Sentences with phrase «viewing church as an institution»

I was not aware of this history of the word, and you are probably right that it has led to people viewing church as an institution.

Not exact matches

In this view, institutions such as the church have tended to look at the media instrumentally, ie.

Too often the debate between a Bernard of Clairvaux and a Peter Abelard is read in terms of the latter's so - called heterodoxy when it was just as much about Bernard's progressive vision of a church disentangled from the control of secular princes over against Abelard's more conservative view of an ordered relation of patronage and rule between secular rulers and sacred institutions.

From the point of view of civilization the question of the church seems often to be regarded as that of an institution which has failed to adjust itself to the world and which is making desperate efforts to overcome its maladjustments.

In this context Hans Urs Von Balthasar observed that since the Council the Church has become more than ever a male institution, which without the Marian dimension threatens to become inhuman and irrelevant.9 It is essential that we rediscover the feminine, Marian dimension of the Church because viewing the Church as a mere organisational or institutional entity not only impoverishes her from within but also «severely diminishes her authentic religious appeal and misleads women who are seeking a legitimate and fruitful role».10 The loss of this feminine dimension of the Church gives rise to a false feminism in the Church - one which expresses itself in appeals for the ordination of woman.

Christian acquiescence in this fate can be measured in any number of ways: by the extent to which the Church renounces her inherent «platonism,» thinking and speaking in the language of psychology, sociology, economics, and politics rather than philosophy (metaphysics) and theology; by the tendency to view the Church not first as sacrament transcending political order, but as a mere mediating institution within that order; by the «political» or «clerical» temptation to equate true ecclesial reform with institutional or curial reform.

Perhaps a broader view of the church as an organization serving people's spiritual needs would speak more powerfully to the laity than does the picture of an institution clutching its «patent.»

If you view the web as the institutional church — a tool for the spider to catch unsuspecting victims — then the dark, looming spider must be the ones who «weave» and «maintain» the sticky institution.