Until even religious men see the uniqueness of Christ's society, until they acknowledge to the full extent its claim to be nothing less than a new Kingdom, they will continue the hopeless attempt to live for two Kingdoms at once. And hence the value of a more explicit Classification. For probably the most of the difficulties of trying to live the Christian life arise from attempting to half-live it. Natural Law, p. 396.
After all God doesn’t want you to be an imitation of someone else. You should be the original you were created to be. There is an anointing on your life, an empowerment. Not to be somebody else, but to be you. If you let people squeeze you into their molds and you bow down to their pressure to try to please your critics, it not only takes away your uniqueness, but it also lessens the favor on your life.
The book is not to be judged from any one-sided estimate of its contents. By the side of much that seems trivial, and even non-moral--for the patriarchs themselves are not saints--it is noteworthy how frequently the narratives are didactic. The characteristic sense of collective responsibility, which appears more incidentally in xx. 7, is treated with striking intensity in a passage (xviii. 23-33) which uses the legend of Sodom and Gomorrah as a vehicle for the statement of a familiar problem (cf. Ezek. xviii., Ps. lxxiii., Job). It will be observed that interviews with divine beings presented as little difficulty to the primitive minds of old as to the modern native; even the idea of intercourse of supernatural beings with mortals (vi. 1-4) is to-day equally intelligible. The modern untutored native has a not dissimilar undeveloped and childlike attitude towards the divine, a naive theology and a simple cultus. The most circumstantial tales are told of imaginary figures, and the most incredible details clothe the lives of the historical heroes of the past. So abundant is the testimony of modern travellers to the extent to which Eastern custom and thought elucidate the interpretation of the Bible, that it is very important to notice those features which illustrate Genesis. "The Oriental," writes S.I. Curtiss (_Bibl. sacra_, Jan. 1901, pp. 103 sqq.), "is least of all a scientific historian. He is the prince of story-tellers, narratives, real and imaginative, spring from his lips, which are the truest portraiture of composite rather than individual Oriental life, though narrated under forms of individual experience." There are, therefore, many preliminary points which combine to show that the critical student cannot isolate the book from Oriental life and thought; its uniqueness lies in the manner in which the material has been shaped and the use to which it has been put. Entry: A
Perhaps the most characteristic religious peculiarities of the various disputed prophecies are--(1) the emphasis laid on the uniqueness, eternity, creatorship and predictive power of Yahweh (xl. 18, 25, xli. 4, xliv. 6, xlviii. 12, xlv. 5, 6, 18, 22, xlvi. 9, xlii. 5, xlv. 18, xli. 26, xliii. 9, xliv. 7, xlv. 21, xlviii. 14); (2) the conception of the "Servant of Yahweh"; (3) the ironical descriptions of idolatry (Isaiah in the acknowledged prophecies only refers incidentally to idolatry) xl. 19, 20, xli. 7, xliv. 9-17, xlvi. 6; (4) the personality of the Spirit of Yahweh (mentioned no less than seven times, see especially xl. 3, xlviii. 16, lxiii. 10, 14); (5) the influence of the angelic powers (xxiv. 21); (6) the resurrection of the body (xxvi. 19); (7) the everlasting punishment of the wicked (lxvi. 24); (8) vicarious atonement (chap. liii.). Entry: V
The integral [int][f](z)dz taken by a closed circuit about the pole not containing any other singularity is at once seen to be 2[pi]iA1, where A1 is the coefficient of (z - z0)
"Just because God is One, all our lives have various and unique places in the harmony of the divine life. And just because God attains and wins and finds this uniqueness, all our lives win in our union with Him the individuality which is essential to their true meaning. And just because individuals whose lives have uniqueness of meaning are here only objects of pursuit, the attainment of this very individuality, since it is indeed real, occurs not in our present form of consciousness, but in a life that now we see not, yet in a life whose genuine meaning is continuous with our own human life, however far from our present flickering form of disappointed human consciousness that life of the final individuality may be. Of this our true individual life, our present life is a glimpse, a fragment, a hint, and in its best moments a visible beginning. That this individual life of all of us is not something limited in its temporal expression to the life that now we experience, follows from the very fact that here nothing final or individual is found expressed" (pp. 144-146). Entry: O
This and similar questions, leading up to the ultimate and supreme question--Wherein does lie the uniqueness of Israel's religion?--are among those which will require in the future renewed examination in the light of a critical study alike of the Old Testament and of all the relevant material furnished by archaeology. Archaeology has not yet found the key to every unopened door; but it has already done enough to justify the surmise that if criticism had not already disintegrated the traditional theories of the Old Testament, archaeology in the latter half of the 19th century would itself have initiated the process. Entry: 3