Earthly Powers Quotes & Sayings

Therefore let every soul be in subjection to the higher powers' (Rom 13.1). The Christian must not be drawn to the bearers of high office; his calling is to stay below. The higher power are over him, and he must remain under them. The world exercises dominion, the Christian serves, and thus he shares the earthly lot of his Lord, who became a servant. 'For there is no power but of God.' (Mark 10.42-45) These words are addressed to the Christians, not to the powers. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I think if we push the analysis to its ultimate point we have to say that each earthly father accuses us of our impotence if we become truly creative personalities; they remind us that we are born of men and not gods. No living person can give genius the powers it needs to shoulder the meaning of the world. — Ernest Becker

What hope is there for individual reality or authenticity when the forces of violence and orthodoxy, the earthly powers of guns and bombs and manipulated public opinion make it impossible for us to be authentic and fulfilled human beings?
The only hope is in the creation of alternative values, alternative realities. The only hope is in daring to redream one's place in the world - a beautiful act of imagination, and a sustained act of self becoming. Which is to say that in some way or another we breach and confound the accepted frontiers of things. — Ben Okri

For at sixteen I had imagined that Blake, like the other romantics, was glorifying passion, natural energy, for their own sake. Far from it! What he was glorifying was the transfiguration of man's natural love, his natural powers, in the refining fires of mystical experience: and that, in itself, implied an arduous and total purification, by faith and love and desire, from all the petty materialistic and commonplace and earthly ideals of his rationalistic friends. — Thomas Merton

The love of talk distracts all the powers of our soul from God, and fills them with earthly objects and impressions, like a vessel of water that cannot be settled while you are continualy stirring the earthly particles from the bottom. — Elizabeth Ann Seton

To comprehend Crowley, one must comprehend what he meant by "Magick" - the "discredited" tradition he swore to "rehabilitate."
Magick, for Crowley, is a way of life that takes in every facet of life. The keys to attainment within the magical tradition lie in the proper training of the human psyche itself - more specifically, in the development of the powers of will and imagination. The training of the will - which Crowley so stressed, thus placing himself squarely within that tradition - is the focusing of one's energy, one's essential being. The imagination provides, as it were, the target for this focus, by its capacity to ardently envision - and hence bring into magical being - possibilities and states beyond those of consensual reality. The will and imagination must work synergistically. For the will, unilluminated by imagination, becomes a barren tool of earthly pursuits. And the imagination, ungoverned by a striving will, lapses into idle dreams and stupor. — Lawrence Sutin

But the problem is that Jesus' kingdom (and Paul's "citizenship in heaven") was about the real world, here and now. It was about allegiance. Jesus and Paul were telling the people that they must live here with their identities as aliens. They must live by the rules of heaven amid the violent earthly powers. And to claim that one's citizenship is in heaven is to say that you pledge allegiance not to any of the kingdoms of the world but to Jesus and the body of those who take on his suffering, enemy-loving posture toward the world. — Shane Claiborne

When you see that earthly powers are not listening to you, that you are under siege in this city for four years and shot at without the international community doing anything to help, what should you do? Die?' he asked me in the course of our conversation. 'No, you pray to Heaven for help. — Kristiane Backer