Church And State Quotes

“A final irony has to do with the idea of political responsibility. Christians are urged to vote and become involved in politics as an expression of their civic duty and public responsibility. This is a credible argument and good advice up to a point. Yet in our day, given the size of the state and the expectations that people place on it to solve so many problems, politics can also be a way of saying, in effect, that the problems should be solved by others besides myself and by institutions other than the church. It is, after all, much easier to vote for a politician who champions child welfare than to adopt a baby born in poverty, to vote for a referendum that would expand health care benefits for seniors than to care for an elderly and infirmed parent, and to rally for racial harmony than to get to know someone of a different race than yours. True responsibility invariably costs. Political participation, then, can and often does amount to an avoidance of responsibility.”
― James Davison Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World

“The bad preacher takes the ideas of our own age and tricks them out into the traditional language of Christianity. The core of his thought is merely contemporary; only the superficies is traditional. But your teaching must be timeless at its heart and wear modern dress.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Spiritual power and spiritual authority notoriously shade over into both politics and poetry.”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

“God is wrath and God is mercy. The State is the instrument of his wrath, the Church of his mercy”
― Martin Luther

“Whenever we use our religion, as individuals, or as groups within the church, to act in tandem with political and economic groups that arrest the voice of truth or destroy others, then we are Judas.”
― Megan McKenna, The New Stations of the Cross: The Way of the Cross According to Scripture

“What is even more striking than the negational character of this political culture is the absence of robust and constructive affirmations. Vibrant cultures make space for leisure, philosophical reflection, scientific and intellectual mastery, and artistic and literary expression, among other things. Within the larger Christian community in America, one can find such vitality in pockets here and there. Yet where they do exist, they are eclipsed by the greater prominence and vast resources of the political activists and their organizations. What is more, there are few if any places in the pronouncements and actions of the Christian Right or the Christian Left (none that I could find) where these gifts are acknowledged, affirmed, or celebrated. What this means is that rather than being defined by its cultural achievements, its intellectual and artistic vitality, its service to the needs of others, Christianity is defined to the outside world by its rhetoric of resentment and the ambitions of a will in opposition to others.”
― James Davison Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World

“there was a common understanding that religion generally served the powerful, who manipulated the words of the gods and prophets to justify their greed and lust for power. Yet Christianity comes in numerous guises; mystical to dogmatic; it is used by some as a reason to justify their wars, their oppression and their hatreds. Others use it to oppose those wars and other injustices.”
― Ron Jacobs

“The unholy alliance of religion and politics collaborated in finding Jesus guilty.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Tell It Slant: A Conversation on the Language of Jesus in His Stories and Prayers

“Jesus from the moment he first appears in Galilee is a sign of contradiction, fomenting revolution through telling the truth about the state of the world, the reality of evil, and the eye of God, who judges in a different vein altogether than courts of law, whether they be religious canons, the ecclesiastical courts, or government legal systems.”
― Megan McKenna, The New Stations of the Cross: The Way of the Cross According to Scripture

“Wearing your feelings on your sleeve will end up being a chip on your shoulder.”
― John Paul Warren

“Since the dawn of time, warring combatants have regularly reached for what support they could find to nerve their own side for battle.”
― Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis

“In Gladstone's mature years he lost faith not in God but in the ability of any government or state to act as the agent of God.”
― George F. Will, The Woven Figure: Conservatism and America's Fabric

“Church and State are both rent, by the tugging of the demonic and the Divine”
― Martin Luther

“Throughout history the cross stands as a symbol of protest and revolt; protest against all claims, whether by religious or political power, to absolute unquestioning control over human minds and bodies; revolt against all systems and ideologies, all regimes and institutions, which continue to push individuals and groups beyond the pale, outside the gate.”
― Megan McKenna, The New Stations of the Cross: The Way of the Cross According to Scripture

“The cross is a crisis point for all societies which seek to produce me in and women of quiescence, men and women who are trained to give unquestioning, uncritical obedience to worldly powers and not to Christ.”
― Megan McKenna, The New Stations of the Cross: The Way of the Cross According to Scripture

“But the consequences of the whole-hearted and uncritical embrace of politics by Christians has been, IN EFFECT, to reduce Christian faith to a political ideology and various Christian denominations and para-church organizations as special interest groups. The political engagement of the various Christian groups is certainly legal, but in ways that are undoubtedly unintended, it has also been counterproductive of the ends to which they aspire.”
― James Davison Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World

“Even if three centuries of outsider status and intermittent persecution had tested the endurance of individuals and communities, coping with the patronage of a newly Christian emperor posed a challenge. The challenge was all the more threatening for its moral complexity. Was it right for the churches to accept the Emperor's favour, knowing full well that if they did so, they also tacitly accepted his right, so evident in all other aspects of life in the Roman Empire, to call the shots?”
― Kate Cooper, Band of Angels: The Forgotten World of Early Christian Women

“He saw the Constitution as the vehicle to keep ecumenical passions in check.”
― Jeffrey Toobin, The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court

“The promise of a social gospel was for Luther an irrelevant and ultimately irrelevant and ultimately cruel delusion.”
― Andrew Pettegree, Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe—and Started the Protestant Reformation

“Real faith is never something that can be forced by the state. It’s something that either be encouraged and smiled upon or discouraged and frowned-upon. Or, simply crushed”
― Eric Metaxas

“Secularism drew a radical distinction between public and private life, in which religion, in any traditional sense, was relegated to the private sphere with no hold over public life. There are many charms in secularism, in particular the freedom to believe what you will in private. But secularism also poses a public problem. There are those whose beliefs are so different from others’ beliefs that finding common ground in the public space is impossible. And then there are those for whom the very distinction between private and public is either meaningless or unacceptable. The complex contrivances of secularism have their charm, but not everyone is charmed.”
― George Friedman

“It is difficult to decide what you mean when you say any of these words and easy to claim that anyone else’s meaning is (or is not) the right one. There is a built-in indeterminacy in our use of language that allows us to shift responsibility for actions in Paris away from a religion to a minor strand in a religion, or to the actions of only those who pulled the trigger. This is the universal problem of secularism, which eschews stereotyping. It leaves unclear who is to be held responsible for what. By devolving all responsibility on the individual, secularism tends to absolve nations and religions from responsibility.”
― George Friedman

“Liberals and conservatives tend to view the economy in purely materialistic terms. They make growth, security, and prosperity ends in themselves. They exalt enlightened self-interest. They tell us that productive work is the fundamental source of human dignity.

But for Christians, (Greg) Forster insists, the materialistic view is a lie. The modern economic man is prone to workaholism, Envy, greed, anxiety, and a host of other ills. The great task for Christians is to become, broadly speaking, innovative entrepreneurs: people who are not only more productive in their work then there would be leaving neighbors, but also more creative, generous, honest, and humane.”
― Greg Forster, Joy for the World

“We put up a kind of spiritual firewall and make a conscious effort to shut out the headlines, because our (Bible) discussions are meant to be timeless.”
― John Kasich, Every Other Monday: Twenty Years of Life, Lunch, Faith, and Friendship

“The second lesson Pulcheria learned from her mother had to do with what kind of man one could trust. Fundamentally, any outstanding man at court who had sons of his own - or hope of having them - was a potential usurper. This is why eunuchs played such an important role in the imperial palace. But Christian priests and bishops constituted another class of men who - even if they did have children - had sworn themselves to a vocation in the Church. This meant that however much trouble they stirred up, they could not threaten the Emperor's person. Still, they had to be managed expertly. Eudoxia had discovered that bishops could be valuable allies and formidable enemies, and Pulcheria took this lesson to heart.”
― Kate Cooper, Band of Angels: The Forgotten World of Early Christian Women

“If Pulcheria were able to pose as the human embodiment of the Theotokos, in so doing she would be blurring the line between Christianity and the rituals of imperial cult, which had existed since pagan times.

This would also raise the disturbing question, whether it was the bishop or the imperial family who had the right to define the nature of Christian piety and liturgical practice. A law of Theodosius II promulgated in 425, for example, reassures those who fail to participate in some public ceremony related to civic cult in order to attend a church service because 'due reverence is paid to the emperor when God is worshipped'. This law reveals that Christian liturgy had now taken precedence over the old civic cult, but it also shows a blurring between the person of the emperor and the person of Christ. One can see why a bishop of Constantinople might have resisted this. Nestorius may have suspected that Theodosius was using Pulcheria to draw the Church even more tightly under the control of the imperial family.”
― Kate Cooper, Band of Angels: The Forgotten World of Early Christian Women

“Cyril's main interest seems to have been in the relationship between Christ's human and divine natures, while Pulcheria's was in Mary herself. He may only have attained the support of the Empress insofar as his theological commitments overlapped with her desire to promote the cult of the Virgin Mary as a form of imperial civic religion.”
― Kate Cooper, Band of Angels: The Forgotten World of Early Christian Women

“When we get to Heaven, we can try a monarchy, perhaps." John Hay”
― John Taliaferro, All the Great Prizes : The Life of John Hay, from Lincoln to Roosevelt

“This is not an issue of geography. He IS of two worlds wherever he goes.”
― Ron Suskind, The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism

“Since much of American taxes prior to 1763 went to support the local clergy, one humorist suggested the opportunity to vote on that. If the minister was turned out, he could open a tavern and preach to his customers if he served them liquor.”
― Colin G. Calloway, The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America