people outside of the church.

It appears that there is general though only implicit recognition of the fact that a call to the ministry includes at least these four elements (1) the call to be a Christian, which is variously described as the call to discipleship of Jesus Christ, to hearing and doing of the Word of God, to repentance and faith, et cetera; (2) the secret call, namely, that inner persuasion or experience whereby a person feels himself directly summoned or invited by God to take up the work of the ministry; (3) the providential call, which is that invitation and command to assume the work of the ministry which comes through the equipment of a person with the talents necessary for the exercise of the office and through the divine guidance of his life by all its circumstances; (4) the ecclesiastical call, that is, the summons and invitation extended to a man by some community or institution of the Church to engage in the work of the ministry.

In the case of Christianity, the Gospel moved from the great centres of the Roman Empire such as Antioch or Rome to the places outside of the Roman Empire and Christian communities thus formed were dependent upon the churches in the Roman Empire for their ecclesiastical life.

I. Ecclesiastical Globalization Christians have been interested in globalization from the earliest days of the faith.

Because of such contacts, the St. Thomas Christians were greatly influenced by the ecclesiastical and liturgical practices of the Persian church.

Apart from this ecclesiastical relationship, there were at least two important waves of emigration of groups of Persian Christians to South India, one in the fourth century and the other in the ninth century, which reinforced and strengthened the existing St. Thomas Christian community.

Is the Church of the Latter - Day Saints a Christian ecclesiastical body?

Consequently, Descartes» texts and writings indirectly advance Judeo - Christian beliefs and traditions in a manner acceptable to the ecclesiastical authorities of his time.

The new forms of Christian life and practice that were emerging would provide the ecumenical movement with a concrete credibility well before ecclesiastical formulations would attempt to rise to the occasion.

It will not be found surprising then by those who accept that, if the ages after Christ also fit into the perspective of Christian and ecclesiastical salvation, even though they do not yet belong to the Church in the tangible sociological sense.

To this growing debate on «fulfillment theology» I would add a contribution from a Reformed theological perspective: the thesis that New Testament messianic claims can be abandoned only at the cost of sacrificing crucial aspects of the church's witness to the gospel of the Kingdom, but that Christians do need to abandon a good deal of «fulfillment theology» that finds its source in ecclesiastical triumphalism.

The tractate so called gives instruction in Christian morals and ecclesiastical practice.

As a matter of fact, the concept is not really alien to Christian and ecclesiastical tradition.

The freedom of the Christian man which Luther rewon for the Christian is that which comes from seeing that no arbitrary rule, ecclesiastical law, or abstract principle takes precedence over this concrete necessity and our conscientious response to it.

For the author, the cult of the icon has served to create a cordon sanitaire around the Orthodox churches, allowing them to immure themselves in a gated community of obscurantist ecclesiastical politics and attempted geographical hegemony whereby Western Christians (or Eastern churches in union with Rome) can not exercise their religious rights (and rites) in the lands of traditional Orthodoxy, but the Orthodox bodies are allowed to evangelize at will in the lands of the Western Enlightenment.

The danger of seeing the Holy Spirit simply in the context of Christian life — and, even worse, solely in the context of ecclesiastical experience — is that we narrow intolerably one great aspect of the operation of God in the world.

While the fragmentation of American churches poses obstacles to the kind of ecclesiastical consensus reached in Germany in the 1930s or the Philippines in the 1980s, some kind of convocation of theologically orthodox bodies could presumably join to consider the duty of Christians under the present order.

It is at the point of conflict with the ruling ecclesiastical authorities who tried to silence the witness of Christians to their faith that the question of fidelity to the higher authority of God became most overt.

To be sure, the church succeeded in making the necessary adjustments, but it was difficult to ban a spirit of enlightenment which spread under the influence of foreign cultures upon the Christian civilization and which furthered the growth of skeptical attitudes toward the absolute validity of the ecclesiastical institution of redemption.

There has also been a fear that ecclesiastical control might stifle Christian initiative.

Christian humanism, present to a minor extent in denominations and schools, but widely prevalent in the «latent» church which seems large and important in America, is strong in its devotion to the Son of Man; reliance upon the Son of God is more characteristic of the ecclesiastical institutions and of the majority movement in the community.

Second, they look for Catholic Christian insights (biblical and ecclesiastical) that are also validated by wider moral experience.

The ecclesiastical promulgation of transcendent Christologies, informed by ancient creeds torn out of their historical contexts, is another kind of Babylonian captivity that restrains Christians from entering into a horizontal relationship with the risen Lord and enjoying the ecstatic sense of self - worth that he wills to share by drawing them into his I AM.

Before the past two decades, the vast preponderance of Christian writers on sexuality assumed that the question before them was simply: What does Christianity (the Bible, the tradition, ecclesiastical authority, etc.) say about sexuality?

As to method, the older view was rooted in the traditional ecclesiastical theory of Mark's derivation from Matthew — which modern Synoptic study completely reverses — and it took for granted a conception of «Paulinism» which made the Apostle to the Gentiles responsible for everything in primitive Christianity which could not be squared with a crass, reactionary Christian Judaism; it completely ignored the development of a Gentile type — or types — of Christianity apart from and even prior to the work of Paul.

Great cathedrals were no longer appropriate shapes or models for Christian ecclesiastical institutions.

The Church, especially the ecclesiastical wing of it comprising the formal councils and institutions, has always opposed any Marxist - Christian encounter.

True, we must seek a community going beyond and thus negating everything that is manifest to us as a Christian and ecclesiastical community.