Sentences with phrase «only by divine grace»

But this is mainly because they were predestinarians, and rejected the very idea of human freedom in the name of the claim that we are all slaves to sin, and are freed only by divine grace.

The story of Jacob is supported only by divine grace, only by divine intention and purpose.

Not exact matches

We can become gods, but» as the Church Fathers put it» only by the grace of adoption, for divine immortality does not belong to us by nature.

Both can be combined only by saying that man is exposed to the influence of divine grace, which offers him communion with God, whether he accepts it or not.

But again, and even with the possible implication of divine judgment in the death of Rachel, we see the repeated motif of the Jacob cycle: the tension between sin and divine grace, the expression of faith that Jacob - Israel is saved and redeemed only by the will and purpose of God (35:5), and finally the repetition of the promise and the blessing, and the second account of the changing of Jacob's name to Israel.

Or, to return to a description of the Jacob cycle in terms of tension, it is characterized by a tension between human perversity and divine grace, a tension resolved only in the obvious final inequality of any contest between man and God.

Biographies of outstanding women conforming to the traditional narrative of womanliness or to the spiritual narrative of service can not tell the stories of women's achievements as paradigmatic but only as exceptions to the rule, made possible by mere chance, inscrutable destiny or divine grace.

cit., pp. 201 ff., 222 - 226; Heim, Glaube und Denken, pp. 342 - 349; Will Herberg, Judaism and Modern Man [New York: Farrar, Straus & Young, 1951], pp. 63 - 66, 72 - 79, 96, 101 f. Herberg writes: «The dominion of sin can only be broken by a power not our own, the power of divine grace» [p. 77], and «In the last analysis, the choice is only between love of God and love of self, between a God - centred and self - centred existence» [p. 96].

Ministers also and the laity of the Church will know what is expected of those who hold this office For the present it is possible only to feel after and to describe in sketchy outline what this new conception is, a conception that we may believe is at least as much gift of grace as consequence of sin and perhaps more something produced by historic forces under divine government than the creature of human pride and fickleness.

Barth again and again emphasizes that the church exists as the church not insofar as it possesses some inalienable human form but only as it lives by divine grace.

They argue that, given the nature of things, there are only certain pathways to God and that the forms approved by their special group are the appropriate symbols for representing him and for providing the «means of grace» by which the divine life is mediated to man.