Sentences with phrase «idolatrous ways»

The authors are clear that the church can easily use its internal history in distorted, complacent, self - justifying, and idolatrous ways.

One danger that besets pastoral counseling is that it will lose its awareness of the spiritual element in all healing and will become infatuated, in an idolatrous way, with the human cleverness of psychology.

The sinful distortions of our lives and consciousness twist and divert our longings and aspirations in such an idolatrous way that we are forced at times to distrust them completely.

Not exact matches

The best way to meet Boswell's argument is to grant for a moment that the O.T. prohibitions reflect idolatrous worship practices, that homosexual acts are wrong because they are used liturgically in false worship of false gods and goddesses.

We can sum up what actually did become the way of Christian living in the ancient world by saying that the Christians lived in the economic, political and social orders of their time seeking new patterns but conforming to the general requirements of the common life, and accepting constituted authority except when it required idolatrous worship.

The Bible itself can be a safeguard against theology as a system becoming idolatrous or an end unto itself, since the Bible itself is not what we would call theological in its style.It speaks about God faithfully in pastoral, ministerial, and argumentative contexts, not in systematic or historical or expository ways.

We moderns who have not been raised in the law do something similar when we return to legalism or religion or some other means of idolatrous coping even though we know it is wrong and not God «s way.

Niebuhr's message to a generation that has become idolatrous in its worship of «the American way of life» is his reminder that «we must fight their falsehood with our truth, but we must also fight the falsehood within our truth.»

As others much brighter than I am have said, all speech about God is in some way idolatrous.

What is called for is some way to transcend or transform the idolatrous governments of the world and to develop a goal and a plan for making the earth into a proper home for mankind.

It is an acknowledgement that a desert of ignorance exists in the midst of every oasis of understanding... This (approach) is not then some temporary place of uncertainty on the way to spiritual maturity, but rather is something that operates within faith as a type of heat - inducing friction that prevents our liquid images of the divine from cooling and solidifying into idolatrous form.»

Also see Stanley Hauerwas, «The Family as a School for Character,» Religious Education 80 (Spring 1985): 272 - 85, for a similar analysis of the way this reasoning about the family in character formation «can too easily turn the family into an idolatrous institution.»

But there is a theological way of making the distinction that brings us quickly to the heart of the matter: false communities are idolatrous.

This may be the ideal for some, but one can not count on it working out that way, primarily because of the presence of various political ideologies which, as I've described in Political Visions and Illusions, tend to take on an idolatrous character and, like all idols, are unwilling to share power with others.

In traditional language it would be idolatrous to trust the body or the unconscious or other people in any unqualified way.