Joel Biermann > Quotes

“Without Christian faith, fallen human beings always create their own heavens, paths of salvation, and institutions of spirituality, in the only way available: by wrongly elevating the status and value of the temporal into the eternal.”
― Joel Biermann, Wholly Citizens: God's Two Realms and Christian Engagement with the World

“Put more bluntly, the gospel gives believers the ability to enter into the messy realities of the present age, political and otherwise, without fear of eternal contamination or exclusion from God’s grace.”
― Joel Biermann, Wholly Citizens: God's Two Realms and Christian Engagement with the World

“Generations of Lutheran pastors in my own denomination, the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, were taught the rudiments of their theological confession by Francis Pieper. The lectures that formed his text, Christian Dogmatics, were delivered in German in the second and third decades of the twentieth century, translated into English, and then, printed and reprinted until the present. The three volumes comprise more than 1600 pages, eight of which address issues relating to the two realms.”
― Joel Biermann, Wholly Citizens: God's Two Realms and Christian Engagement with the World