- Grace: “Hype: Myth-telling that manipulates herd mentality that desperately needs a metanarrative to indulge its gross egocentrism.”
- Bono: “It’s extraordinary to me that the United States can find $700 billion to save Wall Street and the entire G8 can’t find $25 billion dollars to saved 25,000 children who die every day from preventable diseases.” … “‘Bankruptcy is a serious business and we all know people who have lost their jobs,'” Bono said, referring to the bankruptcy declared by Wall Street investment bank Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. ‘But this is moral bankruptcy.'”
- Julian, the last Roman Emperor: “Nothing has contributed to the progress of the superstition of these Christians as their charity to strangers, the impious Galileans provide not only for their own poor but for ours as well.” — Tim Keller: “The early Christians were promiscuous with their charity.”
- Sara Savage and Eolene Boyd-Macmillan, from The Human Face of the Church: A Social Psychology and Pastoral Theology Resource for Pioneer and Traditional Ministry: “”…The sociologist Max Weber observed a cyclical process among religious movements that he called ‘the routinization of charisma’. Weber argued that any great vision requires a human process to carry it through time, sometimes in the form of ‘a man, a mission, a movement, or a monument’. Even with the Body of Christ, the life-giving charism has to be embodied in a routine – in some form of human organization. Yet, life-giving visions do not fit easily into neat boxes. So, the very process that gives the vision continuing life also begins to kill it. When the maintenance of the institution (which protects the charism) becomes the institution’s primary purpose, the death of the charism is on the horizon. Only a spiritual revival or reform will re-ignite the gift. In our era, fresh expressions of church and the re-traditioning of familiar forms of church march alongside many initiatives to re-ignite the gift…”
- Len Sweet: “So far… rather than reach back into 2000 years of Church history, Emergent stopped at the ‘liberal turn’ wherein the Gospel became all social and no gospel.” and “The emerging church has become another form of social gospel. And the problem with every social gospel is that it becomes all social and no gospel. All social justice and no social gospel. It is embarrassing that evangelicals have discovered and embraced liberation theology after it destroyed the main line, old line, side line, off line, flat line church.”
- Len Sweet (via Jordon Cooper): “…musing about how I am SO tired of the church viewing the world more as a market than as a mission.”
- via Frank Viola:
“The real trouble is not in fact that the Church is too rich, but that it has become heavily institutionalized, with a crushing investment in maintenance. It has the characteristics of the dinosaur and the battleship. It is saddled with a plant and programme beyond its means, so that it is absorbed in problems of supply and preoccupied with survival. The inertia of the machine is such that the financial allocations, the legalities, the channels of organization, the attitudes of mind, are all set in the direction of continuing and enhancing the status quo. If one wants to pursue a course which cuts across these channels, then most of one’s energies are exhausted before one ever reaches the enemy lines.”
— John A.T. Robinson“Increasing institutionalism is the clearest mark of early Catholicism – when church becomes increasingly identified with institution, when authority becomes increasingly coterminous with office, when a basic distinction between clergy and laity becomes increasingly self-evident, when grace becomes increasingly narrowed to well-defined ritual acts. We saw above that such features were absent from first generation Christianity, though in the second generation the picture was beginning to change.”
— James D. G. Dunn
it is astonishing how much money went to saving the rich and undeserving even before the trillion dollar bailout. The whole world is a telethon for billionaires.