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"As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to
remake the world--that is the myth of the atomic age--as in being able
to remake ourselves." Mohandas Gandhi
"Faith is not merely a one-way ticket to heaven, but a way to live in
peace and harmony with all of God's children. . . . We believe God has a
will and intent for creation that is larger and more glorious than
anyone's particular religion and that it has everything . . . to do with
reconciliation and peace and justice for which there is no lovelier word
in any language than the Hebrew 'shalom.' "
(Reverend John Buchanan)
On An Ethic of Leadership in Contemporary Society:
"My first duty would be to insist that the paradigmatic person by
whose situation my ethic must be tested would not be the oppressor but
the oppressed, not the most powerful or even the most righteous powerful
person, not my representative or my ruler, but the one with whom Christ
in his servanthood is first identified. The search for an ethic
for the person in positions of relative or great power . . . should take
the model of the subject and servant and modify that . . . to be
socially effective with integrity."
(John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus)
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"You call me 'teacher' and 'master,' and rightly
so, for indeed I am. If I, therefore, the master and teacher, have
washed your feet, you ought to wash one another's feet. I have
given you a model to follow, so that as I have done for you, you should
also do."
(John 13:13-15)
"When the power of love overcomes the love of power, we will have
peace."
On the Authenticity of Christian Witness in a Pluralistic Context:
"For our world it will be in his ordinariness as villager, as rabbi, as
king on a donkey, and as liberator on a cross that we shall be able to .
. . renew the description of Christ crucified as the wisdom and power of
God. This is the low road to general validity. . . . It thereby
frees us to use any language, to enter any world in which people eat
bread and pursue debtors, hope for power and execute subversives.
The ordinariness of the humanness of Jesus is the warrant for the
generalizability of his reconciliation. The non-territorial
particularity of his Jewishness defends us against selling out to
any wider world's claim to be really wider, or to be
self-validating. The particularity of incarnation is the
universality of good. There is no road but the low road. . . . The
real issue is not whether Jesus can make sense in a world far from
Galilee, but whether--when he meets us in our world, as he does in
fact--we want to follow him. We don't have to, as they didn't
then. That we don't have to is the profoundest proof of his
condescension, and thereby of his glory."
(John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus)
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