All who are led by God’s Spirit are God’s sons and daughters. 15 You didn’t receive a spirit of slavery to lead you back again into fear, but you received a Spirit that shows you are adopted as his children. With this Spirit, we cry, “ Abba, Father. ” 16 The same Spirit agrees with our spirit, that we are God’s children. 17 But if we are children, we are also heirs. We are God’s heirs and fellow heirs with Christ, if we really suffer with him so that we can also be glorified with him.
“The church is not responsible for the judgment or destruction of any beings in the world of God, but for the conservation, reformation, redemption, and transfiguration of whatever creatures its action touches.”—H. Richard Niebuhr, “The Responsibility of the Church for Society”
This collection of essays from one of America’s great theological minds explores the nature and meaning of Christian community. First published between 1945 and 1960, these essays make clear for the first time H. Richard Niebuhr’s moral theology of the church. Understanding Christianity itself as a movement—and not an institution—Niebuhr argues that, at their best, Christian communities should express and move forward with the ongoing, transforming relation of God and the world.