Thursday, April 30, 2009

Three Differing Assertions

"Politics and the designation 'political' do not in the first instance refer to the machinations and deceits of state and party officials, but to social arrangements of bodies, the organization of human communities. . . To assert that every theology is always already political is to recognize that every theology embodies, either implicitly or explicitly, a mythos, a vision of how human communities ought to be organized."--Daniel M. Bell, Jr.

"In proportion as the spiritual element recovers its natural position at the centre of our culture, it will necessarily become the mainspring of our whole social activity. This does not, however, mean that the material and spiritual aspects of life must become fused in a single political order which would have all the power and rigidity of a theocratic state. Since a culture is essentially a spiritual community, it transcends the economic and political orders. It finds its appropraite organ not in a state, but in a Church, that is to say a society which is the embodiment of a purely spiritual tradition and which rests, not on material power, but on the free adhesion of the individual mind."--Christopher Dawson

"The existence of any Christian communal life essentially depends on whether or not it suceeds at the right time in promoting the ability to distinguish between a human ideal and God's reality, between spiritual and emotional community. The life and death of a Christian community is decided by its ability to reach sober clairty on these points as soon as possible. In other words, a life together under the Word wil stay healthy only when it does not form itself into a movement, an order, a society, a collegium pietatis, but instead understands itself as being part of the one holy, universal, Christian church, sharing through its deeds and suffering in the hardships and struggles and promise of the whole church."--Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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