“We must acknowledge that the hymn of praise sung at the conclusion of the meal of the Passover is as worthy of our careful attention as are the words of the cross, taken singly.”
We Live in Community
Eberhard Arnold
Here, Arnold lays out the theological rationale for a common life, which is rooted not in the optimism of socialism, but in the power of God to recreate a community out of fragmented society.
The World-Conquering Power of Faith
Herman Bavinck
“[Faith is] firm certainty, unshakeable conviction, ineradicable confidence, not of blood or of the will of the flesh, not of the will of a man, but coming from God and worked in the heart by his Spirit.”
Are We Able to Go Up and Possess the Land?
Rev. Reverdy C. Ransom
Delivered at St. Johns A.M.E. Church, Cleveland, Ohio, April 1894 "Ye shall go over and shall possess that good land."—Deut. 4. 22. To-night I come to you with an interrogation: " Are we able to go up and possess the land?" I have taken a text which you will find in...
The Mercy of God to the Penitent
Saint Maximus the Confessor
INTRODUCTION Saint Maximus, as a learned abbot and theologian in the 7th century, was responsible for leading his community and discerning the truth in the controversies of his time. His words in the sermon below, are given greater weight when we consider his...
Why We Need to Make Things
Susannah Black
Dear friends, We don’t make things in the United States—but we need to start. Remember this time last year when we all started making bread and sewing masks? The bread-making was one thing: always a good idea to get back into baking. The mask-sewing was...
The Assembly of the Peasantry
This anonymous work, authored around May 1525, introduces one of the key tensions in Anabaptist thinking: the perfection of the Christian life, and its relation to the public good. The Anabaptist community exemplifies the way that Christ has meant to order the world, without need of authority, wiling to give to all who have need, paying taxes as a form of public love. But what happens when the community of faith is governed by public figures who exemplify Nero more than David, Satan more than Christ?
The Death of Evil Upon the Seashore
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Dr. King uses the Exodus story to describe the evil that was present in the Old Testament and the evil that is present modern society. Dr. King emphatically proclaims that, “Evil in the form of injustice and exploitation cannot survive.”
On Pride
St. John Climachus
The great monastic father St. John of Sinai, known as ‘Climachus’, authored his 30-step spiritual guide for monastics, the Ladder of Divine Ascent, in the early 7th century. Received by all the apostolic churches as a supreme guide to the spiritual life, through its call to combat the passions and acquire virtue, it retains a unique place in the Lenten daily liturgy of the Byzantine rite. While written for monks, it speaks powerfully to all those who seek to earnestly live the life in Christ.