Theology Of The Body Quotes

The temple of the most high begins with the body which houses our life, the essence of our existence. Africans are in bondage today because they approach spirituality through religion provided by foreign invaders and conquerors. We must stop confusing religion and spirituality. Religion is a set of rules, regulations and rituals created by humans, which was suppose to help people grow spiritually. Due to human imperfection religion has become corrupt, political, divisive and a tool for power struggle. Spirituality is not theology or ideology. It is simply a way of life, pure and original as was given by the Most High of Creation. Spirituality is a network linking us to the Most High, the universe, and each other…

Don't be more serious than God. God invented dog farts. God designed your body's plumbing system. God designed an ostrich. If He didn't do it, He permitted a drunken angel to do it. Empirical facts can add significantly to the meaning of "being godlike".

I know the theological answers, but do my blood and my pulse?

At the cross, Jesus subjects himself to disability, and his resurrected body continues to bear his scars as a sign of God's solidarity with humanity.

The lust of the flesh directs these desires [of personal union], however, to satisfaction of the body, often at the cost of a real and full communion of persons.

Similarly, when we denigrate our bodies—whether through neglect or staring at our faces and counting up our flaws—we are belittling a sacred site, a worship space more wonderous than the most glorious, ancient cathedral. We are standing before the Grand Canyon or the Sistine Chapel and rolling our eyes.

Science is opposed to theological dogmas because science is founded on fact. To me, the universe is simply a great machine which never came into being and never will end. The human being is no exception to the natural order. Man, like the universe, is a machine. Nothing enters our minds or determines our actions which is not directly or indirectly a response to stimuli beating upon our sense organs from without. Owing to the similarity of our construction and the sameness of our environment, we respond in like manner to similar stimuli, and from the concordance of our reactions, understanding is born. In the course of ages, mechanisms of infinite complexity are developed, but what we call 'soul' or 'spirit,' is nothing more than the sum of the functionings of the body. When this functioning ceases, the 'soul' or the 'spirit' ceases likewise. I expressed these ideas long before the behaviorists, led by Pavlov in Russia and by Watson in the United States, proclaimed their new psychology. This apparently mechanistic conception is not antagonistic to an ethical conception of life.

I do not think either virginity or old age contemptible, and some of the shrewdest minds I have met inhabited the bodies of old maids.

Christianity is realistic because it says that if there is no truth, there is also no hope; and there can be no truth if there is no adequate base. It is prepared to face the consequences of being proved false and say with Paul: If you find the body of Christ, the discussion is finished, let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die. It leaves absolutely no room for a romantic answer.

Kundalini means, according to Zeena ‘She Who is Hidden,’ and points to the dormant goddess in every human being’s body. While the kundalini force is found in muladharachakra, she hypnotizes humans, like maya herself, and renders them slaves to the illusory. Kundalini can only awaken people if she travels up along the spine.' --About Zeena Schreck by Malin Fitger 'Contemporary notions of Kundalini, its background and role within new Western religiosity,' University of Stockholm, 2004

Self-control is not needed because the body is evil—the truth is just the opposite.  The body should be controlled with honor because it is worthy of honor.

He had theologically redefined the Christian life as something active, not reactive. It had nothing to do with avoiding sin or with merely talking or teaching or believing theological notions or principles or rules or tenets. It had everything to do with living one’s whole life in obedience to God’s call through action. It did not merely require a mind, but a body too. It was God’s call to be fully human, to live as human beings obedient to the one who had made us, which was the fulfillment of our destiny. It was not a cramped, compromised, circumspect life, but a life lived in a kind of wild, joyful, full-throated freedom—that was what it was to obey God.

Because of my value, I veil myself... If I show too much, I wouldn’t be revealing my true worth to you. I’d be distracting you from what matters most.

My body kills me, so I kill it.

Love begets love.

It is because baptism is a real insertion of human beings into the ascended manhood of Christ that the Church is Christ's own body, flesh of his flesh and bone of his bones.

No one book of scripture can be understood by itself, any more than any one part of a tree or member of the body can be understood without reference to the whole of which it is a part.

Far more serious still is the division between the Church of Rome and evangelical Protestantism in all its forms. Yet how great is the common heritage which unites the Roman Catholic Church, with its maintenance of the authority of Holy Scripture and with its acceptance of the great early creeds, to devout Protestants today! We would not indeed obscure the difference which divides us from Rome. The gulf is indeed profound. But profound as it is, it seems almost trifling compared to the abyss which stands between us and many ministers of our own Church. The Church of Rome may represent a perversion of the Christian religion; but naturalistic liberalism is not Christianity at all.

We don’t yet have a body of scientific knowledge about evil to be called a facet of psychology. Therefore, religious reasoning for actions will always be at the discretion of the psychologist, thus making them the judge and jury over what is delusion and what is a spiritual experience that has to be sedated.

I have never quite managed to see how we can make sense of the sacramental life of the Church without a theology of the risen body; and I have never managed to see how to put together such a theology without belief in the empty tomb. If a corpse clearly marked ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ turned up, I should save myself a lot of trouble and become a Quaker.

The Purpose of the Eucharist lies not in the change of the bread and wine, but in the partaking of Christ, who has become our food, our life, the manifestation of the Church as the body of Christ. This is why the gifts themselves never became in the Orthodox East an object of special reverence, contemplation, and adoration, and likewise an object of special theological 'problematics': how, when, in what manner their change is accomplished.

when the soul no longer conforms to the will of God, the body no longer conforms to the will of the soul.

Actually, it’s rather curious. We are face-to-face with one of the most complex theological issues. Does a foot, detached from its body…have an afterlife?

Our failure to practice lament during such times may also display our inability to recognize that what happens to our bodies also affects our relationships.

My last chance had vanished into itself like a snail coiling up into his shell. Insidiously I had lost my grip, and now this was it. I thought all this without much emotion. I really didn't care anymore. I couldn't hang on anymore. I didn't have the guts to kill myself, but I didn't want it to continue. I walked a couple of blocks, empty, listless, and wished I could cry. ...The diabolic hope, the purposeful pulsing of blood, the flight into coherence allowed for some rationalizing an afterlife. A new theology was evolving, one that had a faith-in-death clause. It was evolved when I kicked a dead waterbug on the pavement. It was dried out, hollowed, emptied, like some kind of shell. Maybe, I thought, its body is a shell, maybe all bodies are shells. We hatch and die. Our spirit or something like that is the yoke: it lives the real life, the true life. It wasn't comforting.

Human Love in the Divine Plan. God’s designs for the person, the designs of divine love for human love—this is the reality the theology of the body attempts to unfold on the basis of the teaching of Jesus.

One is not a "believer" in fairy tales. There is no theology, no body of dogma, no ritual, no institution, no expectation for a form of behavior. They are about the unexpectedness and mutability of the world.

If the social order and the processes of commodification are not transformed in relation to the body through salvation, then salvation becomes hyperlocalized to a single relationship: God and the one being saved.64

He had asked her if she believed in an afterlife and she said that she did not discount such a thing. That it could be. She just doubted that it could be for her. If there was a heaven, was it not founded upon the writhing bodies of the damned? Lastly she said that God was not interested in our theology but only in our silence.

It appears that Venus has Beatrice’s face. Once again, I’m not interested in a historical analysis of the models for the painting. I’m simply asking you to note the visible similarities between the figures. They represent two muses, two ideal types, one theological and one secular. Beatrice is the lover of the soul; Venus is the lover of the body. Botticelli’s La Bella has both faces — one of sacrificial love or agape, and one of sexual love or eros.

It is why God created matter, most of all the human body, which has the greatest power to make spirit visible. (Thus the philosopher Wittgenstein, asked what a human soul could possibly look like, answered, “Like a human body.”)

A stydy today of the products of the animated cartoon industry of the twenties, thirties and forties would yield the following theology: 1. People are animals. 2. The body is mortal and subject to incredible pain. 3. Life is antagonistic to the living. 4. The flesh can be sawed, crushed, frozen, stretched, burned, bombed, and plucked for music. 5. The dumb are abused by the smart and the smart are destroyed by their own cunning. 6. The small are tortured by the large and the large destroyed by their own momentum. 7. We are able to walk on air, but only as long as our illusion supports us.

Divine feminine imagery opens up the notion that the earth is the body of the Divine, and when that happens, the Divine cannot be contained solely in a book, church, dogma, liturgy, theological system, or transcendent spirituality. The earth is no longer a mere backdrop until we get to heaven, something secondary and expendable. Matter becomes inspirited; it breathes divinity. Earth becomes alive and sacred. And we find ourselves alive in the midst of her and forever altered.

for the first time, there burst upon me the idea that there might be real marvels all about us, that the visible world might be only a curtain to conceal huge realms uncharted by my very simple theology. And that started in me something with which, on and off, I have had plenty of trouble since—the desire for the preternatural, simply as such, the passion for the Occult. Not everyone has this disease; those who have will know what I mean. I once tried to describe it in a novel. It is a spiritual lust; and like the lust of the body it has the fatal power of making everything else in the world seem uninteresting while it lasts. It is probably this passion, more even than the desire for power, which makes magicians.

History, Geology, Psychology, Philosophy, Chemistry, Physics, Theology, Mathematics, Technology, Sociology, Biology, and the list goes on and on. If all this body of knowledge exist for human consumption, why would I specialize in only one field?

The sufferings of Christ on the cross are not just his sufferings; they are “the sufferings of the poor and weak, which Jesus shares in his own body and in his own soul, in solidarity with them” (Moltmann 1992, 130). And since God was in Christ, “through his passion Christ brings into the passion history of this world the eternal fellowship of God and divine justice and righteousness that creates life” (131). On the cross, Christ both “identifies God with the victims of violence” and identifies “the victims with God, so that they are put under God's protection and with him are given the rights of which they have been deprived

The incarnation, passion, and resurrection of the Son do not modify the Trinity. In becoming man, the Son 'enhanced human nature without diminishing the divine.' 'Even when the Word takes a body from Mary, the Trinity remains a Trinity, with neither increase nor decrease. It is forever perfect.

Once again I was the center of an intoxicating whirlwind. The French Gestapo contained the following two fascinating elements: treason and theft. With homosexuality added, it would be sparkling, unassailable! It would possess the three virtues which I set up as theological, capable of composing so hard a body as Lucien’s. What could be said against it? It was outside the world. It betrayed (to betray: signifying the breaking of the laws of love). It indulged in pillage. And lastly, it excluded itself from the world by pederasty. It therefore established itself in an unpuncturable solitude.

Later, when Eve is created, Adam understands—as soon as he lays eyes on her—that men and women are fundamentally alike, yet different in complementary ways. Before she even speaks a word, Eve’s body reveals all this and more.  The body reveals the person. This phrase tells us all there is to know about the body. Science can examine our flesh in minute detail, down to our cells and even our DNA. But no amount of scientific exploration can replace the truth that our bodies reveal us, giving form to our innermost being and unique personality. Our bodies are sacramental—they make the invisible visible.

Consider how textbooks treat Native religions as a unitary whole. ... "These Native Americans ... believed that nature was filled with spirits. Each form of life, such as plants and animals, had a spirit. Earth and air held spirits too. People were never alone. They shared their lives with the spirits of nature." ... Stated flatly like this, the beliefs seem like make-believe, not the sophisticated theology of a higher civilization. Let us try a similarly succinct summary of the beliefs of many Christians today: "These Americans believed that one great male god ruled the world. Sometimes they divided him into three parts, which they called father, son, and holy ghost. They ate crackers and wine or grape juice, believing that they were eating the son's body and drinking his blood. If they believed strongly enough, they would live on forever after they died." Textbooks never describe Christianity this way. It's offensive. Believers would immediately argue that such a depiction fails to convey the symbolic meaning or the spiritual satisfaction of communion.

There is one only living and true God, without body, parts, or passions; consisting of three persons—the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.” It is painful to the human mind to be compelled to admit, that such wonderful inconsistencies of language or ideas, have ever found place in any human creed. Yet, so it is.

The presence of the messianic salvation is also seen in Jesus' miracles of healing, for which the Greek word meaning "to save" is used. The presence of the Kingdom of God in Jesus meant deliverance from hemorrhage (Mk 5:34), blindness (Mk 10:52), demon possession (Lk 8:36), and even death itself (Mk 5:23). Jesus claimed that these deliverances were evidences of the presence of the messianic salvation (Mt 11:4-5). They were pledges of the life of the eschatological Kingdom that will finally mean immortality for the body. The Kingdom of God is concerned not only with people’s souls but with the salvation of the whole person.

It is useful to reflect that the word 'liturgy' did not originate in church or worship settings. In the Greek world it referred to publish service, what a citizen did for the community. As the church used the word in relation to worship, ti kept this 'public service' quality - working for the community on behalf of or following orders from God. As we worship God, revealed personally as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in our Holy Scriptures, we are not doing something apart form or away from the non-Scripture=reading world; we do it for the world - bringing all creation and all history before God, presenting our bodies and all the beauties and needs of humankind before God in praise and intercession, penetrating and serving the world for whom Christ died in the strong name of the Trinity.

A Christian is supposed to be in the world, and yet not of the world--a Both/And as perplexing and demanding as the Either/Or that precedes the life of faith. I'm at once a pure, beautiful, genderless soul, but at the same time a gendered body full of flaws, sins, and wanting. This contradiction, the Both/And, is the Cross.

Since, then, man cannot make principles, from whence did he gain a knowledge of them, so as to be able to apply them, not only to things on earth, but to ascertain the motion of bodies so immensely distant from him as all the heavenly bodies are? From whence, I ask, could he gain that knowledge, but from the study of the true theology?

More profoundly, Nihilist "simplification" may be seen in the universal prestige today accorded the lowest order of knowledge, the scientific, as well as the simplistic ideas of men like Marx, Freud, and Darwin, which underlie virtually the whole of contemporary thought and life. We say "life," for it is important to see that the Nihilist history of our century has not been something imposed from without or above, or at least has not been predominantly this; it has rather presupposed, and drawn its nourishment from, a Nihilist soil that has long been preparing in the hearts of the people. It is precisely from the Nihilism of the commonplace, from the everyday Nihilism revealed in the life and thought and aspiration of the people, that all the terrible events of our century have sprung. The world-view of Hitler is very instructive in this regard, for in him the most extreme and monstrous Nihilism rested upon the foundation of a quite unexceptional and even typical Realism. He shared the common faith in "science," "progress," and "enlightenment" (though not, of course, in "democracy"), together with a practical materialism that scorned all theology, metaphysics, and any thought or action concerned with any other world than the "here and now," priding himself on the fact that he had "the gift of reducing all problems to their simplest foundations." He had a crude worship of efficiency and utility that freely tolerated "birth control", laughed at the institution of marriage as a mere legalization of a sexual impulse that should be "free", welcomed sterilization of the unfit, despised "unproductive elements" such as monks, saw nothing in the cremation of the dead but a "practical" question and did not even hesitate to put the ashes, or the skin and fat, of the dead to "productive use." He possessed the quasi-anarchist distrust of sacred and venerable institutions, in particular the Church with its "superstitions" and all its "outmoded" laws and ceremonies. He had a naive trust in the "natural mom, the "healthy animal" who scorns the Christian virtues--virginity in particular--that impede the "natural functioning" of the body. He took a simple-minded delight in modern conveniences and machines, and especially in the automobile and the sense of speed and "freedom" it affords. There is very little of this crude Weltanschauung that is not shared, to some degree, by the multitudes today, especially among the young, who feel themselves "enlightened" and "liberated," very little that is not typically "modern.

O MY FORGETFUL SOUL, Awake from thy wandering dream; turn from chasing vanities, look inward, forward, upward, view thyself, reflect upon thyself, who and what thou art, why here, what thou must soon be. Thou art a creature of God, formed and furnished by him, lodged in a body like a shepherd in his tent; Dost thou not desire to know God’s ways?

I awoke from this nightmare into a freezing cold motel room: the heater had broken at some point during the night, and the fan was now blowing icy air into the room. At first I tried to keep warm under the crappy motel bedspread by thinking about the man I loved. At the time he was traveling in Europe, and was thus unreachable. I didn't know it yet, but as I lay there, he was traveling with another woman. Does it matter now? I tried hard to feel his body wrapped tightly around mine. Next I tried to imagine everyone I had ever loved, and everyone who had ever loved me, wrapped around me. I tried to feel that I was the composite of all these people, instead of alone in a shitty motel room with a broken heater somewhere outside of Detroit, a few miles from where Jane's body was dumped thirty-six years ago on a March night just like this one. 'Need each other as much as you can bear,' writes Eileen Myles. 'Everywhere you go in the world.' I felt the wild need for any or all of these people that night. Lying there alone, I began to feel - perhaps even to know - that I did not exist apart from their love and need of me. Of this latter I felt less sure, but it seemed possible, if the equation worked both ways. Falling asleep I thought, 'Maybe this, for me, is the hand of God.

Darwin, with his Origin of Species, his theories about Natural Selection, the Survival of the Fittest, and the influence of environment, shed a flood of light upon the great problems of plant and animal life. These things had been guessed, prophesied, asserted, hinted by many others, but Darwin, with infinite patience, with perfect care and candor, found the facts, fulfilled the prophecies, and demonstrated the truth of the guesses, hints and assertions. He was, in my judgment, the keenest observer, the best judge of the meaning and value of a fact, the greatest Naturalist the world has produced. The theological view began to look small and mean. Spencer gave his theory of evolution and sustained it by countless facts. He stood at a great height, and with the eyes of a philosopher, a profound thinker, surveyed the world. He has influenced the thought of the wisest. Theology looked more absurd than ever. Huxley entered the lists for Darwin. No man ever had a sharper sword -- a better shield. He challenged the world. The great theologians and the small scientists -- those who had more courage than sense, accepted the challenge. Their poor bodies were carried away by their friends. Huxley had intelligence, industry, genius, and the courage to express his thought. He was absolutely loyal to what he thought was truth. Without prejudice and without fear, he followed the footsteps of life from the lowest to the highest forms. Theology looked smaller still. Haeckel began at the simplest cell, went from change to change -- from form to form -- followed the line of development, the path of life, until he reached the human race. It was all natural. There had been no interference from without. I read the works of these great men -- of many others – and became convinced that they were right, and that all the theologians -- all the believers in "special creation" were absolutely wrong. The Garden of Eden faded away, Adam and Eve fell back to dust, the snake crawled into the grass, and Jehovah became a miserable myth.

How can we distinguish what is biologically determined from what people merely try to justify through biological myths? A good rule of thumb is ‘Biology enables, culture forbids.’ Biology is willing to tolerate a very wide spectrum of possibilities. It’s culture that obliges people to realise some possibilities while forbidding others. Biology enables women to have children – some cultures oblige women to realise this possibility. Biology enables men to enjoy sex with one another – some cultures forbid them to realise this possibility. Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behaviour, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition. No culture has ever bothered to forbid men to photosynthesise, women to run faster than the speed of light, or negatively charged electrons to be attracted to each other. In truth, our concepts ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ are taken not from biology, but from Christian theology. The theological meaning of ‘natural’ is ‘in accordance with the intentions of the God who created nature’. Christian theologians argued that God created the human body, intending each limb and organ to serve a particular purpose. If we use our limbs and organs for the purpose envisioned by God, then it is a natural activity. To use them differently than God intends is unnatural. But evolution has no purpose. Organs have not evolved with a purpose, and the way they are used is in constant flux. There is not a single organ in the human body that only does the job its prototype did when it first appeared hundreds of millions of years ago. Organs evolve to perform a particular function, but once they exist, they can be adapted for other usages as well. Mouths, for example, appeared because the earliest multicellular organisms needed a way to take nutrients into their bodies. We still use our mouths for that purpose, but we also use them to kiss, speak and, if we are Rambo, to pull the pins out of hand grenades. Are any of these uses unnatural simply because our worm-like ancestors 600 million years ago didn’t do those things with their mouths?

It is not possible to understand the NT concept of the church if we overlook the numerous metaphors used to portray it. The church is Christ's body, a temple, a family, a royal priesthood, twelve tribes, the chosen race, Abraham's children, the new creation, the bride of Christ, and so on. Bible readers should be careful not to construct their theology of the church on a single metaphor.

Women are culturally conditioned to care for others, but not ourselves. We believe that having needs, feelings, ambitions, or thoughts of our own is not good. In this self-abnegation, we enact a culturally prescribed role that perpetuates sexist social structures. The needs and thoughts of men matter, but not ours. Christian theology presents Jesus as the model of self-sacrificing love and persuades us to believe that sexism is divinely sanctioned. We are tied to the virtue of self-sacrifice, often by hidden social threats of punishment. We keep silent about rape, we deny when we are being abused, and we allow our lives to be consumed by the trivial and by our preoccupation with others. We never claim our lives as our own. We live as though we were not present in our bodies.

Love for one another in the church is the upbuilding and functioning of the body of Christ, the bond that joins the church sanctified to God together as those who belong to the same family (of God).

The human spirit is so utterly one with the body that the term "form" can be used of the body and retain its proper meaning. Conversely, the form of the body is spirit, and this is what makes the human being a person.

We shall not be redeemed from this earth, so that we could give it up. We shall be redeemed with it. We shall not be redeemed from the body. We shall be made eternally alive with the body. That is why the original hope of Christians was not turned towards another world in heaven, but looked for the coming of God and his kingdom on this earth. We human beings are earthly creatures, not candidates for angelic status. Nor are we here on a visit to a beautiful star, so as to make our home somewhere else after we die. We remain true to the earth, for on this earth stood Christ's cross. His resurrection from the dead is also a resurrection with the dead, and with this blood-soaked earth. In the light of Christ's resurrection we can already trace the contours of the `new earth' (Rev. ii.i), where `death will be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more' (Rev. 2.1.4).

God is not, like creatures, made up of parts. God is spirit, without bodily dimensions. Firstly, no body can cause change without itself being changed. Secondly, things with dimensions are potential of division. But the starting-point for all existence must be wholly real and not potential in any way: though things that get realized begin as potential, preceding them is the source of their realization which must already be real. Thirdly, living bodies are superior to other bodies; and what makes a body living is not the dimensions which make it a body (for then everything with dimensions would be living), but something more excellent like a soul. The most excellent existent of all then cannot be a body. So when the scriptures ascribe dimensions to God they are using spatial extension to symbolize the extent of God's power; just as they ascribe bodily organs to God as metaphors for their functions, and postures like sitting or standing to symbolize authority or strength.

One of the reasons there are so many bitter, disenfranchised people who are angry at the church is because of bad theology. It’s really, really important to separate your theology of the kingdom from the church. These are two separate, autonomous entities. Yes, there is overlap and the lines blur and bleed, but they are two different ideas. Jesus’ ultimate goal for the universe is the kingdom, not the church. The kingdom is where the renewal of all things takes place. Where Eden is restored. Where the entire creation is made new.[1] The story of the Bible ends with heaven crashing into earth. The kingdom is a huge, elephantic theology with layers and texture and depth and dimensions. The problem is that most people erase or ignore the theology of the kingdom. In doing so, they pin all their hopes and dreams on the church. These unrealistic expectations are way too much to bear for the frail shoulders of God’s bride. She was never designed to bear the weight of changing the world, much less perfection. I hear people say things like, “The church is God’s plan to save the world.” No, it’s not. Jesus is God’s plan to save the world. He is bringing his kingdom crashing into this present age, and he is saving the world. Yes, the church is part of God’s plan to save the world. That is very true. We are the body of the Messiah. Meaning, we are the arms and legs, the appendages, the extensions of Jesus to the world. We join and partner and work with him for the kingdom; but he is the one saving the universe, not us.

The theological perspective of participation actually saves the appearances by exceeding them. It recognizes that materialism and spiritualism are false alternatives, since if there is only finite matter there is not even that, and that for phenomena really to be there they must be more than there. Hence, by appealing to an eternal source for bodies, their art, language, sexual and political union, one is not ethereally taking leave of their density. On the contrary, one is insisting that behind this density resides an even greater density – beyond all contrasts of density and lightness (as beyond all contrasts of definition and limitlessness). This is to say that all there is only is because it is more than it is. (...) This perspective should in many ways be seen as undercutting some of the contrasts between theological liberals and conservatives. The former tend to validate what they see as the modern embrace of our finitude – as language, and as erotic and aesthetically delighting bodies, and so forth. Conservatives, however, seem still to embrace a sort of nominal ethereal distancing from these realities and a disdain for them. Radical orthodoxy, by contrast, sees the historic root of the celebration of these things in participatory philosophy and incarnational theology, even if it can acknowledge that premodern tradition never took this celebration far enough. The modern apparent embrace of the finite it regards as, on inspection, illusory, since in order to stop the finite vanishing modernity must construe it as a spatial edifice bound by clear laws, rules and lattices. If, on the other hand, following the postmodern options, it embraces the flux of things, this is an empty flux both concealing and revealing an ultimate void. Hence, modernity has oscillated between puritanism (sexual or otherwise) and an entirely perverse eroticism, which is in love with death and therefore wills the death also of the erotic, and does not preserve the erotic as far as an eternal consummation. In a bizarre way, it seems that modernity does not really want what it thinks it wants; but on the other hand, in order to have what it thinks it wants, it would have to recover the theological. Thereby, of course, it would discover also that that which it desires is quite other than it has supposed

He referred to Pope Paul III as “His Hellishness.” Were not the pope and his associates at least members of the church? Yes, as much as spit, snot, pus, feces, urine, stench, scab, smallpox, ulcers, and syphilis are members of the body. Luther was never one to mince words.

Living in filth was regarded by great numbers of holy men, who set an example to the Church and to society, as an evidence of sanctity. St. Jerome and the Breviary of the Roman Church dwell with unction on the fact that St. Hilarion lived his whole life long in utter physical uncleanliness; St. Athanasius glorifies St. Anthony because he had never washed his feet; St. Abraham's most striking evidence of holiness was that for fifty years he washed neither his hands nor his feet; St. Sylvia never washed any part of her body save her fingers; St. Euphraxia belonged to a convent in which the nuns religiously abstained from bathing. St. Mary of Egypt was emninent for filthiness; St. Simon Stylites was in this respect unspeakable - the least that can be said is, that he lived in ordure and stench intolerable to his visitors.

this consciousness I’m describing is gendered (and I think it is), it is clearly feminine. The single most damaging and distorting thing that religion has done to faith involves overlooking, undervaluing, and even outright suppressing this interior, ulterior kind of consciousness. So much Western theology has been constructed on a fundamental disfigurement of the mind and reality. In neglecting the voices of women, who are more attuned to the immanent nature of divinity, who feel that eruption in their very bodies, theology has silenced a powerful—perhaps the most powerful—side of God.

Like the Church the individual Christian will not be able to escape the deep ambiguities of this-wordly existence whether in its cultural, social, political or other aspects, and he too will inevitably be a mixture of good and evil, with a compromised life, so that he can only live eschatologically in the judgment and mercy of God, putting off the old man and putting on Christ anew each day, always aware that even when he has done all that it is his duty to do he remains an unprofitable servant, but summoned to look away from himself to Christ, remembering that he is dead through the cross of Christ but alive and risen in Him. His true being is hid with Christ in God. The whole focus of his vision and the whole perspective of his life in Christ’s name will be directed to the unveiling of that reality of his new being at the parousia, but meantime he lives day by day out of the Word and Sacraments. As one baptized into Christ he is told by God’s Word that his sins are already forgiven and forgotten by God, that he has been justified once for all, and that he does not belong to himself but to Christ who loved him and gave Himself for him. As one summoned to the Holy Table he is commanded by the Word of God to live only in such a way that he feeds upon Christ, not in such a way that he feeds upon his own activities or lives out of his own capital of alleged spirituality. He lives from week to week, by drawing his life and strength from the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper, nourished by the body and blood of Christ, and in the strength of that communion he must live and work until Christ comes again. As often as he partakes of the Eucharist he partakes of the self-consecration of Jesus Christ who sanctified Himself for our sakes that we might be sanctified in reality and be presented to the Father as those whom He has redeemed and perfected (or consecrated) together with Himself in one. Here He is called to lift up his heart to the ascended Lord, and to look forward to the day when the full reality of his new being in Christ will be unveiled, making Scripture and Sacrament no longer necessary.

Mrs. Winterson didn't want her body resurrected because she had never, ever loved it, not even for a single minute of a single day But although she believed in End Time, she felt that the bodily resurrection was unscientific. When I asked her about this she told me she had seen Pathé newsreels of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and she knew all about Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. She had lived through the war. Her brother had been in the air force, my dad had been in the army -- it was their life, not their history. She said that after the atomic bomb you couldn't believe in mass any more, it was all about energy. 'This life is all mass. When we go, we'll be all energy, that's all there is to it.' I have thought about this a lot over the years. She had understood something infinitely complex and absolutely simple. For her, in the Book of Revelation, the 'things of the world' that would pass away, 'heaven and earth rolled up like a scroll,' were demonstrations of the inevitable movement from mass to energy. Her uncle, her beloved mother's beloved brother, had been a scientist. She was an intelligent woman, and somewhere in the middle of the insane theology and the brutal politics, the flamboyant depression and the refusal of books, of knowledge, of life, she had watched the atomic bomb go off and realised that the true nature of the world is energy not mass. But she never understood that energy could have been her own true nature while she was alive. She did not need to be trapped in mass.

Over the past twenty years, evangelicals have balkanized into several different schools of thought, each of which has their own approach to theology, culture, and church practices. Despite the disagreements, though, almost everyone agrees on this point: Traditional evangelicalism has deeply Gnostic tendencies.

Osiris, to go directly to the important part of this, was not a "dying god," not "life caught in the spell of death," or "a dead god," as modern interpreters have said. He was the hallucinated voice of a dead king whose admonitions could still carry weight. And since he could still be heard, there is no paradox in the fact that the body from which the voice once came should be mummified, with all the equipment of the tomb providing life's necessities: food, drink, slaves, women, the lot. There was no mysterious power that emanated from him; simply his remembered voice which appeared in hallucination to those who had known him and which could admonish or suggest even as it has before he stopped moving and breathing. And that various natural phenomena such as the whispering of waves could act as the cue for such hallucinations accounts for the belief that Osiris, or the king whose body has ceased to move and is in his mummy cloths, continues to control the flooding of the Nile. Further, the relationship between Horus and Osiris, 'embodied' in each new king and his dead father forever, can only be understood as the assimilation of an hallucinated advising voice into the king's own voice, which then would be repeated with the next generation.

How We Approach the New Testament We Christians have been taught to approach the Bible in one of eight ways: • You look for verses that inspire you. Upon finding such verses, you either highlight, memorize, meditate upon, or put them on your refrigerator door. • You look for verses that tell you what God has promised so that you can confess it in faith and thereby obligate the Lord to do what you want. • You look for verses that tell you what God commands you to do. • You look for verses that you can quote to scare the devil out of his wits or resist him in the hour of temptation. • You look for verses that will prove your particular doctrine so that you can slice-and-dice your theological sparring partner into biblical ribbons. (Because of the proof-texting method, a vast wasteland of Christianity behaves as if the mere citation of some random, decontextualized verse of Scripture ends all discussion on virtually any subject.) • You look for verses in the Bible to control and/or correct others. • You look for verses that “preach” well and make good sermon material. (This is an ongoing addiction for many who preach and teach.) • You sometimes close your eyes, flip open the Bible randomly, stick your finger on a page, read what the text says, and then take what you have read as a personal “word” from the Lord. Now look at this list again. Which of these approaches have you used? Look again: Notice how each is highly individualistic. All of them put you, the individual Christian, at the center. Each approach ignores the fact that most of the New Testament was written to corporate bodies of people (churches), not to individuals.

The causes which ruined the Republic of Athens illustrate the connection of ethics with politics rather than the vices inherent to democracy. A State which has only 30,000 full citizens in a population of 500,000, and is governed, practically, by about 3000 people at a public meeting, is scarcely democratic. The short triumph of Athenian liberty, and its quick decline, belong to an age which possessed no fixed standard of right and wrong. An unparalleled activity of intellect was shaking the credit of the gods, and the gods were the givers of the law. It was a very short step from the suspicion of Protagoras, that there were no gods, to the assertion of Critias that there is no sanction for laws. If nothing was certain in theology, there was no certainty in ethics and no moral obligation. The will of man, not the will of God, was the rule of life, and every man and body of men had the right to do what they had the means of doing. Tyranny was no wrong, and it was hypocrisy to deny oneself the enjoyment it affords. The doctrine of the Sophists gave no limits to power and no security to freedom; it inspired that cry of the Athenians, that they must not be hindered from doing what they pleased, and the speeches of men like Athenagoras and Euphemus, that the democracy may punish men who have done no wrong, and that nothing that is profitable is amiss. And Socrates perished by the reaction which they provoked.

Men, discouraged by their failure to accomplish exactly what they desire, often speak of their lives as purposeless, but it is idle talk, for, in fact, no intelligent life which concerns itself vigorously and properly with the things about it can be said to be purposeless. Such a life adheres, automatically, to the law of progression, and therefore moves toward a great destiny of supreme power and accompanying joys. The only purposeless life is the one that does not use its faculties. It matters little what tasks men perform in life, if only they do them well and will all their strength. In the eternal plan they are given progressive value. In an infinite universe, one cannot possibly learn all or do all, at once. A beginning must be made somewhere and corner by corner, department by department, space by space, all will be known and conquered. In the end, all must be explored, and whether one begins in the east or the west cannot matter much. The big concern is the extent to which a man offers himself, mind and body, to his worthwhile work. Upon that will growth depend.

In the classic theological formulation, God is one in being and three in person. Both are equally real, equally ultimate, and equally integral to God’s nature. That might sound paradoxical until you realize it is a way of saying that ultimate reality includes a perfect balance of both individuality and relationship. Or, as philosophers say, it includes both unity and diversity, both the one and the many. Each of the three persons of the Trinity is individually unique, yet they are so united they form a single deity. In the same way, writes John Wyatt, “each human person is unique, yet made for relationship with others. Personhood is not something we can have in isolation—in Christian thinking it is a relational concept.”76

Mind instantiates oneself into matter. In a mathematical sense, matter is an “in-formed” pattern of mind. Time is emergent, and so is space. If space-time is emergent, so is mass-energy. All interactions in our physical world is computed by the larger consciousness system. In short, mind is more fundamental than matter. All realities are observer-centric virtualities.

The body reveals the person. This phrase tells us all there is to know about the body. Science can examine our flesh in minute detail, down to our cells and even our DNA. But no amount of scientific exploration can replace the truth that our bodies reveal us, giving form to our innermost being and unique personality. Our bodies are sacramental—they make the invisible visible.

The original Christians regarded the deposit of faith, as finally inseparable from the very living substance of the Gospel in the saving event of Christ crucified, risen and glorified, but as once and for all entrusted to the church through its apostolic foundation in Christ, informing, structuring and quickening its life and faith and mission as the body of Christ in the world... While the deposit of faith was replete with the truth as it is in Jesus, embodying kerygmatic, didactic and theological content, but its very nature it could not be resolved into a system of truths or set of normative doctrines and formulated beliefs, for the truths and doctrines and beliefs entailed could not be abstracted from the embodied form which they were given in Christ in the apostolic foundation of the church without loss of their real substance. Nevertheless in this embodied form "the faith once for all delivered to the saints" constituted the regulative basis for all explicit formulation of Christian truth, doctrine and belief in the deepening understanding of the church and its regular instruction of catechumens and the faithful. app is

The resurrection of the body - what do we really mean by this? ...Did not the mystics and sages of all times teach us that the positive meaning of death is precisely that it liberates us from the prison of the body, as they say, from this perennial dependency on the material, physical, and bodily life - finally rendering our souls light, weightless, free, spiritual? We [must] consider more profoundly the meaning of the body... We must consider the role of the body in our, in my, life. On the one hand, of course it is entirely clear that all of our bodies are transitory and impermanent. Biologists have calculated that all the cells that compose our bodies are replaced every seven years. Thus, physiologically, every seven years we have a new body. Therefore, at the end of my life the body that is laid in the grave or consumed by fire is no longer the same body as all the preceding ones, and in the final analysis each of our bodies is nothing other than our individual [being] in the world, as the form of my dependence on the world, on the one hand, and of my life and of my activity on the other. In essence, my body is my relationship to the world, to others; it is my life as communion and as mutual relationship. Without exception, everything in the body, in the human organism, is created for this relationship, for this communion, for this coming out of oneself. It is not an accident, of course, that love, the highest form of communion, finds its incarnation in the body; the body is that which sees, hears, feels, and thereby leads me out of the isolation of my *I*. But then, perhaps, we can say in response: the body is not the darkness of the soul, but rather the body is its freedom, for the body is the soul as love, the soul as communion, the soul as life, the soul as movement. And this is why, when the soul loses the body, when it is separated from the body, it loses life.

All their religious conceptions are outward and material. They say that God is of a bodily nature, and has a body in form like that of a man. Material, too, is their conception of eternal life. Ask to what place they are departing, or what hope they have, and they answer — “To another land better than this.” Divine men of old told of a happy life for happy souls, to be passed in the “isles of the blest,” or in the Elysian plains of which Homer speaks. Plato taught that the soul was immortal, and expressly calls the place where it is sent “earth." …They expect to see God with the bodily eye, to hear His voice with their ears, and to touch Him with sensible hands…If a race so craven and carnal can understand anything, let them give ear. Give up your outward vision and look upwards with your mind ; turn aside from the eye of the flesh and raise the eye of the soul : only so will you see God. And if you seek a guide, you must shun vagabonds and jugglers who recommend their phantoms ; you must not blaspheme as idols those who prove themselves to be gods, while you worship one who is not even an idol, but truly a dead man, and seek out a father like unto Him.

But it was useless to try to explain him in terms of Good and Evil. They were no more than baroque abstractions. Good Business and Bad Business were the elements of the new theology. Dimitrios was not evil. He was logical and consistent; as logical and consistent in the European jungle as the poison gas called Lewisite and the shattered bodies of children killed in the bombardment of an open town.

Discussion of theology is not for everyone, I tell you, not for everyone-it is no such inexpensive or effortless pursuit. Nor, I would add, is it for every occasion, or every audience; neither are all its aspects open to inquiry. It must be reserved for certain occasions, for certain audiences, and certain limits must be observed. It is not for all people, but only for those who have been tested and have found a sound footing in study, and, more importantly, have undergone, or at the very least are undergoing purification of body and soul. For one who is not pure to lay hold of pure things is dangerous, just as it is for weak eyes to look at the sun's brightness. What is the right time? Whenever we are free from the mire and noise without, and our commanding faculty is not confused by illusory, wandering images, leading us, as it were, to mix fine script with ugly scrawling, or sweet-smelling scent with slime. We need actually "to be still" in order to know God, and when we receive the opportunity, "to judge uprightly" in theology. Who should listen to discussions of theology? Those for whom it is a serious undertaking, not just another subject like any other for entertaining small-talk, after the races, the theater, songs, food, and sex: for there are people who count chatter on theology and clever deployment of arguments as one of their amusements. What aspects of theology should be investigated, and to what limit? Only aspects within our grasp, and only to the limit of the experience and capacity of our audience. Just as excess of sound or food injures the hearing or general health, or, if you prefer, as loads that are too heavy injure those who carry them, or as excessive rain harms the soil, we too must guard against the danger that the toughness, so to speak, of our discourses may so oppress and overtax our hearers as actually to impair the powers they had before.

The body itself is pure. It is very good, but often a person's intentions are not. Therefore, the problem with immodesty is not that it reveals too much, but that it obscures the value of the person. Modesty, then, is not about hiding one's body but about revealing one's worth. It is an invitation to contemplation. It conceals certain parts of the body not because they are bad, but in order to invite others to discover one's full value as a person, thus opening a way toward love.

Dr. Richard Selzer is a surgeon and a favorite author of mine. He writes the most beautiful and compassionate descriptions of his patients and the human dramas they confront. In his book Letters to a Young Doctor, he said that most young people seem to be protected for a time by an imaginary membrane that shields them from horror. They walk in it every day but are hardly aware of its presence. As the immune system protects the human body from the unseen threat of harmful bacteria, so this mythical membrane guards them from life-threatening situations. Not every young person has this protection, of course, because children do die of cancer, congenital heart problems, and other disorders. But most of them are shielded—and don’t realize it. Then, as years roll by, one day it happens. Without warning, the membrane tears, and horror seeps into a person’s life or into the life of a loved one. It is at this moment that an unexpected theological crisis presents itself.

Because God has originated the power’s and capacities of a creature from nothing, he is entitled to all the agency of these faculties without paying for it; as the artificer of a watch is entitled to all the motion of the watch, without coming under obligation to the watch. Even this comparison is inadequate; for the maker of the watch did not create the materials out of which it is made. But God creates the very substance itself out of which man’s faculties of mind and body are made.

Faith is first of all not attachment to a body of doctrines but a process of responding in obedience and trust to God’s Word. God has given us the possibility of hearing the Word, since it was spoken in the humanity of Jesus, which we share, and since it continues to be spoken through the Holy Spirit, which dwells in us. So also theology is first of all not the study of doctrines, but a process of reflection on this response in faith. The classic definition of theology, “faith seeking understanding”, remains always valid. Faith seeks to understand the one to whom it responds. It also, thereby, seeks to understand itself, and the implications of being so called and so gifted to respond. … Who, then, is qualified for theology? The theological task is implied by the very life of faith itself. Every Christian is therefore called to do theology in this sense. Every Christian must seek an understanding of his or her response to God and the implications of that response for the rest of life.

He got into the tub and ran a little cold water. Then he lowered his thin, hairy body into the just-right warmth and stared at the interstices between the tiles. Sadness--he had experienced that emotion ten thousand times. As exhalation is to inhalation, he thought of it as the return from each thrust of happiness. Lazily soaping himself, he gave examples. When he was five and Irwin eight, their father had breezed into town with a snowstorm and come to see them where they lived with their grandparents in the small Connecticut city. Their father had been a vagabond salesman and was considered a bum by people who should know. But he had come into the closed, heated house with all the gimcrack and untouchable junk behind glass and he had smelled of cold air and had had snow in his curly black hair. He had raved about the world he lived in, while the old people, his father and mother, had clucked sadly in the shadows. And then he had wakened the boys in the night and forced them out into the yard to worship the swirling wet flakes, to dance around with their hands joined, shrieking at the snow-laden branches. Later, they had gone in to sleep with hearts slowly returning to bearable beatings. Great flowering things had opened and closed in Norman's head, and the resonance of the wild man's voice had squeezed a sweet, tart juice through his heart. But then he had wakened to a gray day with his father gone and the world walking gingerly over the somber crust of dead-looking snow. It had taken him some time to get back to his usual equanimity. He slid down in the warm, foamy water until just his face and his knobby white knees were exposed. Once he had read Wuthering Heights over a weekend and gone to school susceptible to any heroine, only to have the girl who sat in front of him, whom he had admired for some months, emit a loud fart which had murdered him in a small way and kept him from speaking a word to anyone the whole week following. He had laughed at a very funny joke about a Negro when Irwin told it at a party, and then the following day had seen some white men lightly kicking a Negro man in the pants, and temporarily he had questioned laughter altogether. He had gone to several universities with the vague exaltation of Old Man Axelrod and had found only curves and credits. He had become drunk on the idea of God and found only theology. He had risen several times on the subtle and powerful wings of lust, expectant of magnificence, achieving only discharge. A few times he had extended friendship with palpitating hope, only to find that no one quite knew what he had in mind. His solitude now was the result of his metabolism, that constant breathing in of joy and exhalation of sadness. He had come to take shallower breaths, and the two had become mercifully mixed into melancholy contentment. He wondered how pain would breach that low-level strength. "I'm a small man of definite limitations," he declared to himself, and relaxed in the admission.

The entire flaw in the Bible is the notion that God is perfect. It represents a failure of imagination on the part of the early scholars. It’s responsible for every impossible theological question as to good and evil with which we’ve been wrestling through the centuries. God is good, however, wondrously good. Yes, God is love. But no creative force is perfect. That’s clear.” “And the Devil? Is there any new intelligence about him?” He regarded me for a moment with just a touch of impatience. “You are such a cynical being,” he whispered. “No, I’m not,” I said. “I honestly want to know. I have a particular interest in the Devil, obviously. I speak of him much more often than I speak of God. I can’t figure out really why mortals love him so much, I mean, why they love the idea of him. But they do.” “Because they don’t believe in him,” David said. “Because a perfectly evil Devil makes even less sense than a perfect God. Imagine, the Devil never learning anything during all this time, never changing his mind about being the Devil. It’s an insult to our intellect, such an idea.” “So what’s your truth behind the lie?” “He’s not purely unredeemable. He’s merely part of God’s plan. He’s a spirit allowed to tempt and try humans. He disapproves of humans, of the entire experiment. See, that was the nature of the Devil’s Fall, as I see it. The Devil didn’t think the idea would work. But the key, Lestat, is understanding that God is matter! God is physical, God is the Lord of Cell Division, and the Devil abhors the excess of letting all this cell division run wild.

Even so, little separation between the soteriological and the humanitarian motifs was in evidence during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The missionaries persisted in the pre-Enlightenment tradition of the indissoluble unity of “evangelization” and “humanization” (cf van der Linde 1973), of “service to the soul” and “service to the body” (Nergaard 1988:34–40), of proclaiming the gospel and spreading a “beneficent civilization” (Rennstich 1982a, 1982b). For Blumhardt of the Basel Mission this clearly included “reparation for injustice committed by Europeans, so that to some extent the thousand bleeding wounds could be healed which were caused by the Europeans since centuries through their most dirty greediness and most cruel deceitfulness” (quoted by Rennstich 1982a:95; cf 1982b:546). And Henry Venn, famous General Secretary of the British CMS, urged missionaries to take their stand between the oppressor and the oppressed, between the tyranny of the system and the morally and physically threatened masses of the people to whom they went (cf Rennstich 1982b:545).

It seems obvious that throughout history, as one of the few professions open to women, midwifery must have attracted women of unusual intelligence, competence, and self-respect§. While acknowledging that many remedies used by the witches were “purely magical” and worked, if at all, by suggestion, Ehrenreich and English point out an important distinction between the witch-healer and the medical man of the late Middle Ages: . . . the witch was an empiricist; She relied on her senses rather than on faith or doctrine, she believed in trial and error, cause and effect. Her attitude was not religiously passive, but actively inquiring. She trusted her ability to find ways to deal with disease, pregnancy and childbirth—whether through medication or charms. In short, her magic was the science of her time. By contrast: There was nothing in late mediaeval medical training that conflicted with church doctrine, and little that we would recognize as “science”. Medical students . . . spent years studying Plato, Aristotle and Christian theology. . . . While a student, a doctor rarely saw any patients at all, and no experimentation of any kind was taught. . . . Confronted with a sick person, the university-trained physician had little to go on but superstition. . . . Such was the state of medical “science” at the time when witch-healers were persecuted for being practitioners of “magic”.15 Since asepsis and the transmission of disease through bacteria and unwashed hands was utterly unknown until the latter part of the nineteenth century, dirt was a presence in any medical situation—real dirt, not the misogynistic dirt associated by males with the female body. The midwife, who attended only women in labor, carried fewer disease bacteria with her than the physician.

The Doctrine of Discovery, first directed towards Portugal then directed towards Spain, affirmed the imperial ambitions of these two European powers.  It gave theological permission for the European body and mind to view themselves as superior to the non-European body and minds.  The doctrine created an insider perception for the European while generating an outside, other identity for non-Europeans; it create an identity for African bodies as inferior and only worthy of subjugation; it also relegated the identity of the original inhabitants of the land 'discovered' to become outsiders, now unwelcome in their own land.

What was the nature of the universe into which she had been born? Why did it exist at all? If it had a purpose, what was it? These seemed to her the only questions worth exploring. And the only valid technique evolved by humans for exploring such questions was the scientific method, a robust and self-correcting search for the truth. Yet it had become obvious to her since about the age of twelve that science as it had progressed so far – physics, chemistry, biology, all the rest – had only inched towards grappling with the true questions, the fundamentals. Those questions had only been addressed by theologians and philosophers, it seemed to her. Unfortunately, their answers were a mush of doubt, self-delusion and flummery that had probably done more harm than good. And yet that was all there was. For now she had devoted herself, nominally at least, to theology and philosophy, as well as to explorations of the natural sciences, such as on this expedition. She had even received grants to help support this mission to the stepwise East from the Vatican, the Mormons, from Muslim orders, and various philosophical foundations. Dealing with such bodies, she had quickly learned when not to share her view that organized religion was a kind of mass delusion.

Given everything we know about the universe it would seem utterly impossible for any sane person to believe that the ultimate truth about the universe and human existence is the story of Israeli, German or Russian nationalism – or indeed of nationalism in general. A story that ignores almost the whole of time, the whole of space, the Big Bang, quantum physics and the evolution of life is at most just a tiny part of the truth. Yet people somehow manage not to see beyond it. Indeed, billions of people throughout history have believed that for their lives to have meaning, they don’t even need to be absorbed into a nation or a great ideological movement. It is enough if they just ‘leave something behind’, thereby ensuring that their personal story continues beyond their death. The ‘something’ I leave behind is ideally my soul or my personal essence. If I am reborn in a new body after the death of my present body, then death is not the end. It is merely the space between two chapters, and the plot that began in one chapter will carry on into the next. Many people have at least a vague faith in such a theory, even if they do not base it on any specific theology. They don’t need an elaborate dogma – they just need the reassuring feeling that their story continues beyond the horizon of death.

Given everything we know about the universe it would seem utterly impossible for any sane person to believe that the ultimate truth about the universe and human existence is the story of Israeli, German or Russian nationalism – or indeed of nationalism in general. A story that ignores almost the whole of time, the whole of space, the Big Bang, quantum physics and the evolution of life is at most just a tiny part of the truth. Yet people somehow manage not to see beyond it. Indeed, billions of people throughout history have believed that for their lives to have meaning, they don’t even need to be absorbed into a nation or a great ideological movement. It is enough if they just ‘leave something behind’, thereby ensuring that their personal story continues beyond their death. The ‘something’ I leave behind is ideally my soul or my personal essence. If I am reborn in a new body after the death of my present body, then death is not the end. It is merely the space between two chapters, and the plot “that began in one chapter will carry on into the next. Many people have at least a vague faith in such a theory, even if they do not base it on any specific theology. They don’t need an elaborate dogma – they just need the reassuring feeling that their story continues beyond the horizon of death.

The tearing of the Temple’s veil is a fitting end to the passion narratives, the perfect symbol of what the death of Jesus meant for the men and women who reflected upon it many decades later. Jesus’s sacrifice, they argued, removed the barrier between humanity and God. The veil that separated the divine presence from the rest of the world had been torn away. Through Jesus’s death, everyone could now access God’s spirit, without ritual or priestly mediation. The high priest’s high-priced prerogative, the very Temple itself, was suddenly made irrelevant. The body of Christ had replaced the Temple rituals, just as the words of Jesus had supplanted the Torah. Of course, these are theological

When I love God I love the beauty of bodies, the rhythm of movements, the shining of eyes, the embraces, the feelings, the scents, the sounds of all this protean creation. When I love you, my God, I want to embrace it all, for I love you with all my senses in the creations of your love. In all the things that encounter me, you are waiting for me. For a long time I looked for you within myself and crept into the shell of my soul, shielding myself with an armour of inapproachability. But you were outside - outside myself - and enticed me out of the narrowness of my heart into the broad place of love for life. So I came out of myself and found my soul in my senses, and my own self in others.

In his book 'God and the Universe of Faiths,' British theologian John Hick makes a compelling argument. Before Copernicus, he says, earthlings believed they occupied the center of the universe - and why not? Earth was the place from which they saw everything else. It was the ground under their feet, and as far as they could tell everything revolved around them. Then Copernicus proposed a new map of the universe with the sun at the center and all the planets orbiting around it. His proposal raised religious questions as well as scientific ones, but he was right. The sun, not the earth, holds the planets in our solar system together. Hick argues that it is past time for a Copernican revolution in theology, in which God assumes the prime place at the center and Christianity joins the orbit of the great religions circling around. Like the scientific revolution, this one requires the surrender of primary place and privileged view. Absolute truth moves to the center of the system, leaving people of good faith with meaningful perceptions of that truth from their own orbits. This new map does not require anyone to give up the claim to uniqueness. It only requires the acceptance of unique neighbors, who concur that the brightness they see at the center of everything exceeds their ability to possess it. The Franciscan father Richard Rohr had his eye on a different planetary body when he said, 'We are all of us pointing toward the same moon, and yet we persist in arguing about who has the best finger.

We read of feeding on flesh and drinking blood; of body parts and flesh-unions; of vines, branches, and living water; of dying in another’s death and living in another’s life; and of the indwelling Spirit and God becoming flesh. Perhaps it is because this language and these images mystify and puzzle us that we fail to reckon properly with them. We feel a bit like many of Jesus’s contemporaries, confused and even troubled by what he says. But we must reckon with these words, because embedded in them are the most astounding of promises—eternal life, the hope of glory, forgiveness, holiness, redemption, resurrection, bodily transformation, and, most astonishing of all, the Son of God dwelling in us. This is the language of salvation and the logic of the gospel,

How can we distinguish what is biologically determined from what people merely try to justify through biological myths? A good rule of thumb is ‘Biology enables, Culture forbids.’ Biology is willing to tolerate a very wide spectrum of possibilities. It’s culture that obliges people to realise some possibilities while forbidding others. Biology enables women to have children – some cultures oblige women to realise this possibility. Biology enables men to enjoy sex with one another – some cultures forbid them to realise this possibility. Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behaviour, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition. No culture has ever bothered to forbid men to photosynthesise, women to run faster than the speed of light, or negatively charged electrons to be attracted to each other. In truth, our concepts ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ are taken not from biology, but from Christian theology. The theological meaning of ‘natural’ is ‘in accordance with the intentions of the God who created nature’. Christian theologians argued that God created the human body, intending each limb and organ to serve a particular purpose. If we use our limbs and organs for the purpose envisioned by God, then it is a natural activity. To use them differently than God intends is unnatural. But evolution has no purpose. Organs have not evolved with a purpose, and the way they are used is in constant flux. There

It is they—the "Seven Hosts"—who, having "considered in their Father (divine Thought) the plan of the operator," as says Pyrnander, desired to operate (or build the world with its creatures) likewise; for, having been born "within the sphere of operation"—the manifesting Universe -- such is the Manvantaric LAW. And now comes the second portion of the passage, or rather of two passages merged into one to conceal the full meaning. Those who were born within the sphere of operation were "the brothers who loved him well." The latter—the "him"—were the primordial angels: the Asuras, the Ahriman, the Elohim—or "Sons of God," of whom Satan was one—all those spiritual beings who were called the "Angels of Darkness," because that darkness is absolute light, a fact now neglected if not entirely forgotten in theology. Nevertheless, the spirituality of those much abused "Sons of Light" which is Darkness, must be evidently as great in comparison with that of the Angels next in order, as the ethereality of the latter would be, when contrasted with the density of the human body. The former are the "First-born"; therefore so near to the confines of pure quiescent Spirit as to be merely the "PRIVATIONS" -- in the Aristotelian sense—the ferouers or the ideal types of those who followed. They could not create material, corporeal things; and, therefore, were said in process of time to have refused to create, as commanded by "God" -- otherwise, TO HAVE REBELLED. Perchance, this is justified on that principle of the Scientific theory which teaches us about light and sound and the effect of two waves of equal length meeting. "If the two sounds be of the same intensity, their coincidence produces a sound four times the intensity of either, while their interference produces absolute silence." Explaining some of the "heresies" of his day,

There have been many attempts during the past century to describe man's peculiar nature, but I am not sure that a better characterization has yet been made than that of the Renascence humanist, Pico della Mirandola, though couched in the now unfamiliar language of theology. "God," observed Pico, "took man as a creature of indeterminate nature, and, assigning him a place in the middle of the world, addressed him thus: 'Neither a fixed body nor a form that is peculiar to thyself have we given thee, Adam; to the end that according to thy longing and according to thy judgment thou mayest have and possess what abode, what form, and what functions thought shalt desire. The nature of all things is limited and constrained within the bounds and laws prescribed by us. Thou, constrained by no limits...shalt ordain for thyself the limits of thy nature....As the maker and molder of thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer, thou shalt have the power to degenerate into lower forms of life, which are brutish. Thou shalt have the power, out of thy soul and judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, which are divine.'" That choice occurs at every stage in man's development.

Pauline Trio One could sing October rain, and one had a gift for plain chant and prayer, a domain unsettled by love or its intimate other. What fits with this theology no one dares to say. These twins so perfectly in tune must know "the modesty of nature," the perfect art and texture that sustains the other name. Paris could not be the frame for loyal Romans, their shame worn upon their bodies light as air, and nothing is quite as endurable as death. Those who have taken this path move with an abiding breath. Such a common dance this dense intention of love's expense. Keep this for that special hour when the Roman drops his sour gift for abandoned splendour; et c'est la nuit, the footfall that troubles that other Paul. I have learned the felicity of fire, how in its wake something picks at buried seed. Think this a most festive deed, nature's mistake, borrowed flare of a village dance, satire of the sun's course, light you read through waste, repair. Death had freed that first opaque habitation (what a widening gyre), an aspen ache, a lustrous scar that might lead to a hidden grove, or breed astonishment in its loss; all entire, a shaping breath proposes its own pyre. Solitude guides me through this minor occasion; moon is my mentor, one on a spree. This notion, night's philanthropy, courts my favor. Devotion, love's predecessor, sings its tidy discretion. Such gentility reins all vigor, all caution.

How does marital love shed light on the nature of the celibate vocation? John Paul II writes that the fidelity and “total self-donation” lived by spouses provide a model for the fidelity and self-donation required of those who choose the celibate vocation. Both vocations in their own way express marital or spousal love, which entails “the complete gift of self” (see TOB 78:4). Furthermore, the fruit of children in married life helps celibate men and women realize that they are called to a fruitfulness as well—a fruitfulness of the spirit. In these ways we see how the “natural” reality of marriage points us to the “supernatural” reality of celibacy for the kingdom. In fact, full knowledge and appreciation of God’s plan for marriage and family life are indispensable for the celibate person. As the Pope expresses it, in order for the celibate person “to be fully aware of what he is choosing ... he must also be fully aware of what he is renouncing” (TOB 81:2). Celibacy, in turn, “has a particular importance and particular eloquence for those who live a conjugal life” (TOB 78:2). Celibacy, as a direct anticipation of the marriage to come, shows couples what their union is a sacrament of. In other words, celibacy helps married couples realize that their love also is oriented toward “the kingdom.” Furthermore, by abstaining from sexual union, celibates demonstrate the great value of sexual union. How so? A sacrifice only has value to the degree that the thing sacrificed has value. For example, we do not give up sin for Lent; we are supposed to give up sin all the time.

As everyone knows, Islam set up a social order from the outset, in contrast, for example, to Christianity. Islamic social teachings are so basic to the religion that still today many people, including Muslims, are completely unaware of Islam's spiritual dimensions. Social order demands rules and regulations, fear of the king, respect for the police, acknowledgement of authority. It has to be set up on the basis of God's majesty and severity. It pays primary attention to the external realm, the realm of the body and the desires of the lower soul, the realm where God is distant from the world. In contrast, Islamic spiritual teachings allow for intimacy, love, boldness, ecstatic expressions, and intoxication in the Beloved. All these are qualities that pertain to nearness to God. (...) In short, on the social level, Islam affirms the primacy of God as King, Majestic, Lord, Ruler. It establishes a theological patriarchy even if Muslim theologians refuse to apply the word father (or mother) to God. God is yang, while the world, human beings, and society are yin. Thereby order is established and maintained. Awe and distance are the ruling qualities. On the spiritual level, the picture is different. In this domain many Muslim authorities affirm the primacy of God as Merciful, Beautiful, Gentle, Loving. Here they establish a spiritual matriarchy, though again such terms are not employed. God is yin and human beings are yang. Human spiritual aspiration is accepted and welcomed by God. Intimacy and nearness are the ruling qualities. This helps explain why one can easily find positive evaluations of women and the feminine dimension of things in Sufism. (...) Again, this primacy of yin cannot function on the social level, since it undermines the authority of the law. If we take in isolation the Koranic statement, "Despair not of God's mercy surely God forgives all sins" (39:53), then we can throw the Sharia out the window. In the Islamic perspective, the revealed law prevents society from degenerating into chaos. One gains liberty not by overthrowing hierarchy and constraints, but by finding liberty in its true abode, the spiritual realm. Freedom, lack of limitation and constraint, bold expansivenessis achieved only by moving toward God, not by rebelling against Him and moving away. Attar (d. 618/1221) makes the same point more explicitly in an anecdote he tells about the great Sufi shaykh, Abu'l- Hasan Kharraqani (d. 425/1033): It is related that one night the Shaykh was busy with prayer. He heard a voice saying, "Beware, Abu'l-Hasan! Do you want me to tell people what I know about you so that they will stone you to death?" The Shaykh replied, "O God the Creator! Do You want me to tell the people what I know about Your mercy and what I see of Your generosity? Then no one will prostrate himself to You." A voice came, "You keep quiet, and so will I." Sufism is concerned with "maintaining the secret" (hifz al-sirr) for more reasons than one. The secret of God's mercy threatens the plain fact of His wrath. If "She" came out of the closet, "He" would be overthrown. But then She could not be found, for it is He who shows the way to Her door.

—and I say you still haven't answered my question, Father Bleu." "Haven't I, dear lady? I thought I stated that death is merely the beginning of—" "No, no, no!" Her voice was as high as a harpy's. "Don't go all gooey and metaphysical. I mean to ask, what is death the act, the situation, the moment?" She watched him foxily. The priest in turn struggled to remain polite. "Madame, I'm not positive I follow." "Let me say it another way. Most people are afraid of dying, yes?" "I disagree. Not those who find mystical union with the body of Christ in—" "Oh, come off it!" Madame Kagle shrilled. "People are frightened of it, Father Bleu. Frightened and screaming their fear silently every hour of every day they live. Now I put it to you. Of what are they afraid? Are they afraid of the end of consciousness? The ultimate blackout, so to speak? Or are they afraid of another aspect of death? The one which they can't begin to foresee or understand?" "What aspect is that, Madame Kagle?" "The pain." She glared. "The pain, Father. Possibly sudden. Possibly horrible. Waiting, always waiting somewhere ahead, at an unguessable junction of time and place. Like that bootboy tonight. How it must have hurt. One blinding instant when his head hit, eh? I suggest, Father Bleu, that is what we're afraid of, that is the wholly unknowable part of dying—the screaming, hurting how, of which the when is only a lesser part. The how is the part we never know. Unless we experience it." She slurped champagne in the silence. She eyed him defiantly. "Well, Father? What have you got to say?" Discreetly Father Bleu coughed into his closed fist. "Theologically, Madame, I find the attempt to separate the mystical act of dying into neat little compartments rather a matter of hairsplitting. And furthermore—" "If that's how you feel," she interrupted, "you're just not thinking it out." "My good woman!" said Father Bleu gently. "Pay attention to me!" Madame Wanda Kagle glared furiously. "I say you pay attention! Because you have never stopped to think about it, have you? If death resembles going to sleep, why, that's an idea your mind can get hold of, isn't it? You may be afraid of it, yes. Afraid of the end of everything. But at least you can get hold of some notion of something of what it's like. Sleep. But can you get hold of anything of what it must feel like to experience the most agonizing of deaths? Your head popping open like that bootboy's tonight, say? A thousand worms of pain inside every part of you for a second long as eternity? Can you grasp that? No, you can't, Father Bleu. And that's what death is at it's worst—the unknown, the possibly harrowing pain ahead." She clamped her lips together smugly. She held out her champagne glass for a refill. A woman in furs clapped a hand over her fashionably green lips and rushed from the group. Though puzzled, Joy was still all eyes and ears. "Even your blessed St. Paul bears me out, Father." The priest glanced up, startled. "What?" "The first letter to the Corinthians, if I remember. The grave has a victory, all right. But it's death that has the sting." In the pause the furnace door behind her eyes opened wide, and hell shone out. "I know what I'm talking about, Father. I've been there." Slowly she closed her fingers, crushing the champagne glass in her hand. Weeping, blood drooling from her palm down her frail veined arms, she had to be carried out. The party broke up at once.

1. Divine Writing: The Bible, down to the details of its words, consists of and is identical with God’s very own words written inerrantly in human language. 2. Total Representation: The Bible represents the totality of God’s communication to and will for humanity, both in containing all that God has to say to humans and in being the exclusive mode of God’s true communication.[11] 3. Complete Coverage: The divine will about all of the issues relevant to Christian belief and life are contained in the Bible.[12] 4. Democratic Perspicuity: Any reasonably intelligent person can read the Bible in his or her own language and correctly understand the plain meaning of the text.[13] 5. Commonsense Hermeneutics: The best way to understand biblical texts is by reading them in their explicit, plain, most obvious, literal sense, as the author intended them at face value, which may or may not involve taking into account their literary, cultural, and historical contexts. 6. Solo Scriptura:[14] The significance of any given biblical text can be understood without reliance on creeds, confessions, historical church traditions, or other forms of larger theological hermeneutical frameworks, such that theological formulations can be built up directly out of the Bible from scratch. 7. Internal Harmony: All related passages of the Bible on any given subject fit together almost like puzzle pieces into single, unified, internally consistent bodies of instruction about right and wrong beliefs and behaviors. 8. Universal Applicability: What the biblical authors taught God’s people at any point in history remains universally valid for all Christians at every other time, unless explicitly revoked by subsequent scriptural teaching. 9. Inductive Method: All matters of Christian belief and practice can be learned by sitting down with the Bible and piecing together through careful study the clear “biblical” truths that it teaches. The prior nine assumptions and beliefs generate a tenth viewpoint that—although often not stated in explications of biblicist principles and beliefs by its advocates—also commonly characterizes the general biblicist outlook, particularly as it is received and practiced in popular circles: 10. Handbook Model: The Bible teaches doctrine and morals with every affirmation that it makes, so that together those affirmations comprise something like a handbook or textbook for Christian belief and living, a compendium of divine and therefore inerrant teachings on a full array of subjects—including science, economics, health, politics, and romance.[15]