When it seems that the issue has been clearly defined as lying between the exponents of a Christian civilization and the non-Christian defenders of a wholly secularized society, new perplexities arise as devoted believers seem to make common cause with secularists.#
Christianity seems to threaten culture at this point not because it prophesies that of all human achievements not one stone will be left on another but because Christ enables men to regard this disaster with a certain equanimity.#
A Celsus moves from attack on Christianity to an appeal to believers to stop endangering a threatened empire by their withdrawal from the public tasks of defense and reconstruction. The same Christian attitude, however, arouses Marx and Lenin to hostility because believers do not care enough about temporal existence to engage in all-out struggle for the destruction of an old order and the building of a new one.#
Roman tolerance, like modern democratic tolerance, had its limits just because it was carried out as a social policy for the sake of maintaining unity. Whatever religion man followed, homage to Caesar was eventually required.#
The word ‘Father’ on the lips of Jesus is a greater, more faithful, and more heroic word than is evident when fatherhood and deity are identified.#
The idea of ascribing “infinite” or “intrinsic” value to the human soul seems wholly foreign to Jesus. He does not speak of worth apart from God.#
His [Jesus’] love of God and his love of neighbor are two distinct virtues that have no common quality but only a common source. Love of God is adoration of the only true good; it i gratitude to the bestower of all gifts; it is joy in holiness; it is “consent to Being.” But the love of man is pitiful rather than adoring; it is giving and forgiving rather than grateful; it suffers for and in their viciousness and profaneness; it does not consent to accept them as they are, but calls them to repentance.#
[Jesus] thought no temporal value as great as the life of the soul; but he healed the sick in body when he forgave their sins.#
The fact that Christians have found kinship between Christ and the prophets of the Hebrews, the moral philosophers of Greece, the Roman Stoics, Spinoza and Kant, humanitarian reformers and eastern mystics, may be less indicative of Christian instability than of a certain stability in human wisdom.#
A synthesist who makes the evanescent in any sense fundamental to his theory of the Christian life will be required to turn to the defense of that temporal foundation for the sake of the superstructure it carries when changes in culture threaten it.#
Instead of two ethics for two stages on life’s way or for two kinds of Christians, the immature and the mature, Paul’s two ethics refer to contradictory tendencies in life. The one is the ethics of regeneration and eternal life, the other is the ethics for the prevention of degeneration.#
As he cannot derive the laws of medical procedure from the gospel when he deals with a case of typhus, so he cannot deduce from the commandment of love the specific laws to be enacted in a commonwealth containing criminals.#
If we look to the revelation of God for knowledge of geology, we miss the revelation; but if we look to geology for faith in God, we miss both him and the rocks. If we make a rule for civil government out of the structure of the early Christian community, we substitute for the spirit of that community, with its dependence on Christ and his giving of all good gifts, a self-righteous independence of our own; if we regard our political structures as kingdoms of God, and expect through papacies and kingdoms to come closer to him, we cannot hear his word or see his Christ; neither can we conduct our political affairs in the right spirit.#
The Christ who commended a good Samaritan for pouring oil and wine into wounds would scarcely likewise honor a man who, trained in contemporary methods of giving first aid, regarded the Biblical example as his absolute guide.#
Faith in this sense is prior to all reasoning, for without a cause – let it be truth, or life, or reason itself – we do not reason.#
Such trust, to be sure, is mated with a kind of objective uncertainty; but it is not the uncertainty that makes it faith. To argue so is to be like a moralist who defines duty as that conduct that runs counter to inclination.#