Universal resurrection

"Dicturi ergo sunt: Dicis mihi quod resurrexerit Christus, et inde speras resurrectionem mortuorum; sed Christo licuit resurgere a mortuis. Et incipit iam laudare Christum, non ut illi det honorem, sed ut tibi faciat desperationem. Serpentis astuta pernicies, ut laude Christi te avertat a Christo, dolose praedicat quem vituperare non audet. Exaggerat maiestatem illius, ut singularem faciat, ne tu speres tale aliquid, quale in illo resurgente monstratum est. Et quasi religiosior apparet erga Christum, cum dicit: Ecce qui se audet comparare Christo, ut quia resurrexit Christus, et se resurrecturum putet. Noli perturbari perversa laude Imperatoris tui; hostiles insidiae te perturbant, sed Christi humilitas et humanitas te consolatur. Ille praedicat quantum erectus sit Christus a te: Christus autem dicit quantum descendit ad te."

"We then remembering, O sovereign Lord, in the presence of Thy holy mysteries, the salutary passion of Thy Christ, His life‑giving cross, most precious death, three days’ sepulture, resurrection from the dead, ascent into heaven, session at the right hand of Thee, the Father, His fearful and glorious coming; we beseech Thee, O Lord, that we, receiving in the pure testimony of our conscience, our portion of Thy sacred things, may be made one with the holy Body and Blood of Thy Christ; and receiving them not unworthily, we may hold Christ indwelling in our hearts, and may become a temple of Thy Holy Spirit."

"The name Jesus defines an historical occurence and marks the point where the unknown world cuts the known world . . . as Christ Jesus is the plane which lies beyond our comprehension. The plane which is known to us, He intersects vertically, from above. Within history Jesus as the Christ can be understood only as Problem or Myth. As the Christ He brings the world of the Father. But we who stand in this concrete world know nothing, and are incapable of knowing anything, of that other world. The Resurrection from the dead is, however, the transformation: the establishing or declaration of that point from above, and the corresponding discerning of it below."

"The greatest blow that has ever fallen on my life was the death, nearly thirty years ago, of my own dear father; so, in offering you my sincere sympathy, I write as a fellow-sufferer. And I rejoice to know that we are not only fellow-sufferers, but also fellow-believers in the blessed hope of the resurrection from the dead, which makes such a parting holy and beautiful, instead of being merely a blank despair."

"The average sceptic wanted to know how I explained the namby-pamby note in the Gospel, the connection of the creed with mediæval darkness and the political impracticability of the Celtic Christians. But I wanted to ask, and to ask with an earnestness amounting to urgency, "What is this incomparable energy which appears first in one walking the earth like a living judgment and this energy which can die with a dying civilisation and yet force it to a resurrection from the dead; this energy which last of all can inflame a bankrupt peasantry with so fixed a faith in justice that they get what they ask, while others go empty away; so that the most helpless island of the Empire can actually help itself?""

"Evolution can produce a workman who wants no more space than a snail, and no more light than an owl. The employer need not mind sending a Kaffir to work underground; he will soon become an underground animal, like a mole. He need not mind sending a diver to hold his breath in the deep seas; he will soon be a deep-sea animal. Men need not trouble to alter conditions, conditions will so soon alter men. The head can be beaten small enough to fit the hat. Do not knock the fetters off the slave; knock the slave until he forgets the fetters. To all this plausible modern argument for oppression, the only adequate answer is, that there is a permanent human ideal that must not be either confused or destroyed. The most important man on earth is the perfect man who is not there. The Christian religion has specially uttered the ultimate sanity of Man, says Scripture, who shall judge the incarnate and human truth. Our lives and laws are not judged by divine superiority, but simply by human perfection. It is man, says Aristotle, who is the measure. It is the Son of Man, says Scripture, who shall judge the quick and the dead."

"The ultimate goal is not life. It is resurrection. The resurrection of nations in the name of Jesus Christ the Savior. Creation and culture are only means--not the purpose--of resurrection. Culture is the fruit of talent, which God implanted in our nation and for which we are responsible. A time will come when all the world's nations will arise from the dead, with all their dead, with all their kings and emperors. Every nation has its place before God's throne. That final moment, "resurrection from the dead," is the highest and most sublime goal for which a nation can strive. The nation is thus an entity that lives even beyond this earth. Nations are realities also in the other world, not only on this one. To us Rumanians, to our nation, as to every nation in the world, God assigned a specific mission; God has given us a historical destiny. The first law that every nation must abide by is that of attaining that destiny, of fulfilling the mission entrusted to it."

"If you're saying "Well, the general resurrection is coming soon" or "The apocalyptic consummation is coming soon", you can say that all you want because it's in the future and you can't be wrong unless you're stupid enough to date it."

"Death is the thing I am most afraid of, and the resurrection of the flesh, a great Spanish theme, is the one that it is hardest for me to accept, from the point of view of.. ..life."

"Our task is to make nature, the forces of nature, into an instrument of universal resuscitation and to become a union of immortal beings. The problem of God's transcendence or immanence will only be solved when humans in their togetherness become an instrument of universal resuscitation, when the divine word becomes our divine action."

"Neither the universal return to life, universal resurrection, nor even death itself, have hitherto been the subject of knowledge or well founded judgement. For there would have been full, detailed investigations into the reasons and conditions that have given rise to the phenomenon. For most people, death appears to be an absolute, inevitable phenomenon; but just how unfounded is this conclusion is obvious from the fact that it is considered acceptable to talk about the opposite of death, about immortality, and even about resurrection; and it is talked about as a possibility, in circumstances where all sorts of sins prevail among people, and all sorts of calamities and evils, arising from the folly of nature. But if the coexistence of the one with the other is unthinkable, since the one excludes the other, then can one talk about the possibility of death where there is moral and physical sinlessness, where nature shows such a benign attitude both within and outside man, of the sort that is deemed possible when man's knowledge and control of nature are complete?"

"The principal forms of contemplation are eight in number."

"The immaterial told me that I was indeed an occidental, a right-thinking Christian who believes in the 'Resurrection of the flesh'. A whole phenomenology then appeared, but a phenomenology without ideas, or rather without any of the systems of official conventions. What appeared was distinct from form and became Immediacy. 'The mark of the immediate' – that was what I needed."

"All those who were physically healed in Lourdes have died or will die, even if for evils other than those for which they turned to Mary's intercession. [...] It is an obvious reflection, perhaps apparently banal. Yet, it allows us to clarify the Catholic's perspective in the face of the impressive dossier of "physical" healings which, at the foot of the Pyrenees, have not ceased to occur since C.E.1858. The believer, that is, knows that what is promised by the Gospel - what 'everyone' is promised - it is indeed the radical and definitive "healing" of the body too; but only when this is resurrected to eternal life. (p. 59)"

"Unique among religions, Christianity not only announces the salvation of the soul, the survival of the "spirit", but also the resurrection of the flesh. It too is destined - albeit mysteriously transfigured - to live in eternity: it is also to show this that the risen Jesus, the model and foretaste of every man's resurrection, asks for something to eat and sits at the table again with the disciples. (pp. 59-60)"

"When a man is taken in a mystical sense, his qualities are often signified by his actions, and by the circumstances of things about him. So a Ruler is signified by his riding on a beast; a Warrior and Conqueror, by his having a sword and bow; a potent man, by his gigantic stature; a Judge, by weights and measures... the affliction or persecution which a people suffers in laboring to bring forth a new kingdom, by the pain of a woman in labor to bring forth a man-child; the dissolution of a body politic or ecclesiastic, by the death of a man or beast; and the revival of a dissolved dominion, by the resurrection of the dead."

"Though his philosophy finds nothing to support it, at least from the standpoint of Terence the scientific student should be ready to acknowledge the value of a belief in a hereafter as an asset in human life. In the presence of so many mysteries which have been unveiled, in the presence of so many yet unsolved, he cannot be dogmatic and deny the possibility of a future state; and however distressing such a negative attitude of mind to the Teresian, like Pyrrho, he will ask to be left, reserving his judgement, but still inquiring. He will recognize that amid the turbid ebb and flow of human misery, a belief in the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come is the rock of safety to which many of the noblest of his fellows have clung; he will gratefully accept the incalculable comfort of such a belief to those sorrowing for precious friends hid in death's dateless night; he will acknowledge with gratitude and reverence the service to humanity of the great souls who have departed this life in a sure and certain hope but this is all. Whether across death's threshold we step from life to life, or whether we go whence we shall not return, even to the land of darkness, as darkness itself, he cannot tell."

"Ah Debs, Debs, Debs, you are out-weighed, out-priced, These are the days of Caesar, not of Christ — And yet — suppose — when all was done and said, There were a Resurrection from the Dead!"

"The unity of God is a doctrine on which the greatest stress is laid in the whole system of revelation. To guard this most important article was the principal object of the Jewish religion; and, notwithstanding the proneness of the Jews to idolatry, at length it fully answered its purpose in reclaiming them, and in impressing the minds of many persons of other nations in favour of the same fundamental truth. The Jews were taught by their prophets to expect a Messiah, who was to be descended from the tribe of Judah, and the family of David, — a person in whom themselves and all the nations of the earth should be blessed; but none of their prophets gave them an idea of any other than a man like themselves in that illustrious character, and no other did they ever expect, or do they expect to this day. Jesus Christ, whose history answers to the description given of the Messiah by the prophets, made no other pretensions; referring all his extraordinary power to God, his Father, who, he expressly says, spake and acted by him, and who raised him from the dead: and it is most evident that the apostles, and all those who conversed with our Lord before and after his resurrection, considered him in no other light than simply as "a man approved of God, by wonders and signs which God did by him.""

"The resurrection of Jesus is vitally important because it proves that He really is the Son of God and that everything He said is true. No one else has ever come back from the dead never to die again."

"We are not saved because we have a good feeling about Jesus. We are not saved because we like His moral teaching. We are saved by trusting in all that Jesus has accomplished for us in His obedient life, His sacrificial death and His bodily resurrection from the dead."

"Why lean upon a blind guide, if you have eyes of your own? Why be clothed by one who is naked, if you have put on Christ? Why use the shield of another, when the apostle gives you armour of your own? It would be better for him to learn from you to acknowledge the resurrection of the flesh, than for you from him to deny it; because if Christians must needs deny it, it would be sufficient if they did so from their own knowledge, without any instruction from the ignorant multitude."

"And how are we going to use the Higgs field to compute, organise information systems out of free quarks and pure energy... the Boundary Condition Postulate... that says that on Easter Day, 2001, Jesus Christ will return, raise the dead, etc. ...inevitable."

"But those who are counted worthy to attain that age, and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry nor are given in marriage; nor can they die anymore, for they are equal to the angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection."

"Truly, these times of ignorance God overlooked, but now commands all men everywhere to repent, because He has appointed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by the Man whom He has ordained. He has given assurance of this to all by raising Him from the dead."

"However, because I have experienced the help that is from God, I continue to this day bearing witness to both small and great, saying nothing except what the Prophets as well as Moses stated was going to take place that the Christ was to suffer and that as the first to be resurrected from the dead,+ he was going to proclaim light both to this people and to the nations."

"Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, separated unto the gospel of God, (Which he had promised afore by his prophets in the holy scriptures,) Concerning his Son Jesus Christ our Lord, which was made of the seed of David according to the flesh; And declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead: By whom we have received grace and apostleship, for obedience to the faith among all nations, for his name: Among whom are ye also the called of Jesus Christ:"

"Now I make known unto you brethren, the gospel which I preached unto you, which also ye received, wherein also ye stand, by which also ye are saved, if ye hold fast the word which I preached unto you, except ye believed in vain. For I delivered unto you first of all that which also I received: that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; and that he was buried; and that he hath been raised on the third day according to the scriptures; and that he appeared to Cephas; then to the twelve; then he appeared to above five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain until now, but some are fallen asleep; then he appeared to James; then to all the apostles; and last of all, as to the [child] untimely born, he appeared to me also. For I am the least of the apostles, that am not meet to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not found vain; but I labored more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me. Whether then [it be] I or they, so we preach, and so ye believed. Now if Christ is preached that he hath been raised from the dead, how say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there is no resurrection of the dead, neither hath Christ been raised: and if Christ hath not been raised, then is our preaching vain, your faith also is vain. Yea, we are found false witnesses of God; because we witnessed of God that he raised up Christ: whom he raised not up, if so be that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, neither hath Christ been raised: and if Christ hath not been raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins."