On the church

Did I post this already months ago? I am not sure. No time to check right now , but I just ran into this quote while editing a piece of writing and it has a post-it on it saying "blog" which I obviously left there for a reason, so here it is.

I didn't make a "Dorothee Sölle" label till recently, so I can't track through that label whether or not I have already posted this, and there are too many posts under "theology" or "church" for me to take the time to sort through them, since I am working under deadline. Perhaps this will ring some bells for you.

Well, we can’t simply be "yes-people"‘ for the church. We are embarrassed on account of the church. It’s like we come from a lousy family: father drinks, mother yells, and the kids fight the whole day. Bishops drive limousines to hunger conferences...

Funny thing is, it’s our family, in spite of it all. We find it to be unbearable, stupid, next to impossible, phony–but we still stay with it. In other words we say: Dad drinks, and Mom yells... but Grandma is super and my little brother is absolutely the greatest. Clergy talk too much, church members have been asleep for centuries... But Jesus simply can’t be done away with, and there isn’t much to be said against people like Albert Schweitzer and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King, Jr.

It is these people –and God knows they are not just people who say yes and amen to everything– that we want to think about in this book. We want to talk about them. We want to try to say what it is that we find good about religion, why we need God and Christ and the Spirit, and why we put up with the church.

********Dorothee Sölle and Fulbert Steffensky
********Not Just Yes and Amen: Christians with a Cause

More later in the same vein.