"If real churches exist, such persons are not called on to make them"
About this Quote
The barb here is aimed less at "church" than at the modern itch to manufacture it. Darby is drawing a bright line between the church as an earthly institution people can design and manage, and the Church as something real only insofar as it is spiritually constituted. The syntax does the work: "If real churches exist" dangles the possibility that what most people call church is, at best, an imitation. Then comes the reprimand: "such persons are not called on to make them". Not "unable", not "unqualified" - not called. That is a theological veto disguised as modesty.
Darby, a key figure in the Plymouth Brethren movement, wrote in a 19th-century Protestant landscape crowded with reformers, revivalists, and well-meaning builders of new denominations. His quarrel was with clerical ambition and ecclesiastical engineering: committees, constitutions, respectability, and the creeping sense that authenticity can be assembled with the right blueprint. He flips the usual reform narrative. Instead of "the church is broken, so we must rebuild", he suggests that the very impulse to build is evidence you have misunderstood what the Church is.
The subtext is both chastening and liberating. Chastening, because it punctures religious entrepreneurialism and the ego of the improver. Liberating, because it relocates authority from human administrators to divine calling: if something is truly "real", it arrives by recognition, fidelity, and gathering - not by construction. In an era of endless institutional reinvention, Darby reads like an early critic of religious branding, insisting that the sacred can't be willed into existence by hustle.
Darby, a key figure in the Plymouth Brethren movement, wrote in a 19th-century Protestant landscape crowded with reformers, revivalists, and well-meaning builders of new denominations. His quarrel was with clerical ambition and ecclesiastical engineering: committees, constitutions, respectability, and the creeping sense that authenticity can be assembled with the right blueprint. He flips the usual reform narrative. Instead of "the church is broken, so we must rebuild", he suggests that the very impulse to build is evidence you have misunderstood what the Church is.
The subtext is both chastening and liberating. Chastening, because it punctures religious entrepreneurialism and the ego of the improver. Liberating, because it relocates authority from human administrators to divine calling: if something is truly "real", it arrives by recognition, fidelity, and gathering - not by construction. In an era of endless institutional reinvention, Darby reads like an early critic of religious branding, insisting that the sacred can't be willed into existence by hustle.
Quote Details
| Topic | Faith |
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