A Quote by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
In the first place, the church can ask the state whether its actions are legitimate and in accordance with its character as state, i.e., it can throw the state back on its responsibilities. Secondly, it can aid the victims of state action. The church has an unconditional obligation to the victims of any ordering of society, even if they do not belong to the Christian community. The third possibility is not just to bandage the victims under the wheel, but to put a spoke in the wheel itself.
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The church has an unconditional obligation to the victims of any ordering society, even if they do not belong to the Christian community.
The church ... is not just to bandage the victims under the wheel, but to put a spoke in the wheel itself.
We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.
If the state - and within the state, the judiciary particularly - harasses and undermines the Church , in any society the state undoes itself.
The separation of church and state was meant to protect church from state; a state that declares religion off limits in public life is a state that declares itself supreme over all religious values.
The day when the Jew was first admitted to civil rights, the Christian state was in danger...the entrance of the Jew into {White) society marked the destruction of the State, meaning by State, the Christian State.
It is true that traditional Christianity is losing some of its appeal among Americans, but that is a religious, not political, matter. It is worth remembering that the Jeffersonian 'wall of separation' between church and state has always been intended to protect the church from the state as much as the state from the church.
The duty of the State toward the citizen is the duty of the servant to its master.... One of the duties of the State is that of caring for those of its citizens who find themselves the victims of such adverse circumstances as makes them unable to obtain even the necessities for mere existence without the aid of others.... To these unfortunate citizens aid must be extended by government--not as a matter of charity but as a matter of social duty.
The union of church and state put the church under a political control... The church was thoroughly subordinated to the state.
Today the separation of church and state in America is used to silence the church. When Christians speak out on issues, the hue and cry from the humanist state and media is that Christians, an all religions, are prohibited from speaking since there is a separation of church and state.
Executing a murderer is the only way to adequately express our horror at the taking of an innocent life. Nothing else suffices. To equate the lives of killers with those of victims is the worst kind of moral equivalency. If capital punishment is state murder, then imprisonment is state kidnapping and restitution is state theft.
National Socialism would have every German decide for himself on spiritual questions, just as in the days of Frederick the Great. The National Socialist state gives to the church what belongs to the church, and to the state what belongs to the state.
The divorce between Church and State ought to be absolute. It ought to be so absolute that no Church property anywhere, in any state or in the nation, should be exempt from equal taxation; for if you exempt the property of any church organization, to that extent you impose a tax upon the whole community.
There's no doubt that the Christian right has gone to bed with the more conservative elements of the Republican Party. And there's been a melding in their goals when it comes to the separation of church and state. I've always believed in the separation of church and state.
I fully understand it's important to maintain the separation of church and state. We don't want the state to become the church, nor do we want the church to become the state.
The contemporary quarrel over church and state is not really about whether a wall of separation of church and state should exist or not... The real question is what does 'separation' mean?
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