Status Updates From Resurrection and Moral Orde...

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A life considered solely as fulfilling of a personal destiny, the working out of an individual charisma, is a vacant abstraction. The particularity of vocation must serve as a window through which the universal character of all Christian life may appear. Just as the variety of voices within the church are unified in a common confession ... so the variety of forms of life are unified within... the life of love.

We will read the Bible seriously only when we use it towards a comprehensive moral viewpoint
There may be resistance from those who have forebodings of a totalitarian theological construction which will legislate where it would be better to respect the Bible's silence. When such doubts have been raised, we are doomed to think the Scriptures inconclusive for questions worth doubting about in the first place.

The church may command with the sanctions of discipline in matters where a theological argument alone seems to require a certain conclusion. For example, the practice of euthanasia is inconsistent with biblical ethics, even though not explicitly condemned in the biblical text... So long as the argument commands general agreement among those who accept Christ's authority, a disciplinary sanction may be appropriate.

The teaching & life of Jesus must be morally authoritative if we are not to be thrown back upon the gnostic gospel of a visitor from heaven who summons us out of the world... Though the redemption of the world had to be wrought from outside it by God's gracious intervention, it had still to be the redemption of the world.

The exercise of political authority is the search for a compromise which, while bearing the fullest witness to the truth that can in the circumstances be borne, will, nevertheless, lie within the scope of possible public action in the particular community of fallen men which it has to serve.

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Moral freedom can never be established on a basis of self-sufficiency & independence of the world. Freedom, if it is freedom to act within the world, must itself be of the world. Man's status as agent is part and parcel of his created being in the world... therefore, he has nothing to fear from the world-order.. He has only to fear being cut off from it. God has given him his freedom ... & a world in which to be free