True faith takes its character and quality from its object. Its strength therefore depends on the character of Christ. Even those of us who have weak faith have the same strong Christ as others!
This insistence on a degree of faith in the communicant is also illustrative of Wesley's belief in the necessity for the co-operation of an active faith in man with the gift of God's grace to make the sacrament effective, which is congruent with his ...
When we meet God in the gospel, we first encounter him as a stranger, come to rescue us from a danger we did not even realize we were in.
Only when we start with the gospel — the most controversial point of Christian faith — are we ready to talk about who God is and how we know him.
We do not read the Bible somewhere off by ourselves in a corner; we read it as a community of faith, together with the whole church in all times and places.
Altamirano: What was your income last year? Jesuit: Last year, 120,000 escudos. Altamirano: And how was it distributed? Jesuit: It is shared among them equally. This is a community. Altamirano: Ah yes, there is a French radical group that teaches tha...
It is interesting that Jesus encounters a person, personally, forgives him, transforms him adds Him into the Church - the Body of Christ, However today, Church is getting the other way around, she is raising up a believer in Church, feeding the cup o...
If only there were a dogma to believe in. Everything is contradictory, everything is tangential; there are no certainties anywhere. Everything can be interpreted one way and then again interpreted in the opposite sense. The whole of world history can...
First, however, I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show, deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmf...
There is a circularity here I do not doubt. I am defending the Bible by the Bible. Circularity of a kind is unavoidable when one seeks to defend an ultimate standard of truth, for one's defense must itself be accountable to that standard.
The wise man who has become accustomed to necessities knows better how to share with others than how to take from them, so great a treasure of self-sufficiency has he found.
The authority of the Scriptures does not depend on the decision of the church or the individual to validate it. To paraphrase the Westminster Confession, we receive it as the word of God because of what it is, not because of what we make of it.
…the doctrinal differences between Hinduism and Buddhism and Taoism are not anywhere near as important as doctrinal differences among Christianity and Islam and Judaism. Holy wars are not fought over them because verbalized statements about reality...
The only thing you should be faking is confidence. If you don't have it yet, pretend that you do. Pretend you're not nervous, pretend you're not scared, and after a while, the pretend part disappears.
Today we often think that before we start living a religious life we have first to accept the creedal doctrines and that before one can have any comprehension of the loyalty and trust of faith, one must first force one's mind to accept a host of inco...
It is interesting that Jesus encounters a person, personally, forgives him, transforms him adds Him into the Church - the Body of Christ, However today, Church is getting the other way around, she is raising up a believer in Church, feeding him up wi...
Doctrines provide an architecture for both Republican and Democrat presidents to carry out policies.
It's not that we start with beliefs and doctrine and then come up with worship practices that properly "express" these (cognitive) beliefs; rather, we begin with worship, and articulated beliefs bubble up from there. "Doctrines" are the cognitive, th...
Properly understood, the doctrine of sin means that believers are never as good as our true worldview should make us. Similarly, the doctrine of grace means as messed up their false worldview should make them.
There is truth, my boy. But the doctrine you desire, absolute, perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long for a perfect doctrine, my friend. Rather, you should long for the perfection of yourself. The deity is withi...
The doctrine of original sin is the doctrine according to which divine forgiveness makes known the accidental nature of human mortality, thus permitting an entirely new anthropological understanding.
