Everywhere Present Quotes

“Christianity that has purged the Church of the sacraments, and of the sacramental, has only ideas to substitute in their place. The result is the eradication of God from the world in all ways other than the theoretical.”
― Stephen Freeman, Everywhere Present: Christianity in a One-Storey Universe

“The legacy of our culture’s image-smashing (a powerful part of the Puritan world) is secularization—though now replete with its own images. If we fail to give a proper account of the role that images play in Christianity, the result will not be a Christianity with no images, but simply the dominance of cultural images and a subtle conformity to the world. The only image that needs to be discarded is the one we have of ourselves as God. We are not He. Worship God. Give honor to whom honor is due. It”
― Stephen Freeman, Everywhere Present: Christianity in a One-Storey Universe

“In describing the modern Christian use of the apocalyptic as linear, I am describing it as essentially conceived as a series of events along a timeline of history, similar to other events along the same timeline. Those events that are seen as apocalyptic differ only in that they come at the end of that timeline. This is a radical departure from classical and Orthodox Christian understanding—a departure that seriously distorts the nature of the Christian faith. History,”
― Stephen Freeman, Everywhere Present: Christianity in a One-Storey Universe

“How tragic it is that so much of the popular version of Christianity preaches a secularized message. It keeps God isolated, but popping in from time to time. It has lost the sense of the permeation of matter by divine Grace, the sacramental vision of reality; it insists that the Eucharist is just bread and wine, baptism is just a bath, and the world operates independently of God. It preaches a moralism of being “good,” leading only to obsession with guilt, and then, when that becomes too much, to shamelessness. It preaches that our salvation is acquired by a simple confession, and that it consists of going to “heaven” instead of going to “hell”—not a life lived in cooperation with divine grace, a body, mind, and heart sanctified by the Presence, which, having been “born again by water and the Spirit” in baptism, will continue to live forever, surviving death itself, to be resurrected. The”
― Stephen Freeman, Everywhere Present: Christianity in a One-Storey Universe

“The world was not a two-storey universe with an empty, meaningless collection of matter in which humanity lives and a lofty, removed paradise of heaven where all things divine dwell. In a variety of ways, the early Church bore witness to life in a one-storey world in which God is truly “everywhere present.”
― Stephen Freeman, Everywhere Present: Christianity in a One-Storey Universe

“the stories of the resurrection make it quite clear that the Christ who sits at the right hand of the Father is no ghostly spirit, but the risen Lord, who has carried earth and man to the right hand of the Almighty. It is not a two-storey account, but the very basis for belief in a one-storey universe. The”
― Stephen Freeman, Everywhere Present: Christianity in a One-Storey Universe

“There is a dark side for religious belief in the context of the two-storey universe. The dark secret thought that is often avoided is the suspicion that no one lives on the second floor: neither God nor the dead. That which is normal and ordinary, all that we think of as the first floor, may be all there is. The dark side of the two-storey universe is that unbelief and atheism are its most natural expressions. The second floor is a religious construct that seeks to salvage something of the universe that predated the rise of secular thought. But in the context of a two-storey universe, such efforts will always be a losing battle. The”
― Stephen Freeman, Everywhere Present: Christianity in a One-Storey Universe