Christian Theology

"Religions are all founded on miracles — on things we cannot understand, such as the Trinity. Jesus calls himself the Son of God, and yet is descended from David. I prefer the religion of Mahomet — it is less ridiculous than ours."

"“To reach your goals, you cannot use wrong means brother. What is Haram to them is also Haram to you. When you are wishing Merry Christmas to them, you are agreeing that he is the son of God and that is Shirk (sin). Because they believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God. Irrespective of whether they are practising Christians or not, they celebrate the day because of His birthday,” Zakir Naik emphasised. . “Is saying Merry Christmas wrong? I am telling you it is wrong. It is 100% wrong according to me,” he reiterated. Naik further added, “If you don’t know what Christmas stands for and happen to wish someone, Allah may forgive you. If you drink alcohol, mistaking it for Pepsi, Allah may forgive you. But if you are doing it to build a relationship after knowing what Christmas stands for, you are building your place in Jahannam (Hell). Therefore, for reaching good means, you never have to follow bad means. You have to follow the guidance of the Quran and the Sunnah (literature based on life and deeds of Prophet Muhammad).”…"

"God entrusted two sublime two missions to Saint Joseph, the greatest of all the saints: that of husband to the Queen of Angels and Saints, the Blessed Virgin Mary; and that of foster father to the Son of God, Jesus. Such a task is even more ineffable and inexpressible than human words can express."

"Bound upon the accurséd tree, Faint and bleeding, who is he? By the eyes so pale and dim, Streaming blood, and writhing limb; By the flesh, with scourges torn; By the crown of twisted thorn; By the side so deeply pierced; By the baffled, burning thirst; By the drooping death-dewed brow: Son of Man, ’tis thou!’t is thou! Bound upon the accurséd tree, Dread and awful, who is he? By the sun at noonday pale, Shivering rocks, and rending veil: By earth, that trembles at his doom; By yonder saints who burst their tomb; By Eden promised, ere he died, To the felon at his side; Lord, our suppliant knees we bow: Son of God, ’tis thou! ’tis thou! Bound upon the accurséd tree, Sad and dying, who is he? By the last and bitter cry; The ghost given up in agony; By the lifeless body laid In the chamber of the dead; By the mourners come to weep Where the bones of Jesus sleep; Crucified! we know thee now: Son of Man, ’tis thou! ’tis thou! Bound upon the accurséd tree, Dread and awful, who is he? By the prayer for them that slew,— “Lord, they know not what they do!” By the spoiled and empty grave; By the souls he died to save; By the conquest he hath won; By the saints before his throne: By the rainbow round his brow; Son of God, ’tis thou! ’tis thou!"

"I think of the stable where Jesus was born and the smell of oxen, donkeys, sheep and wet wool. The reality of the stable is brought home to me: it was a bare, smelly, dirty and unlikely place for the Son of God to born, a poor place. Yet, isn't that just like God? To do the unexpected? The surprising? The mystery of Christmas is that it happened at all."

"The English word “evangelical” comes from a transliteration of the Greek noun euangelion, which was used by the writers of the New Testament to signify the glad tidings-the goods news-of Jesus’ appearance on earth as the Son of God to accomplish God’s plan of salvation for needy humans. Translators of the New Testament into English usually employed the word “gospel” (which means goods news or glad tidings in Old English) for euangelion, as in passages like Romans 1:16-“I am not ashamed of the gospel (euangelion), because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes” (NIV) Thus, “evangelical” religion has always been “gospel” religion, or religion focusing on the “good news” of salvation brought to sinner by Jesus Christ. Already in the middle ages the word was applied, for example, to Isiah as “the evangelical prophet,” because of how later Christians read this Old Testament book as describing the work of Christ. IT was also applied to the followers of St. Francis, because their abandonment of worldly possessions was regarded as a clear imitation of Jesus’ own life. During the sixteenth century, the word “evangelical” began to take on a more specific meaning associated with the Protestant Reformation. In this usage, the evangelicals were those who protested against the corruptions of the late-medieval Western church and who sought a Christ-centered and Bible-centered reform of the church. Because of these efforts, the word became a rough synonym for “Protestant.” To this day in many places around the world, Lutheran churches reflect this older sense of the term (for example, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America or the Evangelical Church of the Lutheran Confession in Brazil). In contemporary Germany, evangelisch retains the older meaning attached to the Lutheran churches descended from the Reformation, while evangelikal is a new coinage to designate those who are often called “evangelicals” in other parts of the world."

"All true development tends ever to God. Its objective aim is the restoration by the second Adam of the Divine image forfeited by the first; and, incidentally, it transmutes grief into gladness and sighs into songs. But it is always a development in Christ, since it is only " in the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God " that any of our race can come "unto a perfect man.""

"The rhythms of the knowledge that comes from faith are slow. That is why revelation must also be hidden, veiled. Man's freedom is unable to bear the full weight of God's revelation. Thus the parables spring from the heart of Jesus urgency of the gospel; they are spontaneous, not artificial, they spring from life itself. The parables are, in this perspective, one of the most beautiful fruits of the mystery of the Incarnation, the frontier to which language is pushed by the Son of God, so that it may be adapted to communicate the mystery of the Kingdom in respect to the concrete situation of man."

"Those executioners of tyranny and barbarity arrived at the garden of Khizrabad at seven O’clock at night. They entered the room where the afflicted prince was walking up and down repeating the words referred to: Muhammad mara mi-kushad, ibn-ullah mara jan mi-bakhshad [Muhammad kills me, and the Son of God gives me life; interpreted as Dara’s desire to convert to Christianity at this moment]. They laid hands upon him, and, showing neither compassion nor respect, flung him to the ground and cut off his head. Leaving the body to welter in its blood, they carried the head with all haste to Aurangzeb’s presence. It was then eight O’clock at night, and he was in the garden of the palace. Such was the tragic and lamentable fate meted out to the unhappy prince Dara, first-born and heir to the Mogul empire, loved and cherished by his father, Shahjahan, and respected by the people. Neither his good qualities nor his rank sufficed to deliver him from the evil designs of Aurangzeb, nor from the ill-effects of his own bad qualities."

"God never gave a man a thing to do concerning which it were irreverent to ponder how the Son of God would have done it."

"Labour therefore diligently, that not only out of the time of temptation, but also in the time and conflict of death, when thy conscience is thoroughly afraid with the remembrance of thy sins past, and the devil assaileth thee with great violence, going about to overwhelm thee with heaps, floods and whole seas of sins, to terrify thee, to draw thee from Christ, and to drive thee to despair; that then I say, thou mayest be able to say with sure confidence: Christ the Son of God was given, not for the righteous and holy, but for the unrighteous and sinners.... If he gave himself to death for our sins, then undoubtedly he is no tyrant or judge which will condemn us for our sins. He is no caster-down of the afflicted, but a raiser-up of those that are fallen, a merciful reliever and comforter of the heavy and broken-hearted. Else should Paul lie in saying: "which gave himself for our sins.""

"Now, if there is anyone dissatisfied with the fact, that there is a whole race of human beings, with the rights of human beings, created with a skin not colored like our own, let him go mouth the heavens, and mutter his blasphemies in the ear of the God that made us all. Tell him that he had no business to make human beings with a black skin. I repeat, I feel no responsibility for this fact. But, inasmuch as it has pleased God to make them human beings, I am bound to regard them as such. Instead of chattering your gibberish in my ear bout negro equality, go look the son of God in the face and reproach him for favoring negro equality because he poured out his blood for the most abject and despised of the human family. Go settle this matter with the God who created and the Christ who redeemed."

"‘’’So when the centurion, who stood opposite Him, saw that He cried out like this and breathed His last, he said, "Truly this Man was the Son of God!"’’’"

"As men, we have God for our King, and are under the law of reason: as Christians, we have Jesus the Messiah for our King, and are under the law revealed by him in the gospel. And though every Christian, both as a deist and a Christian, be obliged to study both the law of nature and the revealed law, that in them he may know the will of God, and of Jesus Christ, whom he hath sent; yet, in neither of these laws, is there to be found a select set of fundamentals, distinct from the rest, which are to make him a deist, or a Christian. But he that believes one eternal, invisible God, his Lord and King, ceases thereby to be an atheist; and he that believes Jesus to be the Messiah, his king, ordained by God, thereby becomes a Christian, is delivered from the power of darkness, and is translated into the kingdom of the Son of God; is actually within the covenant of grace, and has that faith, which shall be imputed to him for righteousness; and, if he continues in his allegiance to this his King, shall receive the reward: eternal life."

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would be either a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."

"As man lives, and moves, and has his Being in the Divine Nature, and is supported by it, whether his Nature be good or bad; so the Wrath of Man, which was awakened in the dark Fire of his fallen Nature, may, in a certain Sense, be called the Wrath of God, as Hell itself may be said to be in God, because nothing can be out of his Immensity; yet this Hell, is not God, but the dark Habitation of the Devil. And this Wrath which may be called the Wrath of God, is not God, but the fiery Wrath of the fallen Soul. And it was solely to quench this Wrath, awakened in the human Soul, that the Blood of the Son of God was necessary, because nothing but a Life and a Birth, derived from him into the human Soul, could change this darkened Root of a self-tormenting Fire, into an amiable Image of the holy Trinity, as it was at first created. This was the Wrath, Vengeance, and vindictive Justice that wanted to be satisfied, in order to our Salvation; it was the Wrath and Fire of Nature and Creature kindled only in itself, by its departing from true Resignation, and Obedience to God."

"This bread and wine are the simple but eloquent monument to the infinite love of the Son of God, around which we gather with tender, tearful gratitude, because He loved us'so, and because we know that our garlands of affection and consecration are pleasing to Him."

"The ninth chapter shows us the new step of sovereign grace in the conversion of Saul to be the witness of an ascended Christ, Who owns the saints as part of Himself, and calls the persecutor to be His chosen vessel to bear His name before Gentiles, kings, and children of Israel, the deepest in truth, the largest in heart, the most abundant in labour of all the apostles. No wonder the gospel of Christ's glory marked him, who first saw and heard the Lord thus; yet a simple disciple baptised him who forthwith, in the synagogues, preached Jesus as the Son of God."

"The Son of God became a Man for our sake. To redeem us He died upon the cross. To re-present His bloody sacrifice of the cross in an unbloody manner, to memorialize it until the end of time and to apply its fruits, He instituted the New Testament priesthood and the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. It is this priesthood and this Mass that the reformers have tried to take from us. But God has not allowed them to be completely successful. I have no doubt myself that He raised up Archbishop Lefebvre to contribute to the continuation of the priesthood and the true Mass. And now by God's mercy we also are in a position to help contribute to the continuation of the priesthood and the true Mass. For this we are grateful to him and to the late Bishop Alfred Mendez who, as one priest said, took a 'most courageous step for the preservation of our holy Catholic Faith in this age of modernism.'"

"There's a devil inside me which cries, "You're not the son of the Carpenter, you're the son of King David! You are not a man, you are the Son of man whom Daniel prophesied." And still more: "The Son of God! And still more: God!""

"A Son of God, Lord of the World, born of a virgin, and rising again after death, and the son of a small builder with revolutionary notions, are two totally different beings. If one was the historical Jesus, the other certainly was not. The real question of the historicity of Jesus is not merely whether there ever was a Jesus among the numerous claimants of a Messiahship in Judea, but whether we are to recognise the historical character of this Jesus in the Gospels, and whether he is to be regarded as the founder of Christianity.[4]"

"Since the Devil is the adversary of Christ he should occupy a position equivalent to his and be the Son of God as well. Satan would be the first Son of God and Christ the second."

"Julian (emperor), Against the Galilaeans (c. 362)"

"But why do you not cease to call Mary the mother of God, if Isaiah nowhere says that he that is born of the virgin is the "only begotten Son of God" and "the firstborn of all creation"?"

"If he was in his room and you wanted to see him, you didn’t just knock and wait for him to respond. What you did was knock and say “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us”, and when he responded with an “Amen”, you walked in."

"This is what the Son of God desires of you: that he might be able to embellish, perfect and gain you lustre with the fullness of his gifts. Since he is so taken by your Beauty, which flows and gushes from him to you, as I have said, what he desires of you is that he might have the supreme pleasure of an eternity enjoying you and his gifts. Thus, everyone who proceeds to live in a way that is contrary to his own self, lives in God; his whole being is God-orientated; he sees nothing but God and himself."

"Thirdly, he must have lost himself in a waylessness and in a darkness in which all contemplatives wander around in enjoyment and can no longer find themselves in a creaturely way. In the abyss of this darkness in which the loving spirit has died to itself, there begin the revelation of God and eternal life. For in this darkness there shines and is born an incomprehensible light which is the Son of God, in whom one contemplates eternal life. And in this light one becomes seeing."

"As long as we dwell in the shadow, we cannot see the sun itself; but Now we see through a glass darkly, says St. Paul. Yet the shadow is so enlightened by the sunshine that we can perceive the distinctions between all the virtues and all the truth which is profitable to our mortal state. But if we would become one with the brightness of the Sun, we must follow love, and go out of ourselves into the Wayless, and then the Sun will draw us with our blinded eyes into Its own brightness, in which we shall possess unity with God. . . . In his outpouring, He wills to he wholly ours: and then He teaches us to live in the riches of the virtues. In His indrawing touch all our powers forsake us, and then we sit under His shadow, and His fruit is sweet to our taste, for the Fruit of God is the Son of God, Whom the Father brings forth in our spirit. This Fruit is so infinitely sweet to our taste that we can neither swallow It nor assimilate It, but It rather absorbs us into Itself and assimilates us with Itself."

"I have said that God is pleased with nothing but love; but before I explain this, it will be as well to set forth the grounds on which the assertion rests. All our works, and all our labours, how grand soever they may be, are nothing in the sight of God, for we can give Him nothing, neither can we by them fulfil His desire, which is the growth of our soul. As to Himself He desires nothing of this, for He has need of nothing, and so, if He is pleased with anything it is with the growth of the soul; and as there is no way in which the soul can grow but in becoming in a manner equal to Him, for this reason only is He pleased with our love. It is the property of love to place him who loves on an equality with the object of his love. Hence the soul, because of its perfect love, is called the bride of the Son of God, which signifies equality with Him. In this equality and friendship all things are common, as the Bridegroom Himself said to His disciples: I have called you friends, because all things, whatsoever I have heard of my Father, I have made known to you."

"’’’But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name.’’’"

"’’’Now Bethany was near Jerusalem, about [a]two miles away. And many of the Jews had joined the women around Martha and Mary, to comfort them concerning their brother."

"’’’Now a certain man was sick, Lazarus of Bethany, the town of Mary and her sister Martha. It was that Mary who anointed the Lord with fragrant oil and wiped His feet with her hair, whose brother Lazarus was sick. Therefore the sisters sent to Him, saying, “Lord, behold, he whom You love is sick.”"

"Now, O son of God, set in the valley of true humility, walk in peace without pride of spirit, which, like a precipitous mountain, offers a difficult, or near-impossible, ascent or descent to those who attempt to scale it, and on its summit no building can be built. For a person who tries to climb higher than he can achieve possesses the name of sanctity without substance, because, in name alone without a structure of good works, he glories in a kind of vain joy of the mind."

"O venerable father Bernard, I lay my claim before you, for, highly honored by God, you bring fear to the immoral foolishness of this world and, in your intense zeal and burning love for the Son of God, gather men [cf. Luke 5.10] into Christ's army to fight under the banner of the cross against pagan savagery. I beseech you in the name of the Living God to give heed to my queries."

"The Son of God is nailed to the cross; but on the cross God conquers human death. Christ, the Son of God, dies; but all flesh is made alive in Christ. The Son of God is in hell; but man is carried back to heaven."

"The interpretation of man as “Son of God,” or, more precisely, as “Son within the Son,” has many weighty implications. But before we pursue them, there is one question that cannot be differed. If men are really Sons of God within Christ, how can we explain that so few of them know this and remember it? If they bear within them this divine Life in all its immensity – because there is no other Life but that, and the living can only bow before its profusion – how can we understand why they are so unhappy? In the end, it is not the tribulations visited upon them by the world that oppress them; rather, it is with themselves that they are so discontented. It is their own incapacity to achieve their desires and plans, it is their hesitations, their weakness and lack of courage, that provoke the deep malaise that accompanies them throughout their miserable existence. If they never tire of attributing the cause of their failure to circumstances or to others, it is only to fool themselves and to forget that the real cause lies within themselves. As Kierkegaard puts it: “Consequently he does not despair because he did not get to be Caesar but despairs over himself because he did not get to be himself.” But how can one despair of this me if it is nothing less than the coming into us of God within Christ? Such despair is possible only if, one way or another, man has forgotten the splendor of his initial condition, his condition of Son of God – his condition as “Son within the Son.” It is this forgetting that we must now attempt to understand."

"To understand man on the basis of Christ, who is himself understood on the basis of God, in turn rests on the crucial intuition of a radical phenomenology of Life, which is precisely that of Christianity: namely, that Life has the same meaning for God, for Christ, and for man. This is so because there is but a single and selfsame essence of Life, and, more radically, a single and selfsame Life. This Life – that self-generates itself in God and that, in its self-generation, generates the transcendental Arch-Son as the essential Ipseity in which this self-generation comes about – is the Life from which man himself takes his transcendental birth, precisely since he is Life and is explicitly defined as such within Christianity. He is the Son of this unique and absolute Life, and thus the Son of God. The tautological expression “Son of God” – tautological in that there are no sons except in Life and thus in God – conceals the profound truth that man’s essence, that which makes him possible as what he really is, is not man as we understand him, and still less some humanitas or other. Rather, it is the essence of divine life – that which makes him one of the living, and that alone."

"The Son of God goes forth to war, A kingly crown to gain; His blood red banner streams afar: Who follows in His train? Who best can drink his cup of woe, Triumphant over pain, Who patient bears his cross below, He follows in His train."

"What Jesus spoke was Truth; the way He spoke was gracious. He spoke the truth in love. God is love, and the Son of God spoke lovingly."

"In God's matters all princes ought to bow their sceptres to the Son of God, and to ask counsel at his mouth, what they ought to do. David exhorteth all kings and rulers to serve God with fear and trembling. Remember, Madam, that you are a mortal creature... And although ye are a mighty prince, yet remember that He which dwelleth in heaven is mightier."

"And then, to sink the roots of this fear deep, the church introduces the idea of evil and the devil to children, for it knows that if it can cut early psychological scars it has a better chance of holding on to the minds thus wounded. All religions are anxious to proselytise the young. Society seems not to see either the absurdity or the danger in the fact that pupils in one school are taught, as truths of history, that the Normans conquered England in 1066 and that Jesus is the son of God, in another that the Normans conquered England in 1066 and Jesus is not the son of God but that Mohammed received the definitive divine revelation, in a third that the Normans conquered England in 1066 and that neither Jesus nor Mohammed is of any significance besides Guru Dev—and in a fourth that the Normans conquered England in 1066 and all three of Jesus, Mohammed and Guru Dev are false distractions, attention to whom is likely to provoke God’s jealous wrath. Yet in schools all over the country these antipathetic “truths” are being force-fed to different groups of pupils, none of whom is in a position to assess their credibility or worth. This is a serious form of child abuse. It sows the seeds of apartheids capable of resulting, in their logical conclusion, in murder and war, as history sickeningly and ceaselessly proves."

"’’’Now a certain man was sick, Lazarus of Bethany, the town of Mary and her sister Martha. It was that Mary who anointed the Lord with fragrant oil and wiped His feet with her hair, whose brother Lazarus was sick. Therefore the sisters sent to Him, saying, "Lord, behold, he whom You love is sick." When Jesus heard that, He said, "This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God may be glorified through it." Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. 6 So, when He heard that he was sick, He stayed two more days in the place where He was. Then after this He said to the disciples, "Let us go to Judea again." [...] Then Jesus said to them plainly, "Lazarus is dead. And I am glad for your sakes that I was not there, that you may believe. Nevertheless let us go to him."’’’"

"‘’’Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life. Verily, verily, I say unto you, The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God: and they that hear shall live.’’’"

"’’’And in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Galilee, named Nazareth, To a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin's name was Mary. And the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women. And when she saw him, she was troubled at his saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be. And the angel said unto her, Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with God. And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name JESUS. He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David: And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end. Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man? And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. And, behold, thy cousin Elisabeth, she hath also conceived a son in her old age: and this is the sixth month with her, who was called barren. For with God nothing shall be impossible. And Mary said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word. And the angel departed from her.’’’"

"A mightier love for the Son of God, to overpower and subdue and lead captive these wayward and truant affections of the natural heart — this is what is needed."

"I’ve always suspected that Judas was the most faithful of the apostles, and that his betrayal of Jesus was not a betrayal at all, simply a test to prove that Christ could not be betrayed. The way I see it, Judas hoped and expected that Christ would have worked some kind of miracle and turned away those soldiers when they came for him. Or perhaps he would not die on the cross. Or perhaps—well, never mind. In any case, Jesus didn’t do any of these things, probably because he was not capable of it. You see, I’ve also always believed that Christ was not the son of God, but just a very very good man, and that he had no supernatural powers at all, just the abilities of any normal human being. When he died, that’s when Judas realized that he had not been testing God at all—he’d been betraying a human being, perhaps the best human being. Judas’s mistake was in wanting too much to believe in the powers of Christ. He wanted Christ to demonstrate to everyone that he was the son of God, and he believed his Christ could do it—only his Christ wasn’t the son of God and couldn’t do it, and he died. You see, it was Christ who betrayed Judas—by promising what he couldn’t deliver. And Judas realized what he had done and hung himself. That’s my interpretation of it, Auberson—not the traditional, I’ll agree, but it has more meaning to me. Judas’s mistake was in believing too hard and not questioning first what he thought were facts. I don’t intend to repeat that mistake."

"[F]acts and events have ultimate meaning only within and by virtue of the context of the world view in which they are conceived. Hence, it is a vicious circle to argue that a given fact (say, the resuscitation of Christ's body) is evidence of a certain truth claim (say, Christ's claim to be God), unless it can be established that the event comes in the context of a theistic universe. For it makes no sense to claim to be the Son of God and to evidence it by an act of God (miracle) unless there is a God who can have a Son and who can act in a special way in the natural world. But in this case the mere fact of the resurrection cannot be used to establish the truth that there is a God. For the resurrection cannot even be a miracle unless there already is a God. Many overzealous and hasty Christian apologists rush hastily into their historical and evidential apologetics without first properly doing their theistic homework."

"Step by step, He had raised their conceptions of Him nearer the unspeakable grandeur of His true nature and work. At first the Teacher, He had, after a time, by gradual disclosures, revealed Himself as the Son of God veiled in the form of man; and, now, since His crucifixion and resurrection, He had taught them to see in Him the Messiah, exalted to immortal and Divine majesty, as the conqueror of Death and the Lord of all."

"As a creature, human beings are "in relationship". Transcendence which characterizes man in relation to other creatures is like the case of a gardener who is responsible for the whole creation. That is why our land is holy. Likewise it is the habitat chosen by the son of God. Nature is the manifestation of the revelation of a God full of goodness."

"Great undulating banners red as blood. And the brass bands. And the manly thud of uniformly set-down boots. And the rage inside the happy shouts. A hundred thousand spleens have found a mouth. Curtains of sperm are flung up the side of the sky. Hell has fertilized heaven. And now the hero comes—the trumpet of his people. And his voice is enlarged like a movie's lion. He roars, he screams so well for everyone, his tantrums tame a people. He is the Son of God, if God is Resentment. And God is Resentment—a pharaoh for the disappointed people."