A Few First Principles Of Religious Life

Origen’s On First Principles is a foundational work in the development of Christian thought and doctrine: it is the first attempt in history at a systematic Christian theology. For over a decade it has been out of print with only expensive used copies available; now it is available at an affordable price and in a more accessible format. On First Principles is the most important surviving text written by third-century Church father, Origen. Origen wrote in a time when fundamental doctrines had not yet been fully articulated by the Church, and contributed to the very formation of Christianity. Readers see Origen grappling with the mysteries of salvation and brainstorming how they can be understood. This edition presents G. W. Butterworth’s trusted translation in a new, more readable format, retains the introduction by Henri de Lubac, and includes a new foreword by John C. Cavadini. As St. Gregory of Nazianzus, Doctor of the Church, wrote: “Origen is the stone on which all of us were sharpened.”

A recent work by M. Guyau was originally announced under the title of The Non-Religion of the Future, and, doubtless, an impression is generally prevalent that, with the modification or disappearance of traditional forms of Belief, the fate of Religion itself is involved. The present volume is a plea for a reconsideration of the Religious question, and an inquiry as to the possibility of reconstructing Religion by shifting its basis from inscrutable dogmas to the unquestionable facts of man's moral nature. It is now some fifty years since Emerson wrote that "the progress of Religion is steadily towards its identification with Morals," and foretold "a new Church founded on Moral Science . . . the Church of men to come". It is more than a century since the immortal Immanuel Kant startled Europe by the betrayal of the immensity of the emotion whereby the contemplation of "man's sense of law" filled his soul, shedding henceforth an unfading glory about the ideal of Duty and Virtue, and elevating it in the strictest sense to the supreme height of Religion. What these men—the prophet and philosopher of the New Idealism—thought and did has borne fruit in the foundation in America, Great Britain and Ireland, in France, Germany, Austria and Italy, of Centres or Societies of Ethical Culture which assume as axiomatic that there is, there can be, no Religion but that which makes us one with the Moral Progress of Humanity, by incessant co-operation with "the Power that makes for Righteousness". If Religion be, what its name signifies, the unifying principle of mankind, in no other wise can we be possibly made One with each other and with the Universal Power than by so living as to secure the ends for which worlds and men exist. As the great Ethical prophet of the West expressed the truth: "My Father worketh even until now, and I also work". In such co-operation by moral life we place the very essence of Religion.

An expose of Bill Gothard's teachings that affected countless Christian families since the 1960s.