Dont Question Me Authority

"If as a Pastor or Minister, if you have to ask for honor and authority, it proves you don't have it, and you're not worthy of it. Those who are always talking about honor and authority have something wrong. Because, listen carefully, where love abounds, honor and authority are as natural as breathing."

- Stephen Crosby. Church refugee survival guide. Videos.

An Authority We Must Forever Bow To

"The church is not over the holy scriptures, but under them. In the sense that the process of canonization was not one where by the church conferred Authority on the books, but one we're by the church acknowledge them to possess authority... . And why? The books were recognized as giving the witness of the Apostles to the life, teaching, death, and resurrection of the Lord Jesus and the interpretation by the apostles of these events. To that apostolic authority, the church must ever bow."

- Anglican Church's Lamberth Conference Statement. 1958

First We Must Agree How To Agree

Epistomology really is the first question. Always has been. And it isbwhybwe have sensless fights and shalkow conversations. 

"One of the most important questions in every religion is the question of authority. 

By what authority do we believe what we believe, and by what authority do we teach what we teach? 

You cannot agree about anything until we have first agreed how to agree."

- John Stott.  

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Righting The Wrongs Often Goes Wrong

"He is both sincere and ambitious. A contradiction, perhaps, but true, nonetheless. He probably means some of what he says. But his ambition will continue long after he discovers his inability to do the things he promises. Righting the wrongs always become secondary to ascend to power."

- Gene Edwards. A Tale Of Three Kings 

Kings Claims

"Kings claim the right to throw spears."

- Gene Edwards. A Tale Of Three Kings 

China Has No Reformer Leadership

"It is long past time to come to the obvious conclusion on the human rights debate. President Xi Jinping may be an exceptional leader, but a liberal reformer he is not. Indeed, more than any Chinese leader since Mao, he is utterly committed to authoritarian governments. The central objective of his tenure to date has been to return China to a system in which one man governs for life."

- Stephen Harper. Right Here Right Now. 

How To Be Taught Better

".... by 1525 the protest movement involved much more than the mass, or even believers baptism - it involved the nature of the church. The concept of a church of committed Believers had taken the place of a church made up of the mixed multitude. This new church, like that of the Apostles, was to be made up only of those confessing Christ as Lord followed by Believers baptism, instead of everyone born in a given Parish. The Lord's Supper would then be observed by the baptized in a simple manner, shorn of its medieval trappings, as a pledge of Brotherly Love in remembrance of the one, all sufficient sacrifice of Christ.

Fritz Blanke (1525) has asserted that the characteristics of the church described above "were not to be found anywhere else at that time." Then he asked, "What is the source of this new view of the Christian Church?" 

Griebel answers: "We were listeners to Zwingli's sermons and readers of his writings, but one day we took the Bible itself in hand and we were taught better.""

- William Estep. The Anabaptist Story. An Introduction To Sixteenth-Century Anabaptism 

Time Interpretation

"Zwingli came as an admirer and student of the renowned humanist scholar Erasmus. As a general principle humanist rejected the church's claim that under the guidance of the Holy Spirit what was implicit in the teaching of the Apostles was clarified and made explicit overtime, which meant that modern teachers were deemed best and most authoritative. In contrast, Christian humanists believe that the sources closest to Christ were most reliable, beginning with the apostles and with the Bible - rather than modern clarifications as the purest source of Christian truth."

- J. Denny Weaver. Becoming Anabaptist. 2nd Edition

The Bible Is Historically Accurate- Or Not - And Is Again

"The critics once insisted, for example, on the nonexistence of ancient Hittites in the Fertile Crescent, of camels in Egypt in Abraham’s time, of writing in Moses’ time, and of Sargon and Belshazzar in much later centuries. Now all learned men are aware that the Hittite empire rivaled the Babylonian and Egyptian, and even the Hittite language has been recovered; moreover, camels and writing have both been restored to ancient Egypt, and Sargon and Belshazzar are no longer dismissed as imaginary. Many other “historical impossibilities” once detailed to discredit the accuracy of the Bible and to caricature any notion of its total reliability have emerged to render ludicrous some gifted critics whose remarkable learning was dwarfed by a prejudice against scriptural reliability. Today the documentary theories of Wellhausen are no longer assigned mantic authority, and what was historically impossible to many biblical critics a few generations ago is frankly conceded by more critical historians to be now convincingly attested."

Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 4 (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1999), 174.

Lies To Discredit Intelligent Voices and Thinkers

Russia ..... typical historical Totalitarian tactics to take down intelligent voices and thinkers. 

"This particular unrelenting wave (1937, 1945 and 1949) grabbed up anyone at all at any moment. But when it came to outstanding intellectuals in the thirties, they sometimes considered it clever to fabricate a case based on some conspicuously shameful violation (like pederasty; or, in the case of Professor Pletnev, the allegation that, left alone with a woman patient, he bit her breast. A national newspaper reports such an incident  - and just try to deny it."

~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago 

Victims Of Our Own Ideologies

"Famous revolutionaries, theoreticians, and Prophets, seven years before their own inglorious destruction, welcomed the roar of the crowd, not guessing then that their own time stood on the threshold, that soon their own names would be dragged down in the roar of "Scum!" "Filth!""

~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago 

The Mole Of Totalitarianism

"As we begin to understand our judicial practices, we realize now that the public trials were only the surface indications of the moles tunnel, and that all the main digging lay beneath the surface."

~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago 

Extrajudicial Reprisals

"It would have been impossible to carry out this hygienic purging, especially under wartime conditions, if they had had to follow outdated legal processes and normal judicial procedures. And so an entirely new form was adopted: extrajudicial reprisal, and this thankless job was self-sacrificingly assume by the Cheka, The Sentinel of the Revolution, which was the only punitive organ in human history that combined in one set of hands investigation, arrest, interrogation, prosecution, trial, and execution of the verdict. 

~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. 

Human Nature Is Our Problem Utopia Can't Exist

"Naturally, the first reaction of conservatives to this advice will be to reject it. Conservatives do not want to behave like leftists, who see politics and government as a means for transforming the world and the people in it. Temperamentally, conservatives are cautious because they know that the problems the world faces are caused by human beings, not by the social institutions that progressives plan to change. Social institutions reflect who we are far more than they shape what we will be. Therefore, all political “solutions” are imperfect; all will fall far short of their goals; all will require constant reforms to fix the additional problems they create........

Conservatives are realists who believe in the constitutional skepticism that guided the Founders. They know that human nature — not society — is the insurmountable obstacle to equality and justice, and that a democracy works only through compromise and respect. Democrats pay lip service to this wisdom but don’t really believe it. There is no compromising utopian goals, and they will accept no lasting modus vivendi with those who oppose these goals."

David Horowitz

Human Rights Authoritarian Failure

"Despite my considerable involvement in pressuring the Ontario government, many years ago, to create Canada's first Human Rights Commission, I regret the attempt to use the law in this way.......
There should be no question of the right to publish the cartoons in question Religious prophets no less than political leaders or even deities may be legally permissible targets of satire or even scoring. This is the essence of free speech in a democracy. No ideology political, religious, or philosophical can be immune. It will be wise, therefore, to remove those provisions in the human rights act....."

Alan Borovoy

If We Lose Our Freedom

"If we lose our freedoms in this country, the job will be done to us not by malevolent autocrats seeking do bad but by parochial bureaucrats seeking to do good "

~ Alan Borovoy

Concocted Persona

".... we grabbed for an autonomous identity. This is the “false self.” Many people live most of their lives under this delusion, and confuse this concocted persona as the real deal."

Richard Rohr.

Questiong Your Leader Is Like Questioning God?

"It is a common characteristic of an abusive church or religious group to have an authoritarian and control-oriented style of leadership. The leader is typically dogmatic, self-confident, arrogant, and is the spiritual focal point in the lives of his followers. The leader assumes he is more spiritually in tune with God than anyone else. To members of this type of church or group, questioning the leader is the equivalent of questioning God."

(Jim Palmer. Notes From Over The Edge)