The Only Weapon …

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Woe to the church that uses other weapons, and would even borrow them from the world! She is no longer a Church of her Lord. No theological learning, no ‘Christian culture,’ no wise church politicking, and no attempt to win ‘influence’ in the world conquers the world for Christ and defeats the kingdom of darkness, but the Word of God alone.

from Herman Sasse, Witness (2013), 204. Originally preached 1936.

In short, I will preach it, teach it, write it, but I will constrain no man by force, for faith must come freely without compulsion. Take myself as an example. I opposed indulgences and all the papists, but never with force. I simply taught, preached, and wrote God’s Word; otherwise I did nothing. And while I slept, or drank Wittenberg beer with my friends, the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that no prince or emperor ever inflicted such losses upon it. I did nothing; the Word did everything. Had I desired to foment trouble, I could have brought great bloodshed upon Germany; indeed, I could have started such a game that even the emperor would not have been safe. But what would it have been? Mere fool’s play. I did nothing; I let the Word do its work.

from Martin Luther, 2nd of the Invocavit Sermons, 1522

Consider also – D. Z. Phillips on Religion and Culture

Herman Sasse on whether the Church has a future

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Yes. Because Jesus has a future. As Ignatius of Antioch once put it, ‘where Christ is, there is the Church.’

Do you really think the church is a thing of the past? That to believe in Jesus means to believe in a man or a message of the past? No, if anything has a future in the world, it is the Church. Perhaps, it is a future that no one can foresee, a future with a completely different outlook than we have now. But a future, which only when it is past, when all is said and done, will we men in the future be able to look back and describe, because the future of the Church is the future of Christ. She travels through the angst and distress of this world, from his incarnation to his return. Yes, the future of our Lord Jesus Christ is the blessed future of the church.

from Witness (2013), 85. Originally preached 1940.

P.S. Readings of Matthew 16:18

Neither useful nor pleasant

Quote llwilmoth

Here’s an abrasively honest passage from a good, little, recent introduction to Christian faith I’d been meaning to read for a while and finally got to. The church, rather than being an association of like-minded people, is more likely to be a group of people you would never choose to be friends with if they […]

Emotions Don’t Come Single File

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Confusion about what you are feeling and why you are feeling it is very normal.

The reason is simple: you love lots of things. If what you love and care about shapes what you feel, then the fact that you love many things means you are always going to be simultaneously responding to different pieces of the world around you differently. While you will find that the cares connected to whatever you’ve focused your attention on have the biggest impact on your emotions, you’ll also find that other cares and other situations are always present in the background to some degree. (42)

… however, we need to remember that we will never exhaustively understand all the streams from our hearts into our emotions, and we don’t need to! Instead, all we need to do is bring whatever we do manage to understand to God and entrust him with all the hidden corners of our hearts, loves, and feelings that we can’t see into but he knows perfectly. (50)

Groves & Smith, Untangling Emotions (2019)

For All the Saints

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“In the economy of the Body of Christ, this becomes the ruling reality: every sign of love and grace bestowed on any person in the Church is given for the sake of all. The Church is truly the Church when the sanctity, the maturity, the freedom, the heroism of a holy person is understood not as some kind of threat or reproach to my own lack of those qualities but as gifts and resource for me, helping me to become a little less unholy, idle and unheroic than I might otherwise be – both directly, by way of example and inspiration, and less visibly through the self-forgetting prayer and intercession of those gifted by God with holiness.”

Rowan Williams, Passions of the Soul (2024), 67.