Avery Dulles Quotes

Power can be invisible, it can be fantastic, it can be dull and routine. It can be obvious, it can reach you by the baton of the police, it can speak the language of your thoughts and desires. It can feel like remote control, it can exhilarate like liberation, it can travel through time, and it can drown you in the present.

But this could be interpreted primarily in terms of the ministry of word and sacrament, in accordance with the previous models of the Church, rather than in terms of caritative service.

In the first of these senses, neither Christ nor the Christian is supposed to be the world’s servant. Jesus is obedient, not to the world but to the Father. He is the servant of God, not of men, and we too are called to be servants of God.

I'm really short. Or you're really tall, depending on how you look at it." This quote from the night we met slips out before I can stop myself. Though, he probably doesn't even remember it. "Bit of both, really." His mouth pulls into a heart-stopping grin. A dull ache forms in my chest, because he does.

Because the Church is mystery, there can be no question of deductive or crudely empirical tests. Deduction is ruled out because we have no clear abstract concepts of the Church that could furnish terms for a syllogism. Empirical tests are inadequate because visible results and statistics will never by themselves tell us whether a given decision was right or wrong.

Pursued alone, any single model will lead to distortions. It will misplace the accent, and thus entail consequences that are not valid.

In our discussion of the need for balanced ministry fronts in chapter 23, we looked at the five models of church proposed by Avery Dulles: “the church as institution” (which we might call doctrine driven); “the church as mystical communion” (worship driven); “the church as sacrament” (community driven); “the church as herald” (evangelism driven); and “the church as servant” (justice driven).