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Quote by William P. Brown

“As God in Genesis 1 is no imperious warrior, so human beings are not conquerors of creation. The language of dominion lacks all sense of exploitation (1:26, 28). The hoarding of resources is implicitly forbidden in the account: seed-bearing plants and fruit trees are granted to animals and humans alike (1:30). Absent is any hint of the savage competition for resources. God's gift of sustenance is one of abundance, not scarcity, to be shared, not hoarded.”

Quote by William P. Brown

Book:The Seven Pillars of Creation: The Bible, Science, and the Ecology of Wonder
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The Seven Pillars of Creation: The Bible, Science, and the Ecology of Wonder

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William P. Brown

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Book:Faith and Wisdom in Science
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“A tiny 'bubble' of the new created world order nucleates at the first Easter. But it does not sweep all nature before it in passivity. Instead there is an implicit invitation to participate in the coming into being of renewed creation. The gospel message contains the same beckoning finger that was extended to Job on his ash heap, extending an invitation to explore the possibilities of a new nature.”

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“The 'ministry of reconciliation' is a stunningly brief encapsulation of the biblical story of the purpose to which God calls people. I do not know a better three-word definition of Christianity, and it does very well as an entry point for Old Testament temple-based Judaism as well. It acknowledges that there is work to do: relationships on all scales are damaged. Nation against nation, communities against communities, families, marriages, even the vital self-worth that describes people's relationship with themselves is often damaged.”

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“A good many proverbs prove to be narrative vignettes in which ... the moral calculus of reward for the good and retribution for the wicked is turned into a seesaw of miniature narrative: “The righteous is rescued from straits, / and the wicked man comes in his stead” (11:8).... The two sequenced images, then, that the line evokes are of the good man, first seemingly pinned down and then popped out of the tight squeeze into which he has fallen, and the wicked man slipped into his place. This is very neat, but, we may ask, is that the way the world is? Obviously not—obvious, I think, not only to us but also to the poet in Proverbs, who has chosen these emblematic images to represent an underlying principle of moral causation that he believes to be present in reality but that he knows would never be so perspicuous in the untidiness of experience outside literature. This for him is precisely the advantage of literary expression, the possibility of understanding made available through “proverb and adage.”

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“Ironically, I would lose my faith by taking a class in theology in a Catholic college that was also a required academic course. So, I started reading theologians and scholars of Bible history. I found, to my amazement, confirmation of my suspicions that the entire Bible was nothing more than mythology, no less fake than the Greek and Roman gods.”

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“The Bible takes its place among the great mythologies of the ancients with their great creation stories, resurrections, and battles for the hearts and minds of the puny humans who they created. Their subjects are ordered not to think for themselves or question God under penalties of eternal suffering and punishment in hell.”

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“For instance, in the matter of the inspiration of Scripture, he fixed first on the obvious fact, which was forgotten by four furious centuries of sectarian battle, that the meaning of Scripture is very far from self-evident; and that we must often interpret it in the light of other truths. If a literal interpretation is really and flatly contradicted by an obvious fact, why then we can only say that the literal interpretation must be a false interpretation. But the fact must really be an obvious fact. And unfortunately, nineteenth-century scientists were just as ready to jump to the conclusion that any guess about nature was an obvious fact, as were seventeenth-century sectarians to jump to the conclusion that any guess about Scripture was the obvious explanation. Thus, private theories about what the Bible ought to mean, have met in loud and widely advertised controversy, especially in the Victorian time; and this clumsy collision of two very impatient forms of ignorance was known as the quarrel of Science and Religion. (chapter 3)”

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“Who can deny it? The Church existed before the Bible; she made the Bible; she selected its books, and she preserved it. She handed it down; through her we know what is the Word of God, and what the word of man; and hence to try at this time of day, as many do, to overthrow the Church by means of this very Bible, and to put it above the Church, and to revile her for destroying it and corrupting it - what is this but to strike the mother that reared them; to curse the hand that fed them; to turn against their best friend and benefactor; and to repay with ingratitude and slander their very guide and protector who has led them to drink of the water out of the Saviour's fountains.”

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