What do you think?

Post Edited (One Love) : 10/23/2008 5:48:38 AM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (selah) : 10/23/2008 6:08:24 AM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (One Love) : 10/23/2008 6:40:06 AM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (One Love) : 10/23/2008 7:18:01 AM (GMT-5)

"Secondly, it follows from this that Christ as Creator-Logos is to be envisaged, not as on the outside, but as on the inside of everything. It is a frequent fault of religious writers that they speak of the created universe as if it were an artifact of a Maker Who has, so to speak, produced it from without. God the Creator becomes the celestial Clock-maker Who sets the cosmic process in motion, winding up the clock, but then leaving it to continue ticking on its own. This will not do. It is important to avoid such images as the divine architect, builder or engineer, and to speak rather in terms of indwelling (without thereby excluding the dimension of divine transcendence). Creation is not something upon which God acts from the outside, but something through which he expresses Himself from within. Transcendent, He is also immanent; above and beyond creation, He is also its true inwardness, its 'within.' "

Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia

Post Edited (One Love) : 10/23/2008 7:31:19 AM (GMT-5)

Evdokimov.

The Soul transcends the senses, abandons the conceptual mode, and rises above every familiar signpost, outside every image and representation. The multiplicity of knowledge (gnosis) gives way to what is "one," the simple, the uncompounded. The life of the soul as the image and mirror of God, becomes the life of the soul as the dwelling-place of God. What lies at the heart of the mystical ascent is the direct, Presence-filled experience which turns the soul towards the Kingdom: "If it is the peculiar power of wisdom to know the truth of the things that are, no one will have acquired the gift of wisdom to perfection, if such knowledge does not include the things to come" (St Gregory of Nyssa). "A spiritual man of the end-times, " St. Issac says, "receives the grace that is appropriate to this." This is the iconographic vision of the "eternal Liturgy".

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Alexei V. Nesteruk
Light from the East: Theology, Science, and the Eastern Orthodox Tradition
Page 28
"Detachment from Nature and the Love of Nature"

Post Edited (One Love) : 10/23/2008 8:07:15 AM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (One Love) : 10/23/2008 8:31:26 AM (GMT-5)

Nines are gentle, easygoing, patient, receptive, and accommodating, whereas Fives are intense, strong-minded, argumentative, contentious, and highly resistant to the influence of others. Nines like people and trust them; perhaps at times they are too trusting. By contrast, average Fives are suspicious of people and are anything but trusting, perhaps at times too cynical and resistant.

Seriously, though... I really don't like disharmony. It really tears at me, for example, how the Palin thread went. And "covering a multitude of sins" is so freakin' central to my thinking and relating. Really, I'm WAY more about relationship than "rightness". So I'm kinda wondering if I might also be a Nine. Historically, I definitely lived as a Five with a Four-wing, but these days... maybe not so much? Maybe I've lived in a deception about who I am.

Post Edited (Corey) : 10/23/2008 11:45:15 AM (GMT-5)

D: Hey, Tom. Holla at cha girl, man. (Selah) For real! You know the deal...

TB: Yeah, I was thinking she needed a spankin’. What’s up with her theology these days? Ha!

Corey: I am highly inclined to reject the "two-storey" view and affirm a radical understanding of omnipresence.

TB: Right. On the other hand, what would a non-radical understanding of omnipresence even look like? I mean, how would it still essentially be omnipresence? The radical part is ‘in’ the concept of omnipresence itself, not added to it by some adjective.

What I’d like to say is that omnipresence be defined as God being part of the definition of any discrete created reality; that whatever the definition of any created X is, the reality of God is part of the sum total of X’s definition. But that may appear to ‘pantheistic’, and I don’t want to say that. We still have to maintain a distinction in ‘identity’ between any created entity and God (which is what a 'relational ontology' intends to do--ahhh, too bad that PhD will never be written! And strange that I have such peace about not writing it!).

[I’m not getting back into the debate with D about this; I always felt he pushed dangerously close to (sometimes into) pantheism by identifying a created reality’s core subjectivity as God, and I don’t know how to distinguish that from pantheism. Be that as it may…]

We can’t say that all created realities reduce in their discrete identities to God. Creation is ‘in’ God, not ‘God’. But that ‘in’, together with a relational ontology, means that until we bring God into our understanding of X we haven’t said all there is to say about X. That’s where I want to go with omnipresence. I try not to be drawn into a ‘spatial’ understanding of the notion by the word “-presence.” Essentially, what I think is important about omnipresence is (a) the belief that God is [or the creative energies of God are] the matrix in which all created realities subsist [and none of us really knows HOW that works, which is why I would never attempt, like D, to dissect things too intricately] and (b) that wherever God is there are always creative possibilities. Broken down more, wherever God is, all that God actually is is actually present and all that God potentially is is potentially present.

(b) grounds the hope for UR. No created thing can fail to have God within the purview of the field that defines its range of possible becoming. Because God is the creative matrix in which all things subsist, and because God is infinitely creative, and because God is love…God-ward becoming can never be utterly erased from the range of a thing’s future possibilities. God naturally brings to every created entity this invitation to become. It cannot fail to be so. Thus, there is always hope for creation. Everything subsists and has its being IN infinite, creative love. So how would we ground or account for irrevocable solidification into evil being sustained by/in such a context of infinite creative love? Such "irrevocability" becomes a meaningless notion.

Corey: Seriously, though... I really don't like disharmony. It really tears at me, for example, how the Palin thread went. And "covering a multitude of sins" is so freakin' central to my thinking and relating. Really, I'm WAY more about relationship than "rightness". So I'm kinda wondering if I might be a Nine too.

TB: He he he.

T

Post Edited (Tom) : 10/23/2008 11:28:03 AM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (Corey) : 10/23/2008 11:55:08 AM (GMT-5)

The ONLY REASON we have the ability to do this is BECAUSE God decided to reflect Himself to Himself...as a human being.  God became human (eternally past manifested in "the fulness of time" ) so that humanity could become "god." (deification)

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Tom:
I’m not getting back into the debate with D about this; I always felt he pushed dangerously close to (sometimes into) pantheism by identifying a created reality’s core subjectivity as God, and I don’t know how to distinguish that from pantheism. Be that as it may…]

FYI, pantheism says that God cannot transcend God's transcendence. God can only "be" everything. God cannot "be" everything (contingent expression, matrix of creative, uncreated energies)...and NOT "be" anything (essential existence, uncreated essence) at the same time. Panentheism says different. Just so you know.


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Tom:
We can’t say that all created realities reduce in their discrete identities to God. Creation is ‘in’ God, not ‘God’. But that ‘in’, together with a relational ontology, means that until we bring God into our understanding of X we haven’t said all there is to say about X. That’s where I want to go with omnipresence. I try not to be drawn into a ‘spatial’ understanding of the notion by the word “-presence.” Essentially, what I think is important about omnipresence is (a) the belief that God is [or the creative energies of God are] the matrix in which all created realities subsist [and none of us really knows HOW that works, which is why I would never attempt, like D, to dissect things too intricately] and (b) that wherever God is there are always creative possibilities. Broken down more, wherever God is, all that God actually is is actually present and all that God potentially is is potentially present.

Now let's tie all this to the Incarnation. God became human. This means that true humanity...what it was truly DESIGNED and CREATED FOR...is to, in it's own self-reflection and self-relatedness, understand itself NATURALLY as the "dwelling place of God". How can it be otherwise? God became a human.  We have SEEN the God-human, Christ. The fullness of God (wave) was found to be in a crucifiable, thus renewable human (particle). The mystery is that the fulness of Godhead can be found in the face of a little newborn baby, by the Spirit of God in and on that baby. Jesus shows us that. Right?


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Tom:
(b) grounds the hope for UR. No created thing can fail to have God within the purview of the field that defines its range of possible becoming. Because God is the creative matrix in which all things subsist, and because God is infinitely creative, and because God is love…God-ward becoming can never be utterly erased from the range of a thing’s future possibilities. God naturally brings to every created entity this invitation to become. It cannot fail to be so. Thus, there is always hope for creation. Everything subsists and has its being IN infinite, creative love. So how would we ground or account for irrevocable solidification into evil being sustained by/in such a context of infinite creative love? Such "irrevocability" becomes a meaningless notion.

Exactamundo.

Post Edited (One Love) : 10/23/2008 12:03:05 PM (GMT-5)