Sermon by Pastor Michael Pearl: The Brain and Addiction, December 17, 2021
But while self, viz. reason, is captivated and fast bound in a close and strong prison, that is to say, in the anger of God, and in earthliness; it is very danger0us for a man to make use of the light of knowledge in self, as if it were in possession of self...
For the wrath of the eternal and temporal nature will soon take pleasure in it, and then self and a man's own reason will rise up in pride, and depart from the true resigned humility towards God, and will no longer eat of the fruit of paradise, but of the property of self, viz. of that dominion of life wherein good and evil are mixed, as Lucifer and Adam did, who both entered with the desire of self back into the original, out of which the creatures were brought forth, and into the condition of the creatures; Lucifer into the center and wrathful nature, into the matrix or womb which bringeth forth fire; and Adam into the earthly nature, into the matrix of the outward world, viz. into the lust after good and evil.
— Jacob Boehme (1576-1624)
It is in Christianity that our arts have developed; it is in Christianity that the laws of Europe have--until recently--been rooted. It is against a background of Christianity that all our thought has significance . An individual European may not believe that the Christian faith is true, and yet what he says, and makes, and does, will all spring out of his heritage of Christian culture and depend upon that culture for its meaning. Only a Christian culture could have produced a Voltaire or a Nietzsche. I do not believe that the culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian faith. And I am convinced of that, not merely because I am a Christian myself, but as a student of social biology. If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes.
— T.S. Eliot, Christianity and Culture, 1939
The Presbyter, a disciple of the apostles, expressed himself in the same way concerning the two covenants, showing that both came from one and the same God and that there is no other God except him who created and formed us. The argument of those who maintain that this world surrounding us was made by an angel or by any other kind of power, or by another god, has no basis at all, for once a person is driven away from the creator fo all things and concedes that the world in which we live was made by another or through another, he has to fall into many absurd and contradictory notions; he will not be able to render an account either of the probability of these or of their truth.
--Irenaeus (130-202 AD)