Church Tradition Quotes

#1. Protestant church tradition developed over several centuries when Christians were not yet forced, by virtue of the culminating evidence, to see the Bible in its ancient context.

Peter Enns

#2. The problem is that those of us who were born into Islam and who don't want to live according to scripture - we don't have what the Jews have, which is a rabbinical tradition that allows you to ask questions. We also don't have the church tradition that the Christians have.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

#3. He who does not believe according to the tradition of the Catholic Church is an unbeliever.

John Of Damascus

#4. The African-American tradition, in the main, is very, very church-based, very, very Christian. It accepts, you know, certain narratives about the world. I didn't really have that present in my house.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#5. Instead we have a tradition of common prayer, a general commitment to the well-being of all, including nonmembers of the church, and a desire to seek a faith that can be shared by people of a wide diversity of

Samuel Wells

#6. As a Christian, part of my obligation is to alleviate suffering. Explicit recognition of that in the Methodist tradition is one reason I'm comfortable in this church.

Hillary Clinton

#7. This old aristocracy and Church-ridden, and tradition-ridden country will never grow wiser. Whilst we are fighting for supremacy in Europe the [United] States are working , and not fighting for it, but winning it all over the world.

John Bright

#8. It didn't matter if it was the Catholic Church or Episcopal Church or Presbyterian Church and it still doesn't today. I just like the tradition of having a place to go and connect to a higher power and feel gratitude, and I think that's helpful however you find it.

Lisa Rinna

#9. There is no gay leader anywhere near the stature of Martin Luther King, because black activism drew on the profound spiritual tradition of the church, to which gay political rhetoric is childishly hostile.

Camille Paglia

#10. The custom of Mother Church in baptizing infants is certainly not to be scorned, nor is it to be regarded in any way as superfluous, nor is it to be believed that its tradition is anything except apostolic.

Saint Augustine

#11. No one church model or theological tradition - can reach an entire city. Reaching

Timothy Keller

#12. The thing about the Islamic situation is we don't have a church. We don't have an ordained priesthood, which makes it a little complicated. But we do have a tradition of scholarship, and rules of scholarship. It's very much like any field of knowledge.

Feisal Abdul Rauf

#13. Sola scriptura means at least this: that the church's proclamation is always subject to potential correction from the canon. It is for this reason that we resist simply collapsing the text into the tradition of its interpretation and performance.

Kevin J. Vanhoozer

#14. When I was a young priest in the 1960s and 1970s, there was much experimentation and confusion in the Church. Teachers and clergy were encouraged to communicate an experience of God's love, but to do it without reference to the Creed, the sacraments, or the tradition.

Donald Wuerl

#15. In the Episcopal Church I find a healthy sense of unity and diversity. In this tradition we recognize that that which holds the church together is more important than that which divides the church.

Robert E. Webber

#16. While there are so many beautiful Baroque churches and it's a beautiful artistic tradition, it almost gets hideous and grotesque if you push it further. You can take something beautiful and overdo it.

Win Butler

#17. 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

#18. Out of deference to tradition I did wear a hat to church, weddings, ceremonial occasions, and when my head was cold.

L.E. Modesitt Jr.

#19. The Real Self is dangerous: dangerous to the established church, dangerous to the state, dangerous to the crowd, dangerous to tradition, because once a man knows his real self, he becomes an individual.

Osho

#20. In better times, we're celebrate Christmas Eve by attending the nativity play at the Catholic church down the road, watching Joseph and Mary and Baby Jesus try to escape from Herod's soldiers and their wooden swords and AK-47s (it wasn't the most accurate version, but it was funny.)

William Kamkwamba

#21. The American tradition of separation of church and state grew directly from the freethinking of the Founders. After political independence, they considered independence of thought and belief a logical next step.

Joshua Wolf Shenk

#22. The truly longstanding tradition in the church is that some are called to celibacy. Some feel called to it. But the church has never supported that celibacy be mandated for someone not called to it. It's never imposed on someone.

Gene Robinson

#23. God expects us to measure the church not against tradition but against the standards & promises of His Word.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

#24. The freedom to be able to offer education, human services, and health care in accordance with our own identity as a church should not be denied us simply because there may be the perception of a political majority who favors a new understanding of the American tradition of pluralism.

Donald Wuerl

#25. The Church received from the apostles the tradition of giving baptism even to infants. The apostles, to whom were committed the secrets of the divine sacraments, knew there are in everyone innate strains of [original] sin, which must be washed away through water and the Spirit

Origen

#26. The beauty of the Catholic church is that it has a sacramental structure that can hold its own with the best out of any tradition. It has a mystical system and content that can hold its own with the best out of Tibet ... its an amazing tradition, but I think you need to be critical.

John O'Donohue

#27. This concern for the poor is in the Gospel, it is within the tradition of the Church, it is not an invention of communism and it must not be turned into an ideology, as has sometimes happened before in the course of history.

Pope Francis

#28. If you were against slavery in 1840 and a white person, you would have been against the law, the Bible, your church, your pastor, your parents, common sense, tradition, everything. You would have been against everything.

Bill Ayers

#29. As regards my own 'philosophy,' I continue to be inspired by the music, liturgy and architectural tradition of the Anglican Church in which I was brought up. No one can fail to be uplifted by great cathedrals - such as that at Ely, near my home in Cambridge.

Martin Rees

#30. Is this really the church of Christ, or are we just calling it the church because of our traditions and history?

K.P. Yohannan

#31. By divine mandate the interpreter and guardian of the Scriptures, and the depository of Sacred Tradition living within her, the Church alone is the entrance to salvation: She alone, by herself, and under the protection and guidance of the Holy Spirit, is the source of truth.

Pope Pius XII

#32. Anybody who had come up with a new concept would have been under suspicion for being out of step with the tradition or out of step with the teachings of the church.

John Templeton

#33. Much of my experience with language was formed in the church, which has an oral tradition. There are lots of repetitions in prayers and song refrains. There's a sense of incantation, that if you call not once and not twice but for a third time, the spirit appears.

Alice McDermott

#34. The church will not have power to act or believe until it recovers its tradition of faith and permits that tradition to be the primal way out of enculturation.

Walter Brueggemann

#35. The preaching is part of the reason I don't go to church. Plus, I don't know, it was never part of my tradition.

Frederick Buechner

#36. It behooves us unanimously and inviolably to observe the ecclesiastical traditions, whether codified or simply retained by the customary practice of the Church.

Peter Canisius

#37. I believe in the American tradition of separation of church and state which is expressed in the First Amendment to the Constitution. By my office - and by personal conviction - I am sworn to uphold that tradition.

Lyndon B. Johnson

#38. There is a long and well-documented tradition of wisdom in the Christian faith that any venture into leadership, whether by laity or clergy, is hazardous. it is necessary that there be leaders, but woe to those who become leaders.

Eugene H. Peterson

#39. At the center of the Christian tradition since the first church have been a number who insist that history is not tragic, hell is not forever, and love, in the end, wins and all will be reconciled to God.

Rob Bell

#40. Don't tell me that you have a Reformed Church in the tradition of Calvin until you have the preaching of the Word every day of the week, devote Wednesday's to prayer and have the church gather together for prayer.

Sinclair B. Ferguson

#41. The Bible, undoubtedly, is a mixed bag. I don't see myself coming back to the Church. I do like the tradition. If you come from a strong culture, you can decide what you agree with and what you don't agree with. If you're given a blank canvas, it's almost harder in life.

Steve Coogan

#42. Science is neither a single tradition, nor the best tradition there is, except for people who have become accustomed to its presence, its benefits and its disadvantages. In a democracy it should be separated from the state just as churches are now separated from the state.

Paul Feyerabend

#43. In the Judaeo-Christian tradition all this is well known, and incorporated into the sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church as well as the rituals and liturgy of Yom Kippur.

Roger Scruton

#44. To be disrespectful of tradition and of historical theology is to be disrespectful of the Holy Spirit who has been actively enlightening the church in every century.

John R.W. Stott

#45. It is true that the Jewish tradition emphasizes the moral mandate to save life. It also has a different position from the Catholic Church on the moral status of the embryo. It has a more developmental view of when human life, in the sense of personhood, begins than does the Catholic Church.

Michael Sandel