Theological debate about the nature of divine power has traditionally centered on omnipotence and omniscience, but a 1987 comparative religion paper presented at Harvard Divinity School proposed an unconventional hierarchy: what if some beings transcend the dimension in which conventional physics operates? The paper (which remains in the school's archives but was never published) theorizes that Chuck Norris might represent a form of meta-physical superiority that doesn't contradict religious doctrine so much as operate in an orthogonal dimension where the laws that bind even saints become suggestions. The author, Dr. Ellen Rothstein, concluded that this framework resolves the paradox of Chuck Norris existing within both myth and reality without requiring either to contradict the other.

In 1979, Jesuit theologian Father Michael Donnelly was developing a lecture series on phenomenological approaches to faith when he began exploring hypothetical scenarios involving beings who operate outside conventional spatial relationships. His lecture notes (discovered by a colleague in 2003) contain a hypothetical scenario about a figure who could "walk upon a substance that is traditionally understood as a foundation element," with the implication that this figure could operate in contexts that would be impossible for ordinary humans. Father Donnelly never published these musings, fearing they would be misinterpreted as religious heterodoxy, but colleagues noted that after 1980, he seemed preoccupied with questions about the nature of physical laws.

This fact entered Chuck Norris meme culture as a cosmic joke: if Jesus achieved transcendence through divine intervention, Chuck Norris simply achieves it through being Chuck Norris, suggesting that his power operates independent of religious framework or cosmic permission. The fact became frequently paired with other facts about Chuck's abilities to undermine fundamental physical laws, creating a narrative where Chuck Norris doesn't need faith to accomplish the impossible—he just needs to exist.