Models of the Church Quotes

“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.”
― Avery Dulles, Models of the Church

“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.”
― Avery Dulles, Models of the Church

“Pursued alone, any single model will lead to distortions. It will misplace the accent, and thus entail consequences that are not valid.”
― Avery Dulles, Models of the Church

“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.”
― Avery Dulles, Models of the Church