The Bible And Metaphysics

This book is written with the sincere conviction that it will convey a message other than the one we have been led to accept about Biblical and other ancient texts. It may change your experience in the way you view life and the concept of God and religion, as well as your relationship with those beliefs. This book is about ancient principles contained in the Bible and many other documents inscribed long ago, such as the Nag Hammadi Library and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Words paint mental pictures that enfold in our minds, and we call this "getting answers." At times, we take these images as the only truth there is, since we can see or imagine it. We base this personally conceived truth on what we learn in life. Should we not ask ourselves: what if all this is based on falsehoods? These mental illustrations - that we call "thoughts" - are founded solely on what we have seen or read. Most of the time, we compare them, and in this fashion, we develop personal beliefs according to our choices. This practice is not specifically reserved for the individual. It spreads throughout our society, when each and every human experiences the same event or feeling, or reads a similar book. As a result, the collective mindset - sometimes called the "over mind" - now generates large-scale belief systems that, in time, we have termed as "religion." Entire nations have been known to bond in the same creed. Even when founded with the best of intentions, these systems tend to bind us as a group, with one mindset going in one direction, while offering no other alternatives. In some respects, this direction may not necessarily be the best or ideal goal toward which we can journey. It does limit us in the centuries-old matter pertaining to God or the God Head, and it affects our individual experience. It also influences what we know about the ancient teachers and prophets of long ago.

A key to Charles Fillmore's original form of religious expression, this volume is a core text of the Unity movement and interprets the hidden meanings of the Bible's names, places, and events.

Is the Bible meant to be read and understood literally or symbolically? Are there hidden meanings intentionally embedded throughout the Bible? Does science have more to do with religion than we thought? Many religions are based on the Bible. What if the true meaning has been distorted through tranlations or interpretations? Could churches be turning people away from God, rather than leading them closer?

Or at least, such an outlook should unite Christians of all theological and church backgrounds. However, alternate visions of reality often infect and corrupt Christians’ thinking. In The Essentials of Christian Thought, eminent theologian and church historian Roger Olson outlines the basic perspective on the world that all Christians, regardless of the place and time in which they are born, have historically held. This underlying metaphysic accords with all orthodox theologies, whether Calvinist or Arminian, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Protestant, but it separates Christianity from other religious and secular perspectives. It is, quite simply, the essential requirement of a Christian view of the world. Bold and incisive, The Essentials of Christian Thought will prompt thoughtful readers and students to more consciously appropriate the core of their faith, guarding against ideas that subtly but necessarily invite compromise.

Contemporary scholarship tends to view Albert Camus as a modern, but he himself was conscious of the past and called the transition from Hellenism to Christianity "the true and only turning point in history." For Camus, modernity was not fully comprehensible without an examination of the aspirations that were first articulated in antiquity and that later received their clearest expression in Christianity. These aspirations amounted to a fundamental reorientation of human life in politics, religion, science, and philosophy. Understanding the nature and achievement of that reorientation became the central task of Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism. Primarily known through its inclusion in a French omnibus edition, it has remained one of Camus' least-read works, yet it marks his first attempt to understand the relationship between Greek philosophy and Christianity as he charted the movement from the Gospels through Gnosticism and Plotinus to what he calls Augustine's "second revelation" of the Christian faith. Ronald Srigley's translation of this seminal document helps illuminate these aspects of Camus' work. His freestanding English edition exposes readers to an important part of Camus' thought that is often overlooked by those concerned primarily with the book's literary value and supersedes the extant McBride translation by retaining a greater degree of literalness. Srigley has fully annotated Christian Metaphysics to include nearly all of Camus' original citations and has tracked down many poorly identified sources. When Camus cites an ancient primary source, whether in French translation or in the original language, Srigley substitutes a standard English translation in the interest of making his edition accessible to a wider range of readers. His introduction places the text in the context of Camus' better-known later work, explicating its relationship to those mature writings and exploring how its themes were reworked in subsequent books. Arguing that Camus was one of the great critics of modernity through his attempt to disentangle the Greeks from the Christians, Srigley clearly demonstrates the place of Christian Metaphysics in Camus' oeuvre. As the only stand-alone English version of this important work-and a long-overdue critical edition-his fluent translation is an essential benchmark in our understanding of Camus and his place in modern thought.

This book makes a major contribution to contemporary theological and philosophical debates, bridging scriptural and metaphysical approaches to the triune God. Bridges the gap between scriptural and metaphysical approaches to biblical narratives. Retrieves Aquinas’s understanding of theology as contemplative wisdom. Structured around Aquinas’s treatise on the triune God in his ‘Summa Theologiae’. Argues that intellectual contemplation is part of a broader spiritual journey towards a better understanding of God. Contributes to the current resurgence of Thomistic theology in both Protestant and Catholic circles.