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Quote by C. Andrew Doyle

“The story of the golden calf is about the human tendency to believe that human-made items can resolve our fear, anxiety, sense of lostness, despair, and hopelessness. The calf was supposed to be a conduit of grace. But God’s work of shalom is about relationship. God invites God’s people directly to go on God’s behalf, so God can do mighty works through them. No golden calf is necessary. No object is needed for the relationship between God and God’s people to take root in the world--only a community of willing individuals.”

Quote by C. Andrew Doyle

Work

Vocatio: Imaging a Visible Church

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C. Andrew Doyle

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“Partnering with God, we cease to see a partitioned world of buffered people. By rejecting this “I get mine you get yours” religion we stop mistaking our faith as a means of compelling others to become something they are not: me. At the very core saying “yes” to God is about becoming a whole of paradoxically interdependent parts.”

“God’s invitation to vocation also erodes the compartmentalization between our religious and professional lives. In the biblical worldview, the way of peace requires full participation. We cannot claim to be one person in one particular context or set of relations, and then a claim to be a totally different person in another context. There is no such thing as professional holy people. We live complete lives in continuity with God and our vocation is equally operative in every space we inhabit.”

“One notorious apikoros named Hiwa al-Balkhi, writing in ninth-century Persia, offered two hundred awkward questions to the faithful. He drew upon himself the usual thunderous curses—'may his name be forgotten, may his bones be worn to nothing'—along with detailed refutations and denunciations by Abraham ibn Ezra and others. These exciting anathemas, of course, ensured that his worrying 'questions' would remain current for as long as the Orthodox commentaries would be read. In this way, rather as when Maimonides says that the Messiah will come but that 'he may tarry,' Jewishness contrives irony at its own expense. If there is one characteristic of Jews that I admire, it is that irony is seldom if ever wasted on them.”