Quotes about World

Everything would be spoiled if we were to reserve Christ for the church while granting the world only some law, Christian though it may be.

But when we create our own God and our own world, what we are really doing is to deify our own lust. We are then bound to hate our fellow-men, as obstacles standing in the way of our wills.

The church must bear witness to Jesus Christ as living lord, and it must do so in a world that has turned away from Christ after knowing him.

It is in this light that the good works of the disciples are meant to be seen. Men are not to see the disciples but their good works, says Jesus. And these works are none other than those which the Lord Jesus himself has created in them by calling them to be the light of the world under the shadow of his cross.

Ethics as formation, then, is the venture of speaking about the form of Christ taking form in our world neither abstractly nor casuistically, neither programmatically nor purely reflectively.

The proper relation of the Church to the world cannot be deduced from natural law or rational law or from universal human rights, but only from the gospel of Jesus Christ.

In such a Church the world finds a cheap covering for its sins; no contrition is required, still less any real desire to be delivered from sin.

No, God and the world, God and its goods are incompatible, because the world and its goods make a bid for our hearts, and only when they have won them do they become what they really are. That is how they thrive, and that is why they are incompatible with allegiance to God. Our hearts have room only for one all-embracing devotion, and we can only cleave to one Lord.

The Reformation biblical faith in God had radically desacralized the world. Thus the ground was prepared in which rational and empirical science could blossom; and even though the natural scientists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were believing Christians, the disappearance of faith in God left behind only a rationalized and mechanized world.

The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15.34). The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us.

If I can hold God's attention, I can hold the world's..

The goal in Pietism was the service of God in ministry to the world.