Christian Theology

"The PRINCE OF PEACE, under whose stainless banner we rally, came not to destroy, but to save, even the worst of enemies. He has left us an example, that we should follow his steps. GOD COMMENDETH HIS LOVE TOWARD US, IN THAT WHILE WE WERE YET SINNERS, CHRIST DIED FOR US. We conceive, that if a nation has no right to defend itself against foreign enemies, or to punish its invaders, no individual possesses that right in his own case. The unit cannot be of greater importance than the aggregate. If one man may take life, to obtain or defend his rights, the same license must necessarily be granted to communities, states, and nations. If he may use a dagger or a pistol, they may employ cannon, bomb-shells, land and naval forces. The means of self-preservation must be in proportion to the magnitude of interests at stake and the number of lives exposed to destruction. But if a rapacious and bloodthirsty soldiery, thronging these shores from abroad, with intent to commit rapine and destroy life, may not be resisted by the people or magistracy, then ought no resistance to be offered to domestic troublers of the public peace or of private security. No obligation can rest upon Americans to regard foreigners as more sacred in their persons than themselves, or to give them a monopoly of wrong-doing with impunity."

"In the Gospel of the New Testament the ancient conception of God is perfected and fulfilled... The same God who spoke from the bush on Mount Horeb had now appeared visibly in the Person of Emmanuel, God with us... The God of the New Testament is not a different God from the God of the Old."

"Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, "Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins." All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: "Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel," which means, "God is with us." When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife, but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus."

"And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”"

"Christmas turns everything upside down This is the central truth of the incarnation — "Immanuel, God with us." The upside of heaven come down to earth. "The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, . . . full of grace and truth." Men miss the entire meaning of Jesus when they see in him the highest upreach of man; he is God reaching down and making common cause with man's struggle. The meaning of Christmas puts down the mighty things in men's minds from their seats — place, riches, talents — and exalts the things of low degree — humility, simplicity, and trust."

"The god of Moses would call for other tribes, including his favorite one, to suffer massacre and plague and even extirpation, but when the grave closed over his victims he was essentially finished with them unless he remembered to curse their succeeding progeny. Not until the advent of the Prince of Peace do we hear of the ghastly idea of further punishing and torturing the dead."

"Christ's mission is to release the divine into our conscious knowing. He awakens the impulse in humanity to rise above his lower nature and be aware of his higher nature that dwells within."

"For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace."

"When to the cross I turn my eyes, And rest on Calvary, O Lamb of God, my sacrifice, I must remember Thee."

"Christ is the great Burden bearer — the Lamb of God who beareth the sin of the world; but in order to enjoy the benefit of His interposition, I must distinctly and for myself take advantage of it. Conscious of my lost estate, I must seek a personal share in the common salvation."

"The way is long and dreary, The path is bleak and bare; Our feet are worn and weary, But we will not despair; More weary was Thy burden, More desolate Thy ways, O Lamb of God, who takest The sin of the world away, Have mercy upon us."

"And did those feet in ancient time, Walk upon England's mountains green? And was the holy Lamb of God On England's pleasant pastures seen? And did the Countenance Divine Shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here Among these dark Satanic mills? Bring me my Bow of burning gold, Bring me my Arrows of desire, Bring me my Spear — O clouds, unfold! Bring me my Chariot of fire! I will not cease from mental fight, Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, Till we have built Jerusalem In England's green & pleasant land."

"I saw in the right hand of Him who sat on the throne a scroll written inside and on the back, sealed up with seven seals. And I saw a strong angel proclaiming with a loud voice, “Who is worthy to open the scroll and to break its seals?” And no one in heaven or on the earth or under the earth was able to open the scroll or to look into it. Then I began to weep greatly because no one was found worthy to open the scroll or to look into it. And one of the elders said to me, “Stop weeping; behold, the Lion that is from the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has overcome so as to be able to open the scroll and its seven seals.” And I saw between the throne (with the four living creatures) and the elders a Lamb standing, as if slaughtered, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth. And He came and took the scroll out of the right hand of Him who sat on the throne."

"O Thou Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world, what Thou bearest in Thy blessed hands and feet I cannot bear; take it all away. Hide me in the depths of Thy suffering love, mold me to the image of Thy divine passion."

"How divinely full of glory and pleasure shall that hour be when all the millions of mankind that have been redeemed by the blood of the Lamb of God shall meet together and stand around Him, with every tongue and every heart full of joy and praise! How astonishing will be the glory and the joy of that day when all the saints shall join together in one common song of gratitude and love, and of everlasting thankfulness to this Redeemer! With what unknown delight, and inexpressible satisfaction, shall all that are saved from the ruins of sin and hell address the Lamb that was slain, and rejoice in His presence!"

"There are some who will try to maintain according to God is a body, since they find it written in the book of Moses "Our God is a consuming fire" (DT 4:24) and in the Gospel according to John, "God is Spirit, and they who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth" (Jn 4:24). Now these men will have it that fire and spirit are body and nothing else. But I would ask them what they have to say about this passage of scripture, "God is light," as John says in his epistle, "God is light, and in him is no darkness" (I Jn 1:5). He is that light, surely, which lightens the whole understanding of those who are capable of receiving truth, as it is written in the thirty-fifth psalm, "In thy light shall we see light" CPs 35: 10 [LXX]). For what other light of God can we speak of, in which a man sees light, except God's spiritual power, which when it lightens a man causes him either to see clearly the truth of all things or to know God himself who is called the truth? Such then is the meaning of the saying, "In thy light shall we see light""

"The light of the people of the world is their knowledge and utterance; while the splendours shed from the glorious acts of Him Whom God shall make manifest are His Words, through whose potency He rolleth up the whole world of existence, sets it under His Own authority by relating it unto Himself, then as the Mouthpiece of God, the Source of His divine light — exalted and glorified be He — proclaimeth: ‘Verily, verily, I am God, no God is there but Me; in truth all others except Me are My creatures. Say, O My creatures! Me alone, therefore, should ye fear’."

"2. Union, spiritual consciousness, is gained through control of the versatile psychic nature. The goal is the full consciousness of the spiritual man, illumined by the Divine Light. Nothing except the obdurate resistance of the psychic nature keeps us back from the goal. The psychical powers are spiritual powers run wild, perverted, drawn from their proper channel. Therefore our first task is, to regain control of this perverted nature, to chasten, purify and restore the misplaced powers."

"The salvation work that started with just the two of us was not at all easy. The hardship that we experienced some days beggared description. It was as if we were walking down a path of thorns. Yet, in our hearts, we were filled with the warm Light of a loving God. Regardless of rain, cold wind, or storms, my father would go out on an old bicycle to help people in trouble. Day and night, he would go as far away as Tachikawa or Hachioji to give Light and teachings, always showing gentle affection for others."

"...and he looked at Jesus as He walked, and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God!"

"Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us. Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us. Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, grant us peace."

"In his Gospel, St. John, through long and deep contemplation, acknowledges Jesus to be the Logos of God. In his epistles he points entirely away from himself toward Christ. Finally, in the Apocalypse, in the vision of the Lamb of God, Old and New Testaments are united, and the whole drama of salvation is summed up."

"Amaterasu, now is the time. We have never needed your power more. Shine your divine light upon this broken and polluted world. Let your heavenly rays become our hope as you guide us all!"

"Just as I am — Thou wilt receive, Wilt welcome, pardon, cleanse, relieve, Because Thy promise I believe— O Lamb of God, I come!"

"One day, as he stood repeating more in his intellect than with his mouth the words, 'God, have mercy upon me, a sinner' (Luke 18:13), suddenly a profuse flood of divine light appeared above him and filled the whole room. As this happened the young man lost his bearings, forgetting whether he was in a house or under a roof; for he saw nothing but light around him and did not even know that he stood upon the earth. He had no fear of falling, or awareness of the world, nor did any of those things that beset men and bodily beings enter his mind. Instead he was wholly united to non-material light, so much so that it seemed to him that he himself had been transformed into light. Oblivious of all else, he was filled with tears and with inexpressible joy and gladness. Then his intellect ascended to heaven and beheld another light, more lucid than the first. Miraculously there appeared to him, standing close to that light, the holy, angelic elder of whom we have spoken and who had given him the short rule and the book."

"There under the cross is the sinner's sanctuary — there, my friend, is the place for you and me. The first smiling look we shall get from God will be when looking unto Jesus; and the first time that we shall experience the alacrity of a lightened conscience, the relief and elasticity of the great life-burden lifted off, will be when we have laid our sins on the Lamb of God."

"He was oppressed and afflicted, Yet He did not open His mouth; Like a lamb that is led to slaughter, And like a sheep that is silent before its shearers, So He did not open His mouth. [...] Therefore, I will allot Him a portion with the great, And He will divide the plunder with the strong, Because He poured out His life unto death, And was counted with wrongdoers; Yet He Himself bore the sin of many, And interceded for the wrongdoers."

"No society is immune from the darkest impulses of man. And too often religion has been used to tap into those darker impulses as opposed to the light of God. Three years ago in our state of Wisconsin, back in the United States, a man went to a Sikh temple and, in a terrible act of violence, killed six innocent people -- Americans and Indians. And in that moment of shared grief, our two countries reaffirmed a basic truth, as we must again today -- that every person has the right to practice their faith how they choose, or to practice no faith at all, and to do so free of persecution and fear and discrimination."

"​智慧はこれ本来神のひかり、"

"Some people think that to be accepting of the will of God means to be rather passive. However, to readily accept the will of God really means to actively strive to accomplish God’s will. All life form—grasses, trees, human beings and so on—prosper by harmoniously following the will of God. This enables a tree to grow tall and strong and a human being to become virtuous and to achieve great things. We need to firmly understand this divine arrangement. It is essential that we do not limit our potential with shallow human logic and that we become a vessel into which the will of God and the Light of God can smoothly enter."

"Love that is truly altruistic seeks no reward and is based on true faith directed towards God. The true practice of altruistic love lies in not seeking anything in return. Yokoshi kamikumite have been given the art of True Light, through which we are able to give the Light of God. This is truly a wonderful gift from God. The foundation of altruistic love lies in giving Light."

"When candle wax is far from the fire, it is solid and can be grasped, but when you put it in the fire it melts, and there it burns in the flame and catches fire and becomes all light and so finds a perfect end in the fire. There is no way for it not to melt in the fire and pour out like water. So too, while man's intellect is by itself, without encountering God, it thinks that everything is solidly in its power. But when it draws near, as it were, to the fire of Divinity and the Holy Spirit, it is completely dominated by that divine light and becomes all light, and there within the flame of the All-Holy Spirit it is set aflame and softened by divine perceptions. And in that fire of Divinity, there is no way for it to consider it own concerns and desires."

"The person who has found him is unable to tell this to others as he has seen it, for the discovery is not made by the soul who makes a statement, but by the soul who is initiated in and lies outstretched towards the divine light, not moving with its own movement, but keeping its own silence as it were. For if it is by nature not able to grasp the essential nature of other realities either by name or by a defining proposition or by scientific knowledge, but by intuitive thought (noêsis) alone, as he himself says in the Letters, how could it discover the essential nature of the Demiurge in any other way than intuitively (noerôs)? How could the soul, having found him in this way, be able to report what it had seen by means of nouns and verbs and convey this to others? After all, because discursive thought proceeds through combination, it is unable to express the nature that is unified and simple. ... If discovery takes place by the soul who keeps silent, how could the flow of language through the mouth be sufficient to bring to light the essential nature of what has been discovered?"

"The next day he *saw Jesus coming to him, and *said, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!"

"The divine in man is our sole ground for believing that there is anything divine in the universe outside of man. Man is the revealer of the divine. At bottom, the world is to be interpreted in terms of joy, but of a joy that includes all the pain, includes it and transforms it and transcends it. The Light of the World is a light that is saturated with the darkness which it has overcome and transfigured."

"Praise consists in the love of God, in wonder at the goodness of God, in recognition of the gifts of God, in seeing God in all things He gives us, ay, and even in the things that He refuses to us; so as to see our whole life in the light of God; and seeing this, to bless Him, adore Him, and glorify Him."

"Because its myriad glimmering plumes Like a great army's stir and wave; Because its golden billows blooms, The poor man's barren walks to lave: Because its sun-shaped blossoms show How souls receive the light of God, And unto earth give back that glow— I thank him for the Goldenrod."

"Grace is from God, and works in the depth of the soul whose powers it employs. It is a light which issues forth to do service under the guidance of the Spirit. The Divine Light permeates the soul, and lifts it above the turmoil of temporal things to rest in God. The soul cannot progress except with the light which God has given it as a nuptial gift; love works the likeness of God into the soul. The peace, freedom and blessedness of all souls consist in their abiding in God's will. Towards this union with God for which it is created the soul strives perpetually."

"The immense energy Nicholas constantly poured into church reform at every level never obscured his philosophical clarity nor his subtle mysticism. For him, consciousness should ever seek Divine Unity, whilst action should have fraternal harmony as its purpose. The church, according to Nicholas, is a living unity, a fraternity united to the divine presence symbolized in Christ. As Deity is simple and also light, the shadows and reflections which constitute the world catch and transmit the light only to the degree that they form a universal harmony, the primary reflection of Divine Unity. Since Divine Light is simple and therefore the referent of only one Word, language and the categories of thought are necessarily engendered from experience of the realm of shadows...Opposites suggest new levels of synthesis; Deity is the coincidentia oppositorum, the reconciliation of contraries. Thus Nicholas, who taught that knowledge in one sense is conjecture, held that a careful examination of Nature and human thought reveals contraries and contradictions that can guide one to ever greater understanding. He found time to study Islam in detail, to propose a method of squaring any circle, to argue for the rotation of the earth on its axis, and to propose that the universe is boundless in time and space. Harmony is understood, he professed, and unity achieved by loving each and every thing according to its place in the community of Nature...Drawing from Pythagoras, Dionysius the Areopagite, and Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa kept alive the mystic flame of intuition and passed it to individuals as different as Giordano Bruno and Copernicus. Whilst struggling for moral reform within a decaying structure, he subtly laid the foundation of human dignity upon which both the Renaissance and the Reformation would be built."

"I do what many dream of, all their lives, — Dream? strive to do, and agonize to do, And fail in doing. I could count twenty such On twice your fingers, and not leave this town, Who strive — you don't know how the others strive To paint a little thing like that you smeared Carelessly passing with your robes afloat — Yet do much less, so much less, Someone says, (I know his name, no matter) — so much less! Well, less is more, Lucrezia: I am judged. There burns a truer light of God in them, In their vexed beating stuffed and stopped-up brain, Heart, or whate'er else, than goes on to prompt This low-pulsed forthright craftsman's hand of mine."

"[T]hought is subjected to the interpreting light of God and immortality, which idea, reigning throughout the poem, has made In Memorium the most distinctively theological poem of the century."

"神の御国には、暗の夜もなし。照り輝ける日の御光は、とどまる事なくして、暖かに且つ穏かなり。"

"We are surrounded by darkness and are afraid to venture out. Unless we do, however, we will not find God, because it is only by leaving what is safe and comfortable to pierce the darkness that we will find the light of God. This is a fitting metaphor for the spiritual pilgrimage that all of us have to make out of our self-contained comfort zone into the wide world of God and God’s people in the Catholic Church."

"“A ruler from whose brow shone the Light of God was that Back-bone of the Faith (zahiru’d-dîn) Muhammad Babur Padshah. Together with majesty, dominion, fortune, rectitude, the open-hand and the firm Faith, he had share in prosperity, abundance and the triumph of victorious arms. He won the material world and became a moving light; for his every conquest he looked, as for Light, towards the world of souls. When Paradise became his dwelling and Ruzwãn asked me the date, I gave him for answer, “Paradise is forever Babur Padshah’s abode.”"

"It is nineteen centuries since, as we are told, the night of Heathenism and Paganism was first dispelled by the divine light of Christianity; and two-and-a-half centuries since the bright lamp of Modern Science began to shine on the darkness of the ignorance of the ages. Within these respective epochs, we are required to believe, the true moral and intellectual progress of the race has occurred."

"No one can be saved without divine light. Divine light causes us to begin and to make progress, and it leads us to the summit of perfection. Therefore if you want to begin and to receive this divine light, pray. If you have begun to make progress and want this light to be intensified within you, pray. And if you have reached the summit of perfection, and want to be superillumined so as to remain in that state, pray."

"Ali is acclaimed as the "Father of Sufism". Most of the Sufi orders claim their descent from Ali. According to Ali Hajjweri, the rank of Ali is very high in the line up of Sufism. According to Junayd of Baghdad, Ali is the Shaykh as regards the principles and practices of Sufism. … The roots of Sufism lie embedded in Islam itself. There are numerous passages in the Holy Quran which are of a mystical character. The Holy Prophet of Islam (peace be on him) himself displayed mystical inclinations and he very often retired to the cave of Hirah for the purpose of devotions, meditation and contemplation. The Holy Prophet was recipient of two types of revelations, one embodied in the Holy Quran, and the other that illuminated his heart. The former was meant for all, the latter for a selected few whose hearts could be illuminated with the Divine Light. The knowledge of the Holy Prophet was thus book knowledge (ilm-i-Safina), and heart knowledge (ilm-i-Sina). Ali got this heart knowledge from the Holy Prophet."

"By prayer I mean not merely prayer from the mouth, but of the mind and heart, of all the powers of the soul and senses of the body. This is the prayer prayed by the soul who wills and desires to find this divine light, studying, meditating and reading without cease in the Book and the more-than-a-book of Life. This Book of Life is the entire life of Christ while he lived as a mortal on earth."

"While women weep, as they do now, I'll fight; while little children go hungry, as they do now, I'll fight; while men go to prison, in and out, in and out, as they do now, I'll fight; while there is a drunkard left, while there is a poor lost girl upon the streets, while there remains one dark soul without the light of God, I'll fight — I'll fight to the very end!"

"I advise you to recite the Qur'an and remember Allah much, for surely the Qur'an will remember you (do your dhikr) in the Heavens and it will be a Divine Light (nur) for you on the Earth."