But are God and nature, spirit and flesh - like individual persons, mutually exclusive?  'He that is unmarried,' said St. Paul, 'careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord.  But he that is married careth for the things that are of the world, how he may please his wife.'  Yet this is to say that the divine cannot be loved in and through the things of the this world, and to deny the saying that 'Inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me.'  If the love of God and the love of the world are mutually exclusive, then, on the very premises of theology, God is a finite thing among things - for only finite things exclude one another.  God is dethroned and un-godded by being put in opposition to nature and the world, becoming an object instead of the continuum in which we 'live and move and have our being.

• christianity
• love
• religion
• st. paul
• god
• nature
• flesh
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• theology