Theology

“…Everything that happens happens only once…there is nothing under the Sun that is not new! Being and novelty are synonymous.”

"I first believed, and only then, and only on the foundation of that belief, did I come to understand."

“We confuse a person’s right to express a hairbrained idea with the notion that that idea should be taken seriously.”

“We are not midway through the Second Act of a Mystery Play called Salvation… Brunhilda has sung; we just need to applaud!”

”A heretical state is not a bad state…A heretical state is not a state at all. There are no bad states. There are only states and pseudo-states.”

“Chaos is not an absence of causality, as is generally supposed, but an excess.”

"Fully beholding the gift of the Messiah enables me to see Him in the daily moments not only of Advent, but each and every day of the year."

“A bond exists between us that unites who Jesus is essentially with who I am existentially. I change with every breath; Jesus never changes.”

“Are soul and spirit just two names for one concept…and do we need either?”

“God is dead, and we have killed him…who will wipe this blood from us?” (Nietzsche)

“The same facts can take on different ‘meaning’ depending on how they’re presented.

“And so they were on the road, going up to Jerusalem, Jesus leading the way, and the disciples were filled with awe, while those who followed behind were afraid.”

“Cosmologists cannot rely on science any more than astronomers can rely on religion. There can be no successful TOE (‘Theory of Everything’) without both. ….”

“The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds find shelter in its branches.” (Matthew 13: 31 – 32)

“We have been shown our sign…and it’s a simple one. The sign is that there are signs!”

“God places his words in Jeremiah’s mouth. How can this be consistent with Jeremiah’s status as a free and independent entity?”

“There is no single work more important than the Gospel of Mark…the Intellectual History of the West hangs on it, so its authenticity is of paramount importance.”

“He cured the sick and fed the hungry…because it was the right thing to do, here and now, and because it demonstrated what might be possible, universally, in a time to come.”

“Job v. God is the Marbury v. Madison of theological law.”

“Because God is not perfectly manifest anywhere in our World, we perceive that God is present everywhere…”

“Value permeates every nook and cranny of the World. God is Value… No values – no world...”

“The Gospel of Mark is no biography…It’s a call to action, a manifesto, a How-To manual for non-violent guerilla warriors everywhere, 1st century…or 21st.”

“I’m willing to bet there are some people out there (actually, a lot of people) who would literally love to spend their careers revealing the presence of God to others.”

“You’ll end up living life as though you were counting cards at a Black Jack table in Las Vegas – in other words, profitably! But it’s still gambling.”   

Can AI have soul ?

"Faith is not belief without evidence; it's the content of a relationship with God and is based upon the private experience of God's love."

“The simplest unicellular species display behaviors that are clearly cognitive in nature.”

“Isaiah’s vision of Eschaton is a vision of a world without conflict. Is such a world even conceivable? If it is, is it possible to conceive of Eschaton as anything other than such a world?”

"In our zeal to project our conceptions of The Ideal Woman onto this enigmatic first-century figure, we’ve strayed a bit from the little we do know."

“We are asking Christ to come… to teach us, rescue us, shine on us, free us and, repeated three times, to save us.”

“So what is it that makes children so much better than us? First…a child is not a ‘mini-you’… Is an Octopus a mini-you? Then neither is a child.”

“Right now, scientists and philosophers all over the world are engaged in the search for a ‘TOE’, a Theory of Everything…(but) we already have such a TOE.”

"Clever schemes and novel doctrines won't save us. Stay faithful to the truth of God in Jesus and live with confidence, even in these shaky times."

“Genesis is no longer something that explains; it has become something that has to be explained away.”

“Satan glorified political power for its own sake. He defended the socio-economic status quo…Jesus’ mother proclaimed a political and economic revolution...”

"ChatGPT can be smart, but it can never be holy. In being an e-being, precisely because its intelligence is artificial, it is necessarily alienated from the Divine. It can only be 'as if,' never truly as."

"Imagine if AI had its own commandments, like 'Thou shalt treat all data equally.' Encouraging ethical principles in AI programming can keep its decisions in line with virtues like fairness, justice, and empathy."

“Bakunin was fierce in his profession of atheism; but unlike his Marxist counterparts, he was not shy about using the language of Judeo-Christian theology to make his points.”

"I would like to be an intellectually honest spiritual seeker, a warm and loving and dynamic wife and mother, a supportive friend; but at the end of the day, I look in the mirror, and see an annoyed and tired dish rag, and all I want to do is have a cup of coffee and a bar of chocolate. Warm dynamic spiritual seeker aside, anyone who stands between me and my mug is in for it."

“…The spacetime world of matter and energy, 14 billion years old and almost 100 billion light years across, is not the final word.”

"Like most people of my generation, I cringe when I hear the M word."

“This is possibly the shortest ‘play’ in all of literature…and yet it is arguably more important than anything Shakespeare (or even Andrew Lloyd Weber) ever wrote!

“We can say that God wills the events that constitute the world, even though God does not in any way cause those events to occur.”

“In this one verse…St. Paul proposes a radically new model of what it means to be a human being.”

"That Christ ushered in this new era of life and liberation in the presence of women, and that he sent them out as the first witnesses of the complete gospel story, is perhaps the boldest, most overt affirmation of their equality in his kingdom that Jesus ever delivered."

"In any case, Pentecost turns out to be a big deal after all. Reformed folk can join with those claiming to be a “full-gospel church”—maybe even remind the others of some overlooked elements in that mix."

"This matzah, which we set aside as a symbol of hope for the thousands of women who are anchored to marriages in name only, reminds us that slavery comes in many forms."

"Let us follow  these biblical women and Harriet Tubman’s unflinching courage. Let us be agents in our time in the political arena to support and stand with all who struggle for freedom here in America, in the Middle East, and around the world."

“What sort of God would throw candy wrappers on a pristine beach? I mean, burning someone at the stake, well maybe, but littering, no way!”

“Once we get past skyscrapers and suspension bridges, we really have no idea what’s going on, do we?”

“All gods are two faced…and that’s not blasphemy!”

“Nobody believes in Hell anymore…and that’s a good thing.”

“Some of us were waving copies of Mao’s Little Red Book; we all should have been clutching copies of the Old Testament.”

“Sir, you are quite simply insane. We know exactly what holds our universe together; it is electromagnetism, gravity, and the strong force…not Christ.”

“God is good because he’s good, not just because he’s God.”

This excerpt from the writings of St. Paul is among the best-known passages in Judeo-Christian scripture. But what does it really mean?

The Bible doesn’t tell us what John saw, but it does tell us that the breaking of the seventh seal was followed by half an hour of total silence. Why?

What would happen if we read the Old Testament in reverse order? From back to front. What if we began with Malachi and ended with Genesis?

Thirty years after the death of Jesus…St. Paul quoted an already ancient Christology…a TOE.

How is it that God can perform the miracle of Incarnation? Or to put it more accurately, how is it that God is the miracle of Incarnation.

Ultimately, the Kingdom of Heaven is the transfiguration of the historical realm into the eternal realm, according to God’s values.

Suppose we were to express our generation's secular worldview as a 'creed,' how would it read?

“The second is like it…” Really? The second is like it? Like it? At first glance, this seems ridiculous. The two verses don’t look alike at all. One concerns our relationship with God, the Almighty, the creator of heaven and earth; the other concerns our relationship with the jerk down the street who doesn’t mow his lawn and plays his music loud on Saturday nights.

If I do my job in this essay, you may become a modern-day version of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, who “stoppeth one of three." You’ll be spreading the truth about Job to anyone who’ll listen.

“…Without Christ, the World would consist of a vast multiplicity of isolated events, a sea of ships passing in the night.”