"Priesthood is not a convenient, historically conditioned form of Church organisation, but is rooted in the Incarnation, in the priesthood and mission of Christ himself."

"Without God, listening to that Christmas sermon was a vinegar experience. Without the incarnation, Christianity isn't even a very good story, and most sadly, it means nothing. "Be nice to one another" is not a message that can give my life meaning, assure me of love beyond brokenness, and break open the dark doors of death with the key of hope. The incarnation is an essential part of Jesus-shaped spirituality."

"The Buddhist theory of re-incarnation is mainly rooted in the theory of Karma."

"Christmas in w:BethlehemBethlehem. The ancient dream: a cold, clear night made brilliant by a glorious star, the smell of incense, shepherds and wise men falling to their knees in adoration of the sweet baby, the incarnation of perfect love."

"I believe in God - not in a Catholic God; there is no Catholic God. There is God, and I believe in Jesus Christ, his incarnation. Jesus is my teacher and my pastor, but God, the Father, Abba, is the light and the Creator. This is my Being."

"We must primarily become seekers of God instead of founders of works, for work will not sustain us through the traumas of incarnation."

"The most destructive criticism has not been able to dethrone Christ as the incarnation of perfect holiness. The waves of a tossing and restless sea of unbelief break at His feet, and He stands still the supreme model, the inspiration of great souls, the rest of the weary, the fragrance of all Christendom, the one divine flower in the garden of God."

"Thus the word reveals the Divine Essence; His incarnation makes that Life, that Love, that Light, which is eternally resident in God obvious to souls that steadily contemplate Himself. These terms Life, Love, Light — so abstract, so simple, so suggestive — meet in God; but they meet also in Jesus Christ. They do not only make Him the centre of a philosophy; they belong to the mystic language of faith more truly than to the abstract terminalogy of speculative thought. They draw hearts to Jesus; they invest Him with a higher than any intellectual beauty."

"Beside the 'regular' clergy exists a special class of ecclesiastical dignitaries — the 'incarnations' or living Buddhas who are at the summit of the lamaist hierarchy and who, in right of their very origin differ from the rest. A Qubilghan, is in fact the representative in flesh and blood, of some Buddha, Bodhisattva, god or saint, whose spirit is incarnated in him at the moment of his birth, and will pass, at his death, into the body of the child destined to become his successor in the functions fulfilled by him. The incarnation is thus less a matter of person than function."

"When all is said and done, science is about things and theology is about words. Things behave in the same way everywhere, but words do not. Quantum mechanics works in all cultures, while theology works in one culture alone. If you have not grown up in Polkinghorne's culture, where words such as "incarnation" and "trinity" have a profound meaning, you cannot share his vision."

"Greatness by nature includes a power, but not a will to power....The great man, whether we comprehend him in the most intense activity of his work or in the restful equipoise of his forces, is powerful, involuntarily and composedly powerful, but he is not avid for power. What he is avid for is the realization of what he has in mind, the incarnation of the spirit."

"The Incarnation is the mystery and the dogma of the Word made Flesh. ln this technical sense the word incarnation was adopted, during the twelfth century, from the Norman-French, which in turn had taken the word over from the Latin incarnatio."

"The essence of the doctrine of the Incarnation is that the preexistent Word has been embodied in the man Jesus of Nazareth, who is presented in the Gospel. According to John as being in close personal union with the Father, whose words Jesus is speaking when he preaches the gospel."

"The development of a more refined theology of the Incarnation resulted from the response of the early church to various misinterpretations concerning the question of the divinity of Jesus and the relationship of the divine and human natures of Jesus. The Council of Nicaea (AD 325) determined that Christ was “begotten, not made” and that he was therefore not creature but Creator. The basis for this claim was the doctrine that he was “of the same substance as the Father.” The doctrine was further defined by the Council of Chalcedon (AD 451), at which it was declared that Jesus was perfect in deity and in humanity and that the identity of each nature was preserved in the person of Jesus Christ. The affirmation of the oneness of Christ with God and with humanity was made while maintaining the oneness of his person."

"The Incarnation implies three facts: (1) The Divine Person of Jesus Christ; (2) The Human Nature of Jesus Christ; (3) The Hypostatic Union of the Human with the Divine Nature in the Divine Person of Jesus Christ."

"The alternative view of human nature may be termed dualistic. It conceives of the individual person as comprising an inner essential self or soul, which is nonmaterial, and a physical body. In many religions] based on this view of human nature, the soul is regarded as being essentially immortal and as existing before the body was formed. Its incarnation in the body is interpreted as a penalty incurred for some primordial sin or error. At death the soul leaves the body, and its subsequent fate is determined by the manner in which it has fulfilled what the particular religion concerned has prescribed for the achievement of salvation. This view of human nature and destiny finds most notable expression in Hinduism and, in a subtly qualified sense, in Buddhism; it was also taught in such mystical cults and philosophies of the Greco-Roman world as Orphism (an ancient Greek mystical movement with a significant emphasis on death), Gnosticism (an early system of thought that viewed spirit as good and matter as evil), Hermeticism (a Hellenistic esoteric, occultic movement), and Manichaeism (a system of thought founded by Mani in ancient Iran)."

"Jesus’ incarnation and ministry thus present us with the final critique of strategic religion; on the cross, where we see God almost deliberately ‘lose’ – as if duped into being strung up by a scheming, fearful group of clerics – we see the end of power games. God will not play. I sincerely believe that if the Church allows itself to be tied up in strategies, into ‘winning’ people for Christ, it will end inexorably moving towards power-politics, towards support for wars, and away from genuine concern for the ‘other’."

"Incarnation, central Christian doctrine that God became flesh, that God assumed a human nature and became a man in the form of Jesus Christ, the Son of God and the second person of the Trinity. Christ was truly God and truly man. The doctrine maintains that the divine and human natures of Jesus do not exist beside one another in an unconnected way but rather are joined in him in a personal unity that has traditionally been referred to as the hypostatic union."

"The word Incarnation (from the Latin caro, “flesh”) may refer to the moment when this union of the divine nature of the second person of the Trinity with the human nature became operative in the womb of the Virgin Mary or to the permanent reality of that union in the person of Jesus. The term may be most closely related to the claim in the prologue of the Gospel. According to John that the Word became flesh—that is, assumed human nature."

"Jesus continues in his incarnation even after the resurrection, albeit in a different corporeal form. The incarnation did not cease with the cross and the tomb; it continues in transcendental glory."

"The effect of the Incarnation on the human will of Christ was to leave it free in all things save only sin. It was absolutely impossible that any stain of sin should soil the soul of Christ. Neither sinful act of the will nor sinful habit of the soul were in keeping with the Hypostatic Union. The fact that Christ never sinned is an article of faith."

"The Christian response is contained in these two fundamental dogmas: that of the Trinity and that of the Incarnation. In the trinitarian dogma God is one, good, true, and beautiful because he is essentially Love, and Love supposes the one, the other, and their unity."

"The Self-revealing of the Word is in every dimension - above, in creation; below, in the Incarnation; in the depth, in Hades; in the breadth, throughout the world. All things have been filled with the knowledge of God."

"Christians believe there is an afterlife. Although the body dies and is buried or cremated, they believe that their unique soul lives on and is raised to new life by God. Their belief that Jesus rose from the dead three days after his crucifixion (a Roman method of execution) gives Christians hope that if they follow Jesus’ teaching and accept him as their Lord and Saviour, then this new resurrection life awaits them. By being born as a human being (the incarnation), and then dying on the cross, Jesus made this new ‘life after death’ possible for all."

"The purpose and cause of the incarnation was that He might illuminate the world by His wisdom and excite it to the love of Himself."

"Jesus did not spend a great deal of time discoursing about the trinity or original sin or the incarnation, which have preoccupied later Christians. He went around doing good and being compassionate."

"In the Platonic anthropology, the first incarnation of the soul occurs in a masculine body, and only a subsequent incarnation, marking a later descent of the soul into the world of bodies, is feminine."

"He was made man in order that we might be made gods.[Christ] manifested himself by a body that we might receive the idea of the unseen Father; and He endured the insolence of men that we might inherit immortality."

"I have come that they may have life and have it more abundantly"

"The will of Christ remained free after the Incarnation. This is an article of faith."

"Basically there can be no categories such as 'religious art' and 'secular' art, because all true art is incarnational, and therefore 'religious'."

"There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation."

"A child's cry touches a father's heart, and our King is the Father of his people. If we can do no more than cry it will bring omnipotence to our aid. A cry is the native language of a spiritually needy soul; it has done with fine phrases and long orations, and it takes to sobs and moans; and so, indeed, it grasps the most potent of all weapons, for heaven always yields to such artillery."

"There is the instance of the Gadarene swine, where it certainly was not very kind to the pigs to put the devils into them and make them rush down the hill into the sea. You must remember that He was omnipotent, and He could have made the devils simply go away; but He chose to send them into the pigs. Then there is the curious story of the fig-tree, which always rather puzzled me. You remember what happened about the fig-tree. "He was hungry; and seeing a fig-tree afar off having leaves, He came if haply He might find anything thereon; and when he came to it He found nothing but leaves, for the time of figs was not yet. And Jesus answered and said unto it: 'No man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever'.... and Peter.... saith unto Him: 'Master, behold the fig-tree which thou cursedst is withered away.'" This is a very curious story, because it was not the right time of year for figs, and you really could not blame the tree. I cannot myself feel that either in the matter of wisdom or in the matter of virtue Christ stands quite as high as some other people known to History. I think I should put Buddha and Socrates above Him in those respects."

"It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us."

"If I were granted omnipotence, and millions of years to experiment in, I should not think Man much to boast of as the final result of all my efforts."

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals."

"His Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to him, but not nonsense. This is no limit to his power. If you choose to say 'God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it,' you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words 'God can.'... It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of his creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because his power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God."

"If you get into these spaces [non-ordinary states of consciousness] at all, you must forget about them when you come back. You must forget you're omnipotent and omniscient and take the game seriously so you'll engage in sex, have children, and participate in the whole human scenario. When you come back from a deep tank session — or a coma or psychosis —there's always this extraterrestrial feeling. You have to read the directions in the glove compartment so you can run the human vehicle once more."

"And we must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent or omniscient—that we are only 6 percent of the world's population—that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94 percent of mankind—that we cannot right every wrong or reverse every adversity—and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem."

"Disbelief is the only possible revenge for omnipotence."

"It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods."

"A work of skill, surpassing sense, A labor of Omnipotence; Though frail as dust it meet thine eye, He form'd this gnat who built the sky."

"You rodent, I'm omnipotent Let off then I'm reloading Immediately with these bombs I'm totin' And I should not be woken."

"Clearly, the Scripture tells us that we lack the capacity to grasp God's infinite mind or the way He intervenes in our lives. How arrogant of us to think otherwise! Trying to analyze His omnipotence is like an amoeba attempting to comprehend the behavior of man."

"Power confuses itself with virtue and tends also to take itself for omnipotence."

"It is with men as with wheat; the light heads are erect even in the presence of Omnipotence, but the full heads bow in reverence before Him."

"Who is all-powerful should fear everything."

"The omnipotence of evil has never resulted in anything but fruitless efforts. Our thoughts always escape from whoever tries to smother them."