#doctrine

For Christians to influence the world with the truth of God's Word requires the recovery of the great Reformation doctrine of vocation. Christians are called to God's service not only in church professions but also in every secular calling. The task of restoring truth to the culture depends largely on our laypeople. To bring back truth, on a practical level, the church must encourage Christians to be not merely consumers of culture but makers of culture. The church needs to cultivate Christian artists, musicians, novelists, filmmakers, journalists, attorneys, teachers, scientists, business executives, and the like, teaching its laypeople the sense in which every secular vocation-including, above all, the callings of husband, wife, and parent--is a sphere of Christian ministry, a way of serving God and neighbor that is grounded in God's truth. Christian laypeople must be encouraged to be leaders in their fields, rather than eager-to-please followers, working from the assumptions of their biblical worldview, not the vapid clichés of pop culture. ↗

— J. Gresham Machen

#church #doctrine #machen #reformation #business

Do not believe anything merely because you are told it is so, because others believe it, because it comes from Tradition, or because you have imagined it. Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect. Believe, take for your doctrine, and hold true to that, which, after serious investigation, seems to you to further the welfare of all beings. (47) ↗

— Jean-Yves Leloup

#belief #believe #doctrine #teachers #teaching

Considering he was neither priest nor scholar, the young man gave sensible, thoughtful replies -- the more so, perhaps, for being untrained, for he had not learned what he should believe or should not believe. Present a statement to him in flagrant contradiction to all Christian doctrine and he could be persuaded to agree on its good sense, unless he remembered it was the sort of thing of which pyres are made for the incautious. ↗

— Iain Pears

#doctrine #education #freedom #freedom-of-religion #freedom-of-thought

We believe that religions are basically the same…they only differ on matters of creation, sin, heaven, hell, God, and salvation. ↗

— Steve Turner

#pluralism #reductionism #religion #dating

David and his followers taught no new doctrines, in their dispersion or when they came to power, that can be brought to countenance thee at all in shaving off thy beard. ↗

— Lord George Gordon

#brought #came #countenance #david #dispersion

Yesterday I had a Shaker visitor, and today a Catholic; and the more I see and hear, the less do I care about church doctrines. ↗

— Maria Mitchell

#care #catholic #church #doctrines #had

What I did was, I went and collected every bit of information from Adventist publishing houses in the basic areas of doctrine covered in the book Questions on Doctrine. ↗

— Walter Martin

#areas #basic #bit #book #collected

Example moves the world more than doctrine. The great exemplars are the poets of action, and it makes little difference whether they be forces for good or forces for evil. ↗

— Henry Miller

#difference #doctrine #evil #example #forces

Names are changed more readily than doctrines, and doctrines more readily than ceremonies. ↗

— Thomas Love Peacock

#changed #doctrines #more #names #readily

The president led us into the Iraq war on the basis of unproven assertions without evidence; he embraced a radical doctrine of pre-emptive war unprecedented in our history; and he failed to build a true international coalition. ↗

— Nancy Pelosi

#basis #build #coalition #doctrine #embraced