Gordon Lathrop on Church

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It is most likely Paul himself who privileges this name [ekklesia] for those Christian communities, which otherwise might have been much like other Hellenistic supper clubs and like-minded associations. And his privileging of this name had a reforming, pastoral intent. Paul’s extensive use of the word — sometimes in the plural for the various assemblies; sometimes in the […]

Bonhoeffer on perseverance in faith

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You do not have your faith once and for all. The faith that you will confess today with all your hearts needs to be regained tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, indeed, every day anew. We receive from God only as much faith as we need for the present day. Faith is the daily bread that God gives us. You know the story about manna. This is what the children of Israel received daily in the desert. But when they tried to store it for the next day, it was rotten. This is how it is with all the gifts of God. This is how it is with faith as well. Either we receive it daily anew or it rots. One day is just long enough to preserve the faith. Every morning it is a new struggle to fight through all unbelief, faintheartedness, lack of clarity and confusion, anxiety and uncertainty, in order to arrive at faith and to wrest it from God. Every morning in your life the same prayer will be necessary: I believe, dear Lord, help my unbelief.

from The Collected Sermons of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Fortress, 2012), 203.

PS Farrer on Committing to God

Bonhoeffer on Building the Church

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Yet it is not we who are to build, but God. No human being builds the church, but Christ alone. Anyone who proposes to build the church is certainly already on the way to destroying it, because it will turn out to be a temple of idolatry, though the builder does not intend that or […]

Robert Wilken on the language of scripture

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How, it is asked, are we to speak of God in an age of light bulbs and computers? The assumed answer is that we need to translate the idiom of the Scriptures into the idiom of our own time, to discuss the biblical faith in terms intelligible in the nonbiblical categories of today.

The difficulty with this program of translation is that the language of the Bible is irreplaceable, and more often than not the consequence of ‘translation’ is that the language of the Scriptures is supplanted by another language or relegated to the footnotes. It ceases to be the vehicle of thought. As necessary as it is to ‘translate’ the Bible into the though patterns of our age, it is also the case that Christians in every generation must learn afresh how to think and imagine in the language and idiom of the Scriptures.

from Remembering the Christian Past (Eerdmans, 1995), 175-6.

Note too that Augustine holds fast to the biblical language. A less gifted preacher—and especially a contemporary one—might be inclined to translate the biblical language into the current cultural idiom. Augustine, however, translates one set of biblical terms into terms from elsewhere in the Bible. He knew that the language of the Bible is more resonant, more affective, more enduring (because it will be heard again), richer in spiritual and moral content, and more edifying than any local idiom.

from The Sermon on the Mount through the Centuries (2007), 49.

Also don’t miss: “The Church’s Way of Speaking,” First Things, 2005