Church Authority Quotes

#1. When you find the church you're supposed to be in, you will recognize the pastor's voice as an important spiritual authority in your life.

Stormie O'martian

#2. I have taken this step because I want the discipline, the fire and the authority of the Church. I am hopelessly unworthy of it, but I hope to become worthy.

Edith Sitwell

#3. When Holy Church occasionally hinted that she still considered her authority to be supreme over all nations and superior to the authority of states, men in these times tended to snicker.

Walter M. Miller Jr.

#4. Priesthood is the means whereby the Lord acts through men to save souls. One of the defining features of the Church of Jesus Christ, both anciently and today, is His authority. There can be no true Church without divine authority.

David A. Bednar

#5. You must never be limited by external authority, whether it be vested in a church, man, or book. It is your right to question, challenge, and investigate.

Bhagat Singh Thind

#6. Spiritual power and spiritual authority notoriously shade over into both politics and poetry.

Harold Bloom

#7. you cannot "save" a church without focusing on the important things that make it a church - scriptural authority, biblical leadership, teaching and preaching, ordinances, covenant community, and mission.

Ed Stetzer

#8. Catholic Church reasserts its moral authority on contraception: If God believed in birth control, altar boys would have a uterus.

Dana Gould

#9. There has always been a certain proportion of people who leave the Church on issues of authority and sex. That hasn't changed since we started doing research on it back in the early 1960s.

Andrew Greeley

#10. For in our own day we see many who are stupid enough to be so overcome by the mere title of "the church," that they take sides with the pope, and would be damned forever rather than raise a finger against his authority.

John Calvin

#11. I'm theologically in line with the Roman Catholic Church. I believe in the authority of the church, but I also have tremendous respect for my brothers and sisters in other Christian faiths.

Marco Rubio

#12. Let what I here set down meet with correction or applause, it shall be of equal welcome and utility to me [...]And yet, always submitting to the authority of their
censure, which has an absolute power over me, I thus rashly venture at everything.

Michel De Montaigne

#13. The authority of the Scriptures does not depend on the decision of the church or the individual to validate it. To paraphrase the Westminster Confession, we receive it as the word of God because of what it is, not because of what we make of it.

Michael S. Horton

#14. Apostles receive revelations from God, and consequently they are able to say 'This is what the Spirit is saying to the churches right now.' Making such a statement with credibility carries with it tremendous authority.

C. Wagner

#15. Birth control appeals to the advanced radical because it is calculated to undermine the authority of the Christian churches. I look forward to seeing humanity free someday of the tryanny of Christianity no less than Capitalism.

Margaret Sanger

#16. Furthermore, in this one Church of Christ no man can be or remain who does not accept, recognize and obey the authority and supremacy of Peter and his legitimate successors.

Pope Pius XI

#17. The crisis of the church is not at its deepest level a crisis of authority, or a crisis of dogmatic theology. It is a crisis of powerlessness in which our sole recourse is to call on the help and inward power of the Holy Spirit.

James K. Baxter

#18. I would not believe in the Gospel if the authority of the Catholic Church did not move me to do so.

Saint Augustine

#19. The church doctrines of obedience to authority, repentance, fear of punishment, self-abnegation, acceptance of outer direction rather than inner assurance, elevation of faith over reason, and intolerance make institutionalized religion an ideal instrument of social constraint.

Madalyn Murray O'Hair

#20. What is held by the whole Church, and that not as instituted by Councils, but as a matter of invariable custom, is rightly held to have been handed down by authority.

Saint Augustine

#21. God wants the church to become an authority to bring order, righteousness and purity to the country

Sunday Adelaja

#22. Christ has not only ordained that there shall be such officers in his Church - he has not only specified their duties and prerogatives - but he gives the requisite qualifications, and calls those thus qualified, and by that call gives them their official authority.

Charles Hodge

#23. During the first seven years, every society tries to condition the mind - and conditioning means nothing but hypnosis: forcing authority, law, tradition, religion, scripture, the priest, the church, into the innermost unconscious of the child so that from there you can control him.

Rajneesh

#24. The Church, during the apostolic age, did not consist of isolated, independent congregations, but was one body, of which the separate churches were constituent members, each subject to all the rest, or to an authority which extended over all.

Charles Hodge

#25. Who does not see that ... the same authority which can force a citizen to contribute three pence only of his property for the support of any one establishment, may force him to conform to any other establishment in all cases whatsoever?

James Madison

#26. The priest is immense because he makes others believe in a heap of weird things. The Church wanting to do everything and be everything: it is a law of human spirit. Peoples adore authority. Priests are the servants and followers of imagination. The throne and the altar: revolutionary maxim.

Charles Baudelaire

#27. Wherefore, by the authority of Apostolic power, We declare inventors of novel notions, which as the Apostle Paul has said are of no edification, but rather are practiced to beget most foolish questions, are to be deprived of the communion of the Church.

Pope Innocent I

#28. The state authorities have no place in the church of God, no right to control and persecute the conscience.

Hans Denck

#29. The church has no authority to preach of inclusivity if we fear altering the look of our church by bringing in the poor.

Matthew Barnett

#30. My mother's side of the family is Methodist, which is how I was raised. It was conservative in that I had strong values - sitting down and eating with the family every day, listening to authority and going to church every week and having perfect attendance at Sunday school.

Jonathan Groff

#31. Nearly all the evils in the Church have arisen from bishops desiring power more than light. They want authority, not outlook.

John Ruskin

#32. In Revelation 12, we see a pure, holy woman giving birth to a son - a corporate son who brings victory by the blood of Jesus, their testimony and sacrifice. My vision is to see that kind of church moving in the authority, the sacrifice and love of Jesus.

John Noble

#33. If the Church has no the authority to tell its members that they may not engage in homosexual practices, then it has no authority at all. And if we accept the argument of the hypocrites of homosexuality that their sin is not a sin, we have destroyed ourselves.

Orson Scott Card

#34. The essential thought must ever be that a man does not, except in his spiritual infancy, accept a statement merely because the Church or someone in authority declares it correct, but because, under mature examination, it is found to be true and right and worthwhile.

John Andreas Widtsoe

#35. The transcendent gift of the Holy Ghost, along with membership in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is bestowed by confirmation, by the laying on of hands by those having priesthood authority.

James E. Faust

#36. I rebelled against all form of authority, against my grandfather, my step-father, the Church, the police, the government, the bosses. Everything male that was there, and was determining my life.

Isabel Allende

#37. In other words, the Church acknowledges Science as the higher authority.

Wilhelm, Ostwald

#38. The separation of "church and state" of which America is so proud was established in Islam fourteen centuries ago, when it was decided that no Caliph would have religious authority over the community.

Reza Aslan

#39. It's time for a new Reformation in the Church
to call the Church back to the authority of the Word of God, beginning in Genesis.

Ken Ham

#40. By misunderstanding the nature and purpose of God's kingdom, we have marginalized the church's authority and influence both within its walls and outside them.

Tony Evans

#41. The only people who had authority within the Church to stop Brendan Smyth from having contact with children were his Abbot in the Monastery in Kilnacrott and his Religious Superiors in the Norbertine Order.

Sean Brady

#42. Because the Western church has emphasized the work Jesus did for us as Savior rather than His position as Lord, lack of submission to His position of authority creates a significant fault in our foundation. Hear

John Bevere

#43. Isn't the essential pillar of Catholicism papal infallibility? Well, then how can the church ever change its mind about anything unless God gets confused one day? Not all religions claim the direct authority of God speaking to their leader. You know, I'm an atheist, but I'm a Puritan atheist.

Dave Foley

#44. A leader - whether in the home, church, business, community, or government - has authority due to her role, but her positional power will not bring about good for individuals or organizations unless it is backed up by the capital of character.

Dan B. Allender

#45. Father Paisii, as a priest of the Moldovan Metropolitan of Orthodox Church, refused to sing the requiem.
However, as a priest of the Bessarabian Metropolitan, which in no way at all recognized the authority of the Moldovan Metropolitan, Paisii performed it.

Vladimir Lorchenkov

#46. The idea that the Man Christ Jesus has absolute and final authority over the whole church and over all of its members in every detail of their lives is simply not now accepted as true by the rank and file of evangelical Christians

Aiden Wilson Tozer

#47. Preaching the Word is the primary task of the Church, the primary task of the leaders of the Church, the people who are set in this position of authority; and we must not allow anything to deflect us from this, however good the cause, however great the need.

David Lloyd-Jones

#48. We are not the Church in failure, running out the back door while the devil kicks in the front door. We are the Church of Luke 10:19 that has authority over all the power of the enemy.

Harold R. Eberle

#49. The great monuments are raised up like dams, pitting the logic of majesty and authority against all the shady elements: it is in the form of cathedrals and palaces that Church and State speak and impose silence on the multitudes.

Georges Bataille

#50. Too often, our concept of pastors and church leaders reinforces rather than obliterates the sad state of family life in our current context.

Russell D. Moore

#51. We do not admit the authority of the church with respect to its pretended infallibility, its manufactured miracles, its setting itself up to forgive sins. It was by propagating that belief and supporting it with fire that she kept up her temporal power.

Thomas Paine

#52. Joining the church felt like joining a secret club; and you learned the rules after you joined. The first rule of the church was: Never question what it is that you have joined.

Stephen White

#53. To lift the authority of the church up is for nations to come to church

Sunday Adelaja

#54. The custom of the Church has very great authority and ought to be jealously observed in all things.

Thomas Aquinas

#55. I believe strongly that in the eyes of God women and men should be the same and they should be given the same authority in the church, women should as men.

Jimmy Carter

#56. With others, I feel betrayed that those who had the authority in the Church to stop Brendan Smyth failed to act on the evidence I gave them. However, I also accept that I was part of an unhelpful culture of deference and silence in society and the Church, which thankfully is now a thing of the past.

Sean Brady

#57. Many man's scruples lie almost wholly about obedience to authority and compliance with indifferent customs, but very seldom about the dangers of disobedience and unpeaceableness and rending in pieces the Church of Christ by needless separations and endless divisions.

John Tillotson

#58. Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid ... research and discussions ... with regard to the doctrine of evolution.

Pope Pius XII

#59. PRESBYTERIAN, n. One who holds the conviction that the government authorities of the Church should be called presbyters.

Ambrose Bierce

#60. The church has not been given authority to make commandments; it is the duty of the church to obey the commandments already made. It is not the prerogative nor the privilege of any church to modify, minimize or in any way obscure . . . any commandment, of Jesus Christ.8

Mark Dever

#61. The second is the release from the principle of authority, that is, from any obligation to obey parents, the Church, the state, and whoever places restrictions in the name of the common good. The

Fr Gabriele Amorth

#62. I call that church free which enters into the covenant with the ultimate source of existence. It binds together families and generations, protecting against the idolatry of any human claim to absolute truth or authority.

James Luther Adams