15 quotes
Radical Christians are always making use of the culture, or parts of the culture, which they ostensibly reject.
Christ and Culture (1951)
Faith and God belong together somewhat as sense experience and physical reality do.
Radical Monotheism and Western Culture (1960)
Faith is at least as much an unavoidable counterpart of the presence of God as sense experience is an unavoidable counterpart of the presence of natural entities.
Radical Monotheism and Western Culture (1960)
The spirit of Jesus revolted against Jewish class distinctions between the righteous few and the unhallowed many He spoke to the outcast poor of the promise of the kingdom.
The Social Sources of Denominationalism (1929)
Men must continue to condemn themselves not only for their failure to do what they could, but also for their failure to perform what they could not, for their denial of the absolute good whose categorical demands were laid upon their incapable will.
The Social Sources of Denominationalism (1929)
The difference between the radicals and the other groups is often only this: that the radicals fail to recognize what they are doing, and continue to speak as though they were separated from the world.
Christ and Culture (1951)
The chief rival to monotheism, I shall contend, is henotheism or that social faith which makes a finite society, whether cultural or religious, the object of trust as well as of loyalty and which tends to subvert even officially monotheistic institutions, such as the churches.
Radical Monotheism and Western Culture (1960)
The relation of the authority of Jesus Christ to the authority of culture is such that every Christian must often feel himself claimed by the Lord to reject the word and its kingdoms with their pluralism and temporalism, their makeshift compromises of many interests, their hypnotic obsession by the love of life and the fear of death.
Christ and Culture (1951)
The monastic movement ... was directed to the achievement of a Christian life, apart from civilization, in obedience to the laws of Christ, and in pursuit of a perfection wholly distinct from the aims that men seek in politics and economics, in sciences and arts.
Christ and Culture (1951)
The ideal which was implicit in Jesus’ teaching became explicit in Paul. Not only did this apostle refuse to recognize the religious differences between the parties of Peter, Apollos, Paul, and Christ, but — what is more important — he showed his converts that in Christ there can be neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, bond nor free, and that with God there is no respect of persons. Recognizing the diversity of gifts he resisted the ever-present tendency to find in diversity the excuse of division.
The Social Sources of Denominationalism (1929)
In its one-sided view of progress which saw the growth of the wheat but not that of the tares, the gathering of the grain but not the burning of the chaff, this liberalism was indeed naïvely optimistic. A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.
The Kingdom of God in America (1935)
Because suffering is the exhibition of the presence in our existence of that which is not under our control, or of the intrusion into our self-legislating existence of an activity operating under another law than ours, it cannot be brought adequately within the spheres of teleological and deontological ethics, the ethics of man-the-maker, or man-the-citizen.
The Responsible Self: An Essay in Christian Moral Philosophy (1963)
Tolstoy ... can center his attack on the conscious beliefs, the tangible institutions, and the specious customs of society. He is not content simply to withdraw from these himself and lead a semimonastic life; he becomes a crusader against culture under the banner of the law of Christ.
Christ and Culture (1951)
It is part of the meaning of suffering that it is that which cuts athwart our purposive movements. It represents the denial from beyond ourselves of our movement toward pleasure; or it is the frustration of our movement toward self-realization or toward the actualization of our potentialities.
The Responsible Self: An Essay in Christian Moral Philosophy (1963)
Denominations, churches, sects, are sociological groups whose principle of differentiation is to be sought in their conformity to the order of social classes and castes. It would not be true to affirm that the denominations are not religious groups with religious purposes, but it is true that they represent the accommodation of religion to the caste system. They are emblems, therefore, of the victory of the world over the church, of the secularization of Christianity, of the church's sanction of that divisiveness which the church's gospel condemns.
The Social Sources of Denominationalism (1929)