"It may be asked what possible object a redactor could have had in combining the narrative of a rebellion against civil authority with another having for its moral to warn against usurpation of the priesthood. The story presents nothing improbable. We need not search deeply into history to find similar examples of parties with different, or even conflicting interests, uniting for a common end."

"Theologians like F. C. Baur resisted and followed Creuzer, insisting instead on a universal diffusionary history with its roots in the Orient. In his own two-volume Symbolik und Mythologie of 1824-5, Baur argued that world history was at once “‘a revelation of the divine (der Gottheit)” and “the evolution of Consciousness,” and neither of these processes had begun in Europe. Using Creuzer, Genesis, and the Zend Avesta, Baur traced the formation of the first mythologies back to a ‘‘primeval seat” [Ursiz] in “the Edenic highlands of Central Asia” between the Jaxartes and the Oxus, Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Stressing the similarities between religious ideas across cultures, Baur readily admitted Europe’s dependence on the Orient for its population and ‘‘a great portion of its culture.’’ This also allowed him to lay the foundations for what he believed to be a scientific history of religious one philosophy, one which would put the evolution of Christianity into proper perspective — without compromising its unique truth."

"Vindictive justice — and for that matter all justice — requires a distinction between the subject of a right and that of a duty."

"God remains silent so that men and women may speak, protest, and struggle. God remains silent so that people may really become people. When God is silent, and men and women cry, God cries in solidarity with them but doesn’t intervene. God waits for the shouts of protest."

"Resurrection does not simply spell the survival of the soul but requires the transformation of the world as we know it."

"Not a few of the experienced times of , when in s they felt themselves in the very presence of God, heard him speak, and saw celestial realities."

"Four hundred years ago the Bible of England was the . Few men could read it, and fewer women. For knowledge of it ordinary people were dependent upon the clergy, who were themselves none too well acquainted with its meaning. It was at such a time that a young Oxford man, William Tyndale, undertook the task of making a translation of the New Testament directly from the into the , and thus laid the foundation of the . The disfavor with which the medieval church regarded the circulation of the Bible among the people had found expression in a regulation of the , passed in 1229 , that no layman should be allowed to have any book of the Bible, especially in a translation, except perhaps the ."

"Devotion to the Bible remains an underappreciated aspect of American religious life partly because it fails to generate controversy. This essay opens a window onto America's relationship with the Bible by exploring a controversial moment in the : the public reception of professor Edgar J. Goodspeed's American Translation (1923). Initially, at least, most Americans flatly rejected Goodspeed's impeccably credentialed attempt to cast the language of the Bible in contemporary “American” English. Accusations of the professor's irreligion, bad taste, vulgarity, and crass modernity emerged from nearly every quarter of the Protestant establishment (with the exception of some card-carrying theological modernists), testifying to a widespread but unexplored attachment to the notion of a traditional Bible in the early twentieth century. By examining this barrage of reaction, “Monkeying with the Bible” argues that Protestants, along with some others in 1920s America, believed that traditional biblical language was among the forces that helped stabilize the development of American civilization."

"The kingdom of god means, then, the ruling of God in our hearts; it means those principles which separate us off from the kingdom of the world and the devil; it means the benign sway of grace; it means the Church as that Divine institution whereby we may make sure of attaining the spirit of Christ and so win that ultimate kingdom of God Where He reigns without end."

"Variations are naturally to be expected in four distinct, and in many ways independent, accounts of Christ's words and deeds, so that their presence, instead of going against, rather makes for the substantial value of the Evangelical narratives."

"Catholic scholars justly regard Biblical introduction as a theological science. They are indeed fully aware of the possibility of viewing it in a different light, of identifying it with a literary history of the various books which make up the Bible. They distinctly know that this is actually done by many writers outside of the Church, who are satisfied with applying to the Holy Scriptures the general principles of historical criticism."

"There is no evidence that James worshipped his brother or considered him divine. His emphasis in his letter was not upon the person of Jesus but upon what Jesus taught."

"Christianity, as we came to know it, is Paul and Paul is Christianity."