sum coo-ohtes

From "Against Christianity":



"...if the Church is God's society among human societies, a heavenly city invading the earthly city, then a territorial conflict is inevitable."



"The Church's competitors are nation-states and international political bodies like the United Nations. The Church's ethos and culture are not just a challenge to other "religions," but to the ethos of Americanism and the culture of globalizations, insofar as such an ethos and culture can exist.

But we do not preach the gospel faithfully. We preach Christianity.

And therefore we avoid the clash."



"Every invention is a wager for utopia...Culture always embodies religion."



"Theology is gnostic, and the Church firmly rejected gnosticism from her earliest days."



"For the Saxons, the oak of Thor was 'holy,' 'taboo,' and 'threatening.'

Boniface called it 'kindling.'"



"Are baptism and the Supper symbols or realities?

It is a false question. Words are symbols, but we know words have enormous power for good or evil...So, to say that the Church's bread, wine, and water are symbols is not to say that they are without value or power, or that they lack 'reality.' It is merely to say that the power they have is the kind of power that symbols have, and not the kind of power that a combustion engine or a nuclear power plant has...Theology goes into a ditch when it treats symbols as if they were something other than symbols."



"Baptism is not a 'symbol' of someone becoming a disciple. Because Jesus designated it as such, this symbol is his 'becoming-a-disciple.' It is not a picture of a man being joined in covenant to Christ; it is a man being joined in covenant to Christ.

The Supper is not a symbol of a meal with Jesus. The bread and wine are symbols of Christ's body and blood, but because Jesus promised to be with us at the table, this symbolic meal is a meal with Jesus. By eating the symbols, we are partaking the reality.

Symbol or reality? It is a false question."



"We are what we eat.

In contrast to the animal sacrifices of the Old Covenant and of Greco-Roman festivals, the Christian feast is a feast of bread and wine, both cultivated foods, products of culture. The stuff of the meal thus signals that the community is a 'construct,' not a 'natural' community, a 'fictive' kin group rather than a kin group bound by flesh and blood. (The Christian household is bound together by blood, but it is blood shed not blood transmitted in birth.) Bread and wine thus signal that this table fellowship is one where there is neither Jew nor Greek..."



"Virtue is trinitarian, reflecting the eternal ecstasy, the flowing out of the Father into the Son into the Spirit into the Son into the Father."



"For His city, the future is always the touchstone. His city now is not a preserve of the city of yesterday but an anticipation of the city of tomorrow."



"...the ethos of the Christian Church was formed by the Spirit, working through the Church's myth and rituals, just as the ethos of the Greek polis and the empire of Rome had been formed by demons, telling different myths and binding worshippers to themselves through different rituals."

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