Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Jaroslav Pelikan

Quote by Jaroslav Pelikan

“The apostle Paul often appears in Christian thought as the one chiefly responsible for the de-Judaization of the gospel and even for the transmutation of the person of Jesus from a rabbi in the Jewish sense to a divine being in the Greek sense. Such an interpretation of Paul became almost canonical in certain schools of biblical criticism during the nineteenth century, especially that of Ferdinand Christian Baur, who saw the controversy between Paul and Peter as a conflict between the party of Peter, with its 'Judaizing' distortion of the gospel into a new law, and the party of Paul, with its universal vision of the gospel as a message about Jesus for all humanity. Very often, of course, this description of the opposition between Peter and Paul and between law and gospel was cast in the language of the opposition between Roman Catholicism (which traced its succession to Peter as the first pope) and Protestantism (which arose from Luther's interpretation of the epistles of Paul). Luther's favorite among those epistles, the letter to the Romans, became the charter for this supposed declaration of independence from Judaism.”

Quote by Jaroslav Pelikan

Book:Jesus Through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture
Create image

Work

Jesus Through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Jaroslav Pelikan
Jaroslav Pelikan

Jaroslav Pelikan was a renowned American historian and theologian, known for his research on the history of Christianity. His works covered the development of Christianity from ancient times to the modern era, with a particular focus on the Reformation and Christian theology. more

You May Also Like

“Once, during my Catholic days, I was complaining with a Catholic friend about how terrible the teaching was in parish life. A priest listening to us said that everything we griped about was true, but we didn't have to resign ourselves and our children to this fate. 'You could go online to Amazon.com tonight and have sent to you within a week a theological library that Aquinas would have envied,' he said. 'My parents raised me in the seventies, which was the beginning of the catechesis nightmare. They knew that if they were going to raise Catholic kids, they would have to do a lot of it themselves, and they did. So do you.”

EducationChristianityRoman Catholicism
Book:The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation
Create image

“If Roman Catholic Christianity has always struggled with the threat of works righteousness, Reformed Protestantism has always struggled with the threat of cheap grace. For many, if not the majority of Protestants, God's love and acceptance do not lead to personal transformation. Evangelical formation often involves seeking to reestablish a pattern of maturing behaviour that should be integral to one's conversion. So both traditions can be challenged on whether there is a genuinely helpful connection between conversion and transformation.”

TransformationConversionProtestantismCheap GraceRoman CatholicismEvangelicalismWorks Righteousness
Book:Beginning Well: Christian Conversion & Authentic Transformation
Create image

“Dialogue with Catholics and other nonevangelical Christians offered some correction to the Church Growth movement's fixation on cultural accommodation and baptism rates. However - save for those few who converted - evangelicals attracted to other Christian traditions have made those traditions their own. They assemble do-it-yourself liturgies from a hodgepodge of monastic prayers and mystics' visions. They lionize medieval dissenters - Celtic monks, or renegade Franciscans - but don't understand their broader Catholic context. Without quite realizing what they have done, evangelicals often use these ancient teachings and practices to confirm, rather than challenge, their own assumptions. History becomes a sidekick to one's twenty-first-century journey with Jesus.”

ChristianityLiturgyRoman CatholicismEmergent ChurchPostmodern Christianity
Book:Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism
Create image

“I remember that one Holy Week, the magazine I got every Thursday, Anteojito, came with a free poster depicting the Stations of the Cross. I burned the poster and flushed the ashes down the toilet to dispose of the evidence. The idea that I was supposed to pin this graphic depiction of torture and death on my wall seemed to me as obscene as if someone had suggested decorating my room with pictures of the inner workings of Auschwitz.”

TortureAuschwitzRoman Catholicism2000Christian ArtStations Of The Cross
Book:Kamchatka
Create image

“Although I had become disillusioned with certain aspects of Roman Catholicism, yet I was finding similarities between that religious system and my new-found philosophies. I sought to clear up my own confusions by developing an ecumenical reasoning, accommodating both Christian and Hindu schools of thought. This led to a sense of spiritual superiority for being 'tolerant' both of Eastern and Western religions. I welcomed the idea that all paths led to the same God and that all beliefs were equal.”

PhilosophyReligionHinduismNew AgeRoman Catholicism
Book:Out of India
Create image

“Theotokos is a courageous title. A woman is the Mother of God. One could say, ‘How is this possible? God is eternal, He is the Creator. We are creatures, we are in time. How could a human being be the Mother of God, of the Eternal One, since we are all in time, we are all creatures?’ … Aristotelian philosophy, as we well know, tells us that between God and man there is only a non-reciprocal relationship. Man refers to God, but God, the Eternal, is in Himself. He does not change; He cannot have this relationship today and another relationship tomorrow. He is within Himself, He does not have ad extra relations. It is a very logical term, but it is also a word that makes us despair: ‘So God himself has no relationship with me.’ With the Incarnation, with the event of the Theotokos, this radically changed, because God drew us into Himself – and God in Himself is the relationship and allows us to participate in His interior relationship. Thus we are in His being Father, Son and Holy Spirit; we are within His being in relationship, we are in relationship with Him and He truly created a relationship with us. At that moment, God wished to be born from woman and to remain Himself always: this is the great event.”

ReligionChristianityRoman Catholicism
Author:Pope Benedict XVI
Create image