This week’s quote comes from a prominent Rabbi and while this work of his was published sixty years ago I feel it
still resonates with the Church’s situation:
“It is customary to blame
secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in
modern society. It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats.
Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant,
dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship
by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of
the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living
fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with
the voice of compassion--its message becomes meaningless.” –Abraham Joshua
Heschel God in Search of Man (p. 3)
If the church is to move and work toward a new future, I can't help but feel like it will have to begin with the setting aside of discrimination
complexes and doing some housekeeping in the form of reflective truth telling.
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