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One Love
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| Posted 11/16/2008 7:35 AM (GMT -6) |   | | | |
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Similitude
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| Posted 11/16/2008 10:31 AM (GMT -6) | | | D: Can you tell I love growing consensus?
Jeff: Don't we all?!  I'll check out that other book too.
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One Love
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| Posted 11/17/2008 11:42 AM (GMT -6) | | Ok.
This is gonna get freaky.
Pressing my luck. (No whammies...no whammies...)
Jeff:
I would say that we INFER the experience of other subjects of experience. Cause we have to infer that the relation is one to another being as opposed to another thought object (which is an accidental attribute). Cause, like Neo, it is not necessary that my experience corresponds to an extra-ego reality at all. Also, I don't see how God's objectivity is different in kind to ours. Rather, I would say it is different in degree. Otherwise, we may BE like Neo in that we are the only other person than God, the "Matrix programmer," and all our experience is MERELY subjective since it doesn't correspond accurately to any REAL extra-ego beings.
Thought.
When we dream...and we (as thought object in our dreams) interact with other "people' and object in the dream (also thought objects). What if there was a state of active consciousness WITHIN that dream world? This is actually called lucid dreaming. Basically, your "waking self consciousness" exists in a "residual digital self/avatar" type form to exist within a dream brought into being by your unconscious and conscious mental activity...AND...you would be intereacting with "persons" in the dream...whom you would KNOW to also be created and sustained by the your (Jeff's) mind/brain interaction. In other words, Jeff, if you were to have a lucid dream, and you were to speak to a "woman in a red dress" on the street in your dream, who would you really be talking to, responding to, and interacting with...even though you would genuinely experience this "woman" as "other" than your self? Yourself, right? The one person's (Jeff's) mind as context for all the other "personae". Like talking to yourself...in a distinct way. Moreover, your dream, dreaming interaction (via your "avatar") would be as inseparable from your grounding self as any active thought can be separated from the thinker of the thought who uses mental energy in sustaining the thought.
Now this kind of dreaming is being researched and it is known to occur.
Now, what if God did something like this? This is how I could see it being...
Matrix Programmer/Source: Father/Father's Spirit
The One/Neo: God the Son/Logos/Word
Shared Consciousness/Ground: The One, Omnipresent Spirit of God the Son/Logos/Word
Lucid Dreamer: Jesus Christ-the-Logos
Lucid Dream: Creation
Lucid Dream Context: Mind of Christ-the-Logos
Toldja it was weird...but doesn't it make some odd kind of sense though? A twisted version: Vanilla Sky.
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.
"I love, therefore I am in I Am." Post Edited (One Love) : 11/17/2008 11:06:34 AM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 11/17/2008 11:48 AM (GMT -6) | | In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all might believe. He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light.
The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband's will, but born of God.
The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only [Son], who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.
(John testified concerning him. He cried out, saying, "This is he of whom I said, 'He who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.' " ) Out of his fullness we have all received grace in place of grace already given. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God, but the one and only [Son], who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.
Christ-the-Logos, the Holy One and Creator who is inseparable from the One Holy Spirit of God, is the "inner reality" of all things.
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.
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One Love
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| Posted 11/17/2008 11:59 AM (GMT -6) | | Another way to say things...
Christ-the-Logos, the Holy One, is as transcendent and immanent to Creation...
...as a (Lucid) Dreamer/Thinker is transcendent and immanent to their Dream/Thought.
Make sense, Jeff?
Any and all feedback is accepted.
One more thing...a question, Jeff...
How would subjectivity and objectivity work from the standpoint of a lucid dreamer in the midst of a dream? When you talked to the "woman in the red dress" in your dream, was she "other" than you...really? What grounded the very "otherness" that you perceived between "you" and "her"?
See what I'm getting at?
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.
"I love, therefore I am in I Am." Post Edited (One Love) : 11/17/2008 11:04:49 AM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 11/17/2008 12:20 PM (GMT -6) | | | Loder stuff for you, Jeff...
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James Loder. Knight's Move. 273
Beyond vision, in the fourth and final phase of the journey of intensification, is the numinous, imageless passage into the absolute unity of all things. Here no-thingness (cf. Eckhart's Ohne bild) is experienced as more real that than the reality of the ordinary state, even after self-consciousness returns to phase 1. Although imageless, its impact most often leaves the after-image of radiant white light, so vivid it cannot be described except perhaps by a kind of via negativa. For this phase there is no language, only silence--favete linguis (hold your tongue), says Kierkegaard. For this phase there is still differentiated self-consciousness, but beyond that only a reaction of awe as before the Holy who both fascinates and overpowers at the same time. This corresponds to the vision of God in Augustine, Hildegaard, Teresa (of Avila), Eckhart, and several others.
The neurological foundation of this experience is the profoundly significant capacity of the brain to present to consciousness not only an ordered content but the very way in which that content is itself presented: i.e., the order itself. In this case, it is the whole or totality in itself that is communicated. Clearly this is not a reductive account, but only a claim that the human organism is made so as to support and entertain an encounter with an imageless sense of the Absolute Unity of Being. The numinous impact of this is, of course, like that of the encounter with the Holy in the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures. If mythic vision and cosmic consciousness were the consequences of the third phase, then here the consequence is that one may now see the cosmos from a standpoint beyond it, while still within it.
The benevolent detachment from the world which is the consequence of this experience has the effect of making the world becomes a matter of choice rather than one of defensive survival. All that is needed for ultimate survival has been given and far more, so engagement with the world are a matter of decision in what can only be called a state of blessedness.
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"If truth is stranger than fiction, as we sometimes say, it may be that we live in a state of estrangement from the truth. Suppose it were all turned around and the fictions by which we lice were suddenly and starkly thrust, as on the Damascus road, into the light of a Truth so splendid we would cringe and hide our wounded eyes from it. Suppose we can only bear one glimpse of the Truth at a time. Then the Truth would be wonderful and terrible, and we would cherish our moments before it and long for more—yet we would be afraid lest we get too much all at once.
But suppose further that the Truth took on the nature of our fictions making—incredible!—our fictions bearers of the Truth. Who could conceive such a thing, even in retrospect? Perhaps only those who have once been partially blinded by the Truth—whether suddenly or gradually—come to the breath-taking realization that the One who sits at table and breaks bread and drinks wine with us is the One through whom and for whom all ten billion light years of creation, including our own come-lately, here and now existence, have their being. To sit at table with Him is more wonderful and terrible than a blinding light since it allows us no fictional existence in which to shroud ourselves, no place to hide from the relentlessly gracious claim that our very existence, fractured and fictionalized as it is, is of infinite worth, potentially a bearer of the very Truth which we fear could so easily crush us under the weight of it’s glory.
But suppose, finally, that this awesome condition in which we may find ourselves has in it a kind of comprehensive intelligibility we had not dared to consider before, a reason about reason, a supra rationem, that is so inclusive of us and the universe that we couldn’t see it unless it were shown to us in a gigantic mirror. If even cosmic chaos has in its hidden order, as we are surprisingly coming to understand, how much more astonishing and compelling is that greater intelligibility which unites all creation—even the turbulence and unpredictable upheavals of natural and human existence—to its creator. Such a union would have to be full God and fully human. Yet this remains ancient text and obscure doctrine until, in that breathless moment, we see ourselves, the full dimensions of our existence, reflected in the Holy One at the table with us. In the broken bread and wine, He becomes a mirror in whom we see simultaneously the embodied chaos of human existence in a vast and meaningless universe, and the hidden order and sacred destiny which He by His Presence—and not separable from that Presence—in a moment of epiclesis would beget in us. Then—though we could never say how—we see that the fragment could contain the whole, we are captivated by the intelligibility of His nature which we long to embrace, and it draws us to the edge of the abyss of uncreated light, the inner life of God.
But alas—to lay hold on that remarkable intelligibility by which one’s fragmentary existence becomes the bearer of the whole, that intelligibility through which all things have been made---to lay hold on that by faith is to touch the ark of the covenant, it is to hear “the sound of a mighty wind,” as “the roar of the New Jerusalem”,” and it is to die. Who wants to die so that the uncreated light and life of God may indwell human flesh and turn everything we do into the work of God’s Spirit?
Holy in its nature, the life of the Spirit is stunning in its impact; the depths of its mysterious centered silence remains unmoved, intensely personal, even in its rush through the walls of the upper room, its pause to console, its power to disclose and to heal, and its provocation to joy and exuberant praise. This is marvelous and dangerous; ordinary human flesh should not have to consider such alternatives.
If we do die, then all that we saw in Him and in ourselves because of Him as He sat at table with us, now becomes in our death the transformation of ordinary existence. We become in our individual and common life the outer expression of His invisible nature, including the darkness of dereliction as well as the light or the transfiguration—that by which condemnation is condemned, false light is itself falsified, and daily life is a continuing intra-mundane ecstasy. Who will die to bear witness to the inner life of God, to become an expression of this higher order? Not many—or perhaps, in another way, somewhere inside, all of us know we are supposed to die. In moments of deeply centered reflection we know the death instinct is not biological but teleological—we have been given life so as to die for what is so much more important than our own lives. If we just knew a bit more—if we could just put our hand and touch it, to be sure we are not being deceived…”
James E. Loder, The Transforming Moment, pp. 211-213
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.
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Similitude
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| Posted 11/17/2008 7:50 PM (GMT -6) | | | just noticed your new stuff, here, D. Will probably be strapped for time til Wednesday night. Will try to get back with you then.
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One Love
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| Posted 11/18/2008 6:38 AM (GMT -6) | | |
No problem, Jeff. I'll wait. Your response are always worth waiting for. 
Some quotes and thoughts in the meantime...
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The non-trivial connection between the problem of the space of the universe and the incarnation of the Logos of God in flesh has been articulated by T. Torrance. This section will develop further his argument that space and time are relational entities whose concepts reflect the contingent rationality of the world, which depends on the transcendent God-Creator. Our intention is to build an argument that the relational nature of space, understood as a physical (natural) place for human beings to live, points towards an ontology of created things and human beings that is relational upon the Logos of God or, in other words, is inherent in the hypostasis of the Logos.
The belief in the incarnation of the Logos of God in flesh plays a central role here; on the one hand, Jesus Christ, being in his nature fully human, lived in the space and time of the empirical world, located in body in a particular place and time of earthly history; on the other hand, Jesus was fully God, who did not leave his "place" in the Holy Trinity and who, being God, not only was present in Palestine two thousand years ago, but was always present in all places and times of the universe created by God. We have here a non-trivial, historico-topological relation between the finite track of Jesus in empirical space and time, which is an extraordinary way is linked to the whole history of the visible universe.
...
Origen stresses...that God, who is the creator and governor of the whole universe, being incarnate in flesh in Jesus Christ, did not cease to be God as a provider of existence and intelligibility of everything at every point in the universe. Being incarnate in flesh--that is, being a human being among humankind, Christ as God was still ruling the whole universe and holding the entire creation together. God in creating the universe and making sense of it in order to receive his Son-Logos in flesh, prepares a place for himself, but in such a way that , while descending into the created world, in a particular place in Palestine and in a particular time, God still holds the entire creation together, being present in all possible "places" of the universe.
Alexei Nesteruk. Light from the East. Page 231
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The human nature in Christ was operating within the reality of empirical space and historical time, whereas Christ's divine nature was always beyond the empirical and intelligible aeons, in the uncreated realm of the kingdom of God, which can be expressed symbolically in terms of the boundaries of the created if these boundaries are seen form the vertical (divine) dimension. It is from this "outside" that Christ the Logos of God coordinated the empirical space where he indwelled in the body with the rest of the created universe. This helps us to understand the space-time of the physical universe as the manifestation of the hypostatic mode of the relationship between God and the world.
One can rephase this idea by using a different analogy. Indeed, space and time are percieved by human beings from within creation. In this sense, one can speculate that this space-time is an internal form of the relation of the universe with the transcendent Divine. This internal form of space and time, being contingent and dependent on the interactions between the parts of the universe and being essential for the existence of human beings and their history, cannot be conceived, however, without its "external" counterpart, it's "boundary," which can be articulated only from "outside," from the perspective of the uncreated. This links empirical space and time with its moving "boundary" (which originates from the divine dimension), so that in no way are the space and time of the physical universe accomplished and fixed forever in the shapes that we can comprehend at present.
The question, then, is how the internal space-time of the universe is held in relation to the divine "environment" in which it is embedded, or, in other words, what is the principle of the borderline between the universe and its nonworldly ground associated with the external side of the space of the universe? Here, the analogy with the hypostatic union of two natures of Christ can be employed. Indeed, it is because of the hypostatic union of the divine and natural in Christ that one can argue by analogy thta the interplay between the space and time of the universe and its uncreated ground in God is upheld also hypostatically by God in the course of God's economy of creation. The fulfillment of this economy took place in the incarnation of the Logos of God in flesh, which the link between the humanity of Christ (in space) and Christ's divinity as the Logos (which is beyond space but yet hold all space together) was established. This manifested that space and time are linked to the Divine. It is from this perspective that Torrance's assertions on the relational nature of space, as the form of rationality created by the Logos God to communicate his presence to us, receive further interpretation--namely, that the space and time of the universe manifest in natural (physical) terms the relation between the visible universe and it's "external" uncreated and divine "form," which constitutes the ground for the natural one. This implies that a particular appearance of space and time in the physical universe is not complete in itself and is open to the unfolding rationality of God, whose presence in the space and time of the universe has not an essential but a hypostatic character. Indeed, the very relation between the space and time of the universe and its uncreated ground is hypostatic; that is, it exists only in the hypostasis of the Logos God.
Alexei Nesteruk. Light from the East. Pages 232-233.
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To me, this is analogical to when a human being has a lucid dream. Though the waking self is localized in the dream as a "residual digital self" (Matrix), empirically experiencing it by following the "rules" of the composed dream world...
...it is also true that the "rules" guiding the dream (and all of the mental energy in sustaining the dream and self-experience in the dream) come from the mind/brain activity of the waking self's one personal being having the dream. The lucid dreamer experiences the dream world from within the "boundary" of the created dream, though obviously also forming the "environment" which sustains and holds the dream together.
So...
One personal being:
Lucid dreamer...Analogous the Person of Christ-the-Logos
Two dimensions of one personal being:
Operating 1) within [immanent] dream "boundary." Analogous to Christ's human nature
and...
2) outside [transcendently immanent] dream "boundary" as continually sustaining "environment." Analogous to Christ's divine nature
Just like we wouldn't say that the Dream is ESSENTIALLY linked to the Dreamer, but only HYPOSTATICALLY linked...so also we wouldn't say that Creation is essentially linked to Christ-the-Logos, but only hypostatically so.
Make sense? Clear as mud? 
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.
"I love, therefore I am in I Am." Post Edited (One Love) : 11/18/2008 5:49:15 AM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 11/18/2008 7:02 AM (GMT -6) | | | Oh. For the sake of clarity, I'm not saying that the Uncreated God "sleeps" and "dreams" from some unconscious state. That would be like a dream-initiated lucid dream...and the Uncreated doesn't sleep. ( "He that watches over Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep." Psalms 121) It would be much more like a wake-initiated lucid dream, where there is no gaps in consciousness between the waking state and dreaming state, just a shifting of consciousness to a different experiential state.
Just for clarity's sake.
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.
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One Love
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| Posted 11/18/2008 7:32 AM (GMT -6) | | | One... (trapped in dream?)
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.
"I love, therefore I am in I Am." Post Edited (One Love) : 11/18/2008 6:39:48 AM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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PotOnWheel
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| Posted 11/18/2008 9:28 PM (GMT -6) | |
just stumbled on this -- funny to have happen -- and have NO idea what is being talked about.
want to tell me, and then ask?
either...
One Love said...I bet that what Nesteruk describes above is related to what Bruce (POW) means when he says that "time and space are grace." Ain't that right, Bruce? 
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PotOnWheel
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| Posted 11/18/2008 10:44 PM (GMT -6) | | | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 11/19/2008 8:53 AM (GMT -6) | | Ok. I know that all this may sound weird. But ask yourself: is this just TOTALLY implausible? If so, why? Especially if a case can be made that God's spiritual and mental abilities are at least analogical to our own spiritual and mental abilities...AND we know lucid dreaming to be scientifically documented potential experience of the human being?
Something else. See this Scripture through the idea of the "Creation as Christ-the-Logo's Lucid Dream" scenario...
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"Then the King will say to those on his right, 'Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.'
"Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?'
"The King (Christ-the-Logos) will reply, 'Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.'
"Then he will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.'
"They also will answer, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?'
"He will reply, 'Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.'
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Or even just think of the INSEPARABILITY of the love of human beings from the love of God, and vice versa?
As we think of "Christ-the-Logos as Lucid Dreamer"...and how the people in the dreams are "hypostatically linked" to the dreamer...To do something loving or unloving to any human being is to truly give that experience to Christ-the-Logos, Archetype of the Image (Dreamer of the Dream) in a direct way...not only a "super-empathetic" way. When we hurt or bless other human beings, we DIRECTLY hurt or bless Christ, who experiences all human experience from the inside.
Don't laugh at it or dismiss it off hand. Just let it sink in...and think about all this in the context of the "Creation as Christ-the-Logo's Lucid Dream" scenario.
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.
"I love, therefore I am in I Am." Post Edited (One Love) : 11/19/2008 7:59:48 AM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 11/19/2008 9:07 AM (GMT -6) | | | This may seem unrelated, but it's not...
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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"
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Though fascinated by the natural world and appreciating its great beauty, the Fathers clearly understood that if the mind were to be distracted by the puzzles of nature and to consider them as ends in themselves, then the knowledge of nature would itself become an obstacle in trying to know God. Thus a tension was created between the appreciation of nature and the danger of being trapped by its investigation. On the one hand, the natural world is accepted and affirmed, while, on the other, it is renounced as having no meaning without its spiritual ground. The necessity to rise above nature in order to find God was always experienced as the difficulty of being detached from a natural world that at the same time was highly appreciated.
In the contemplation of the logoi of creation (Maximus), the Greek Fathers found an ingenious way of resolving this tension, freeing themselves from the demands of nature, on the one hand, while enjoying nature, on the other. They never experienced any fear of nature, which was the creation of a God "who loves mankind." Their detachment from the material world provided a paradoxical freedom to treat this world in a way that never subverted their spiritual vision of reality, that is, their faith. The secret of the Greek Fathers' freedom to enjoy nature was their detachment from it. Their spiritual vision of nature freed them to love and appreciate nature without condemning its created origin and without fearing its demands, for the natural world, like all of creation, is good because everything done by God through his Word (Logos) is good.
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Endokimov.
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".
"Eternal Liturgy"? What could that mean? Here...
"In the Kingdom of Christ to come, there will no longer be need for receiving the Body and Blood of Christ, for all who have been vouchsafed will be in closest converse with Him and will enjoy the pre-eternal light of the Life originating Trinity, experiencing that blessedness which no tongue can express, and which is incomprehensible to our feeble mind. For this reason after partaking of the Holy Mysteries at Liturgy, in the altar is always pronounced the prayer which we sing on Paschal days: "O Christ, Thou great and most sacred Pascha! O Wisdom, Word and Power of God! Grant us to partake of Thee more fully in the unwaning day of Thy kingdom" (Pachal Canon, 9th Ode). "
Bruce, you feelin' me?
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.
"I love, therefore I am in I Am." Post Edited (One Love) : 11/19/2008 8:18:27 AM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 11/19/2008 9:22 AM (GMT -6) | | My thoughts...
Mystical union is a "quantum leap" into God's time (inseparable from God's Presence), embodying the "eschata"...in this world, in this life. Truly being a spiritual being "of the end times" who is "always in the Spirit."
Make sense?
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In the ongoing interplay between the human spirit and the Holy Spirit, there is is a vital exchange--continuously alive, bringing forth fundamentally new orders of being and understanding. Yet the new orders do not violate or contravene the paradoxical unity of the two spirits. The kinetic moments of convergence presupposed by the model are a kind of epiclesis--the moment in the celebration of the Eucharist when by an act of the Holy Spirit the elements become the body and blood of Christ. Repeatedly enacted, the moment is a "leap" between the human and the Divine, the Divine and the human, which in all situations brings forth transformation--if not a transubstantiation--of the fallen orders of mind, life, and creation.
The final point to be stressed here is the twist [of the Mobius Strip.] As a physical model of the decisive kinetic moment, the twist depicts a temporal event via spatial terms but without spatializing it. Thus, the twist in the model bears a fundamental truth about the relationship between the two spirits: in this interplay time eludes space and all its presumed determinants, and via transformation a new order of fundamental determinants emerges. In the context of irreversible thermodynamics it is not time per se that is irreversible, but time's determinants. The fallen and shattered teacup can't reassemble itself on the table; the filmstrip of events does not run backward. However, time stripped of its determinants (as can only happen in reflective human consciousness, an inveterably "open system") appears to be reversible in the spontaneous creation of a new order of determinants.
Theologically, the experience of that "reversibility" in faith is a new being in Christ. However, as we will see, this notion involves "God's time." In this context, what appears to be reversibility may instead be highly accelerated motion toward the eschatological future in Christ--a wrinkle in time and foretaste of the redemption of all things.
James Loder, The Knight's Move. 121-122.
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.
"I love, therefore I am in I Am." Post Edited (One Love) : 11/19/2008 10:05:30 AM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 11/19/2008 11:14 AM (GMT -6) | | | Remember this, Bruce?
In Christ, human nature is united with the hypostasis of the Logos and while remaining fully itself is liberated from sin, the source of which is the gnomic will. Because it is "en-hypostasized" in Logos Himself, Christ’s humanity is perfect humanity. In the mysterious process, which started with His conception in the Virgin’s womb, Jesus passed through natural growth, ignorance, suffering, and even death — all of experiences of the fallen humanity, which He had come to save, and He fulfilled through the resurrection the ultimate human destiny. Christ could thus be truly the saviour of humanity because in Him there could never be any contradiction between natural will and gnomic will. Through the hypostatic union, His human will, precisely because it always conforms itself to the divine, also performs the "natural movement" of human nature.
The doctrine of "deification" in Maximus is based upon the fundamental patristic presupposition that communion with God does not diminish or destroy humanity but makes it fully human. In Christ the hypostatic union the communication of idioms (perichõresis tõn idiõmatõn). The characteristics of divinity and humanity express themselves "in communion with each other" (Chalcedonian definition), and human actions, "energies," have God Himself as their personal agent. Therefore, it can be said that "God was born," that Mary is the Theotokos, and that the "Logos was crucified" while birth and death remain purely human realities. But it can and must also be said that a man rose from the dead and sits at the right hand of the Father having acquired characteristics, which "naturally" belong to God alone: immortality and glory. Through Christ’s humanity deified according to its hypostatic union with the Logos, all members of the Body of Christ have access to "deification" by (G)race through the operation of the Spirit in Christ’s Church.
The essential elements of Maximian Christology provided the permanent terminological and philosophical framework for Byzantine thought and spirituality. They were adopted with the Trinitarian doctrine of the great Cappadocian Fathers together in the Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith of John of Damascus (first half of the eighth century), which served as a standard doctrinal textbook in Byzantium. They also provided the most authoritative frame of reference in most of the doctrinal controversies, which arose in the East during the Middle Ages.
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.
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One Love
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Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 11/19/2008 11:20 AM (GMT -6) | | | More stuff from Brucie...
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taken from some paragraphs from Georgios I. Mantzaridis' book "Man and Time".
IN SUMMARY:
* "Liturgical time transfigures physical time and transports us from symbol to truth, from the transient to the eternal, from creation to the Lord of creation. ... Behind the symbolism is the one symbolized. ..... Thus the function of time is to refer creation to the uncreated Creator." (p. 105 )
* "...the mystery (sacrament)...preserves...the memory of all the events in the divine economy, and of the events in the history of mankind in their eschatological perspective." (p. 102)
* "In this way, all time becomes sacred time. Every day and every moment is sanctified because it becomes a bearer of eternity. In the same way, all space becomes sacred because it is sanctified by spiritual worship." (p. 104 )
* Eternal life is not abstract or imaginary. It is God himself, who became man and manifested himself to the world in Christ....for a Christian, the memory of God is made concrete in the memory of Christ and his regenerative work in the world. So the content of the memory of Christ is the Church herself as the Body of Christ, the enter and essence of which is the mystery of the Holy Eucharist." (p. 103)
* "By taking part in the Divine Liturgy and approaching for Holy Communion, the believer experiences the unique and eternal event of his regeneration in Christ. Without ceasing to be in time, he nevertheless shares in eternity. Even one participation in holy Communion would be sufficient for his regeneration. ... Each one of these approaches is the one unrepeatable approach to the mystery of his union with Christ. It represents his approach to, and his progress within, the ties indestructible and constantly renewed communion which deifies the Church. Furthermore, whatever happens in time and is of truth, no longer belongs to time, but to eternity. And what ever is repeated in time and is of truth, is not confined to time but extends into eternity. Thus every Holy Eucharist is a repetition of the unique and unrepeatable Eucharist of the Last Supper." (p. 102)
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Christ himself was treated as “the New Man” and the last Adam. The divine plan of salvation was consummated, the kingdom of God inaugurated through Christ, but the ultimate things were yet to come in fullness and glory. The king had come, but the kingdom was still to come. The promise of the kingdom was granted to the church by the Holy Spirit. The church has lived since then in two dimensions: in sight of ongoing secular history and world events in the time of decay and oblivion, but also in the time of the heavenly kingdom inaugurated by the risen savior (in which the church has lived epicletically in the expectation of the kingdom.)
The coming of Christ and the resurrection changed completely the human situation, for in fallen existence, the time form of the world is characterized by law (nomos); this implies that humans were involved in an irreversible chain of decay and corruption, which led them to mortality with no hope of undoing the things they had done. Everything that had been done became ontologically necessary, so that there was no way to overcome this necessity, which is indicated by the word “law”. The coming of Christ and the resurrection relieved us from this law; we are still living in the world or “fallen” temporal order, but we are relieved from the necessity of the law; that is, we have a chance of renewal and of entering the kingdom [of God], cleansing ourselves through constant participation in the resurrection of the Lord.
Alexei V. Nesteruk, Light from the East: Theology, Science, and the Eastern Orthodox Tradition, p.246
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.
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One Love
Registered Member
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Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 11/19/2008 12:29 PM (GMT -6) | | | I oughta call this..."Bruce's Greatest Hits"
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Georgios Mantzaridis' Time and Man (a philosophical, theological and anthropological look at time and man's relation to it.) "Just as red-hot iron, without ceasing to be iron, simultaneously becomes fire as well, so too the deified man, without ceasing to be man, simultaneously becomes god. Without ceasing to be a creation of God, he becomes a partaker in the divine life and attains the eternity that is God. He becomes not only eternal, but also unoriginate and everlasting in the image of the eternal and unoriginate and everlasting God. He becomes a son of God, because the Son of God too became man and united himself with man."
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-B.
I had never been satisfied by the notion that the Chronicles were a mish-mash, and I think I have stumbled upon their secret, governing, imaginative scheme. Let me provide three important contexts for the large claim I wish to make.
The first context is Lewis’s characteristic presentation of Christology. When he thought of Christ, he typically thought of him not as something “out there” in Nature or “up there” in Heaven or “back there” in History or “in there” in the Bible and the Eucharist.
Lewis typically thought of Christ (in the words of Colossians 1:17) as the one “in whom all things hold together.” He paraphrased that verse in Miracles, rendering it thus: “Christ is the all-pervasive principle of concretion or cohesion whereby the universe holds together.”
The universe included Lewis himself and his own understanding of Christ. His very thoughts about Christ were themselves held together by Christ. He could not in that sense step outside Christ and look at him as if from some external spectator’s point of view. (OL's Note: This is EXACTLY what the self-referential EGO PROCESS attempts to do: to utterly "individuate" itself in a separative manner...and distinguish itself from it's actual relational context in and with Divine Presence. False "objectivity" in perceiving God.) .And this put him, as it puts all of us, into something of a predicament, which he expressed in Miracles:
The fact which is in one respect the most obvious and primary fact, and through which alone you have access to all the other facts, may be precisely the one that is most easily forgotten—forgotten not because it is so remote or abstruse but because it is so near and so obvious. And that is exactly how the Supernatural has been forgotten.
Throughout his writings, Lewis points out this natural human tendency to be oblivious to the obvious. In Mere Christianity he writes: “Since that [divine] power, if it exists, would not be one of the observed facts but a reality which makes them, no mere observation of the facts can find it.” In Letters to Malcolm he writes: “We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito.”
Lewis’s belief in the “overlookability” of God should be kept in mind when we consider the apparent planlessness of the Narnia Chronicles.
http://touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=20-10-022-f
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.
"I love, therefore I am in I Am." Post Edited (One Love) : 11/19/2008 11:36:13 AM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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