I'm a Sunday School teacher, and I've always known that the structure of law is founded on the Christian ethic that you shall love... the Lord your God and your neighbor as yourself--a very high and perfect standard. We all know the fallibility of man, and the contentions in society, as described by Reinhold Niebuhr and many others, don't permit us to achieve perfection.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If theology is an effort to construct a rational and systematic view of life out of the various and sometimes contradictory myths ...which are associated with a single religious tradition, philosophy carries the process one step further by seeking to dispense with the mythical basis altogether and resting its world-view entirely upon the ground of rational consistency. Thus for Hegel, religion is no more than primitive philosophy in terms of crude picture-thinking, which a more advanced rationality refines. This rationalization of myth is indeed inevitable and necessary, lest religion be destroyed by undisciplined and fantastic imagery or primitive and inconsistent myth. Faith must feed on reason. (Unamuno.) But reason must also feed on faith. Every authentic religious myth contains paradoxes of the relation between the finite and the eternal which cannot be completely rationalized without destroying the genius of true religion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A wise architect observed that you could break the laws of architectural art provided you had mastered them first. That would appl...y to religion as well as to art. Ignorance of the past does not guarantee freedom from its imperfections.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I think there ought to be a club in which preachers and journalists could come together and have the sentimentalism of the one mat...ched with the cynicism of the other. That ought to bring them pretty close to the truth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The intimate relation between humour and faith is derived from the fact that both deal with the incongruities of our existence. Hu...mour is concerned with the immediate incongruities of life and faith with ultimate ones. Both humour and faith are the expressions of the freedom of the human spirit, of its capacity to stand outside of life, and itself, and view the whole scene. But any view of the whole immediately creates the problem of how the incongruities of life are to be dealt with; for the effort to understand the life, and our place in it, confronts us with inconsistencies and incongruities which do not fit into any neat picture of the whole. Laughter is our reaction to immediate incongruities and those which do not affect us essentially. Faith is the only possible response to the ultimate incongruities of existence which threaten the very meaning of our life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The scientific observer of the realm of nature is in a sense naturally and inevitably disinterested. At least, nothing in the natu...ral scene can arouse his bias. Furthermore, he stands completely outside of the natural so that his mind, whatever his limitations, approximates pure mind. The observer of the realm of history cannot be disinterested in the same way, for two reasons: first, he must look at history from some locus in history; secondly, he is to a certain degree engaged in its ideological conflicts.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
From the standpoint of the typical modern, Protestantism and Renaissance are merely two different movements in the direction of in...dividual freedom, the only difference between them being that the latter is a little more congenial to the modern spirit than the former. The real significance of the two movements lies in the fact that one represents the final development of individuality within terms of the Christian religion and the other an even further development of individuality beyond the limits set in the Christian religion, that is, the development of the "autonomous" individual. It is this autonomous individual who really ushers in modern civilization and who is completely annihilated in the final stages of that civilization.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »