The purpose of Scripture is to teach obedience. Moses did not seek to convince the Israelites through reasoning but rather bound them through covenants, oaths, and acts of benevolence. He encouraged obedience to the laws by threatening punishment and promising rewards. The gospel teaching contains nothing more than simple faith: to believe in God...
The sayings of the prophets and apostles openly proclaim that God's eternal word, His eternal covenant, and true religion have been written by God into the hearts of people, that is, into the human soul. This is God's true original writing, which He has authenticated with His seal, or His idea, as the image of His divinity.
The word "law" means that each individual acts in the same prescribed manner. This manner depends either on the necessity of nature or on the will of people. A law that depends on the necessity of nature is one that necessarily follows from the nature of the thing itself. A law that depends on the will of people, called human...
The Beguine movement fundamentally differed from all previous significant movements within the Western Church. It was a women's movement, not merely an appendage of a movement initiated, led, and maintained by men.
Human reason itself is based on the irrational, on will and emotion, and is unable to prove the existence of a Supreme Reason, which itself would have to be based on the Supreme Irrational, the Universal Consciousness. It is precisely the manifestation of this Supreme Consciousness in our emotional world and imagination that leads us to faith in...
The so-called logical God was a God who neither loved nor hated, because He did not experience either pleasure or suffering. He was an inhuman God, whose truth was rational or mathematical truth, which means injustice. The attributes of the living God must be inferred from the historical revelation found in the Gospel, not from metaphysical...
Religious feeling is the feeling of divinity; only by violating everyday human language can one speak of a godless religion. Everything depends on the concept we form of God. This, in turn, depends on the concept of divinity. It is through divinity that man has reached God, rather than deriving divinity from God.
The rivers of Indian thought and philosophy, as well as the life, culture, and literature of India, originate in the dim beginnings of a distant past. At times, they changed their course, sometimes dried up, but they retained their essential identity. This persistence is not necessarily a virtue; it can easily signify stagnation and decline, which...
Sanskrit is an astonishingly rich, thriving, and lushly developed language that remains precise and adheres strictly to the grammatical framework established by Pāṇini over 2,600 years ago. Its wealth has expanded and flourished, yet it has never severed its connection to its original roots. During the declining years of Sanskrit literature, the...
The symbol of the North American Indian is the proud, aquiline-nosed plains rider adorned with a feathered headdress. The Great Plains were home to numerous Native American tribes. However, the Plains lifestyle and culture were among the youngest in America, developing in the 18th century and coming to an end in the last quarter of the 19th...