Sentence examples for the visible church from inspiring English sources

Faithfulness to the true Church can entail the necessity of rebelling against the visible church and its members, when their requests are in conflict with the teaching of Christ (De civili dominio, vol. 1, pp. 384, 392).

While the visible church bears a special relation to the city of God, membership in the Church is no guarantee of salvation [e.g. De Civitate Dei XX.9], and the history that is visible to us is merely a vestige of the moral drama that takes place behind the scenes, defying the scrutiny of our weak and often presumptuous reason [De Civitate Dei XX.21 & 22].

The visible church is made up of sinners.

The most influential conception of the visible church was the historical-evolutionary doctrine of the German theologian Albrecht Ritschl, who saw the institutional church as the actualization of the Kingdom of God progressively realized in history.

Although the visible church is prone to be as weak and sinful as any other human institution, God works in it insofar as it is faithful to his word.

The Reformers, perhaps borrowing from St .Augustine, believed that the visible church contained a mixture of members of the invisible church, on the one hand, and hypocrites, or false believers, on the other.

In many ways, he kept up that assignment the rest of his life, becoming one of the most visible church leaders in Mormon history.

Similarly, other Reformers, among them French theologian John Calvin, employed the distinction between a visible church and an invisible one, the latter referring to the people who were saved, even if they were in churches where full doctrinal purity had not been achieved.

And Kerri Webb, a spokeswoman for the center in Los Angeles, said that acquiring a large, highly visible church in Manhattan fit the center's "grand style".

It is in no way identical to the visible (empirical) church organization.

If I left the name visible, the church would probably claim persecution and, the next thing you know, Christian conservative money would come rolling in.