D, I don't think just denying that we are God 'essentially' (one in 'ousia' with him) necessarily means you can't be a pantheist, espeically if a) you go with the essence/energies distinction where the energies are divine and eternal but not God's essence, and b) you say God can contingently express himself via his energies.

The pantheism we feel coming from you is not that you expressly claim that we are God 'essentially', but that you don't sufficiently account for human, individual, personal uniqueness as distinct from God so as avoid the same failure in this regard that pantheism makes. See? We may be other than God essentially. Fine. But that doesn't ITSELF mean you've said what we ARE in unique, personal terms or that we don't collapse into a function or mere predicate of God.

I do HEAR you say this isn't true. I read the words on the screen when you type your admission that we're non-divine persons. But this so easily evaporates when you make other comments.

Remember, 'person' is indivisible, unlike nature. You can't 'share' personhood/identity, or give your 'person' to another (though you can/must share in determining the identity of others, yes--that's different). But if a) 'person' is indivisible, and b) we're persons other than God (non-divine persons), and c) the subjective perceptions that define our experience as unique, indivisible persons are not God's "own" perceptions (a-c you've conceded), then what's that say?

I don't think it says that we possess a self or an identity independent of God. A-C's being true means personal uniqueness, not independent, self-sufficiency.

T

Post Edited (Tom) : 12/14/2008 11:51:07 AM (GMT-6)

with notes 50 and 54 ...again, all Zizzy...

--The structure of the sacrament of baptism was identified at the outset with the structure of the evangelical narrative of the baptism of Jesus.  The words "this is my beloved [or "only-begotten" ] Son in whom I am well pleased," uttered by the Father with reference to the Son of the Trinity in the presence of the Spirit, are pronounced at baptism with reference to the person being baptized.  In this way, the structure of the Trinity is made the structure of the hypostasis of the person being baptized, a fact which makes Paul summarize the sense of baptism with  the phrase "Spirit of adoption, in which we cry Abba, Father."  (Roman 8:15)

--It is characteristic that according to the Fathers, every baptized person becomes "Christ."

One more note...66

The meaning of asceticism consists in the fact that the less one makes one's hypostasis rely on nature, on the substance, the more one is hypostasized as a person.  In this way asceticism does not deny "nature", but frees it from the ontological necessity of the biological hypostasis; it enables it to be in an authentic manner.  It is superfluous to stress that this does not suffice to bring about the transcendence of the biological hypostasis if nature is not "hypostasized" simultaneously in the eucharistic community.   Other non-Christian soteriological systems also exhibit asceticism as a transcendence of the biological hypostasis.  But only the Church offers the positive side of this transcendence in the way I have just described with reference to the eucharist.  Without the ascetic dimension, the person is inconceivable.  But in the end, the context of the manifestation of the person is not the monastery; it is the eucharist.

---------------------------------

In short, whenever Jesus told the dude who wanted to bury his father..."Let the DEAD bury the DEAD.  Come follow me!"...he was specifically talking about human beings TRAPPED in "the whole network of relations that constitutes the biological hypostasis." (Zizzy, pg 57, note 52)   People who are "dead while they yet live!"

Post Edited (One Love) : 12/15/2008 8:04:58 AM (GMT-6)

Post Edited (One Love) : 12/15/2008 11:15:21 AM (GMT-6)

Hi all-

I had several posts I had jotted down recently while traveling. I’m still in Kuwait waiting to fly out. But since I couldn’t get online with my laptop I’ve decided to just dump everything into one post and wait until I could get online somehow. Sorry for the length. I’m not sure what’s related to what, so I’ll just title them PART A, B, C, and D. And D, I’ve not read your past couple of posts. Just saw them. So I’ll have to catch up.

PART A

This is just a word of caution about making claims of the more speculative type. I like speculation. It’s fun. But I try to remember that speculation is what it is—very tentative. For example, D wants to work out a one-story view of reality (inclusive of both God and creation). Cool. I think there’s something to be said for that, depending on what you mean by one-story and what the consequences are for interpersonal God-human relations. Me? I want such relations, whether or not it’s a one-story or ten-story cosmology. I don’t give a rip about a plurality of ‘stories’. I care about a plurality of ‘persons’ (divine and human) in relation.

But take the simple matter (no pun intended) of ‘matter’. I mean, we don’t even know what ‘matter’ really is. We observe certain behaviors under certain conditions, but to really say just what ‘matter’ is? We’re not there.

Take the simplest event of creaturely existence we know of—quantum events. Take for example the behavior of photons. Observe the photon passing through the slit and you get one outcome. Don’t observe it and you get another. The very best minds haven’t exhausted the truth of what the material universe is at its most fundamental level or really explained what it is we observe. What really is energy/matter? We don’t know. We know SOME things. We know for example that creation at this most fundamental level is irreducibly relational, that an act of observation is a causal event that creates and shapes outcomes. And it makes sense (to me at least) to posit sentience at this fundamental level. Reminds me of Berkely’s well-known, “To be is to be perceived.” And we know information is involved. We know a lot. But to say we’ve parsed the ontology of the universe and pinpointed the causal nexus that is the ‘sustaining’ act of God on one side and the non-divine creation on the other? I don’t think so.

I mean, I remember a room full of theologians and scientists asking Polkinghorne “What is it?” about creation at its most fundamental level. They wanted to know. He just smiled and said, “Well, we don’t really know!” I was like, “Here’s one of world’s top particle physicists AND theologians, and he can’t saw ‘what it is’.” “The best I can manage,” he answered, “is ‘waves of information’.” That doesn’t buy you a whole cosmology.

So I have two points to make. First, if we can’t unravel creation’s simplest event—the behavior of a quantum particle—how can we expect to unravel creation’s most complicated event—self-conscious human being? Forget describing ‘how’ God and creation relate to compose a single ‘story’, how creation is ‘in’ God, how ‘matter’ “just is the energies of God” (Nesteruk), and that God is an all-inclusive subject who sustains the created order. These all have theological warrant ‘as claims’ but a) there’s more we don’t know than we do know, and b) theological claims can’t be put under the microscope and verified scientifically. But we’re making claims about the material universe, that’s the thing. Second, shouldn’t we then live more out of our surest claims and less out of our more speculative beliefs? Shouldn’t we have less at stake existentially speaking the more speculative claims we make and more at stake in surer truth claims? D seems to now have the bulk of his meaningful living invested in the most speculative of theological claims. Just wondering.

Mind you D, I am NOT questioning the genuineness of you change of life. I love you and really am glad that life’s turned around for you. You know that. But I wonder sometimes if some of what we think are correct answers to complex theological issues aren’t really what’s responsible for effecting change in our lives. I wonder if what effects the change is more aesthetic (less propositional), i.e., just a passion and desperation for God. That’s all. It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that. Maybe God doesn’t care as much as we do that we get it all right. Maybe God allows us to experience him because we feel a need and desperation for him. We think the experience is a validation of every ‘t’ we’ve crossed and every ‘i’ we’ve dotted while God is like, “Hey, whatever. Just stay desperate and Christ-centered.” Kinda like a child wanting to spend time with her father and the two of them sit down to piece together one of those big picture puzzles with 1,500 pieces. They have a wonderful time talking and laughing and fall in love. In the end, the little girl gets some of the pieces fitted together right and some fitted wrongly, so the picture isn’t all correct. Does it really matter? The fellowship occurred on an entirely different level.

If I’m wrong about all this, then somebody do us a favor and parse the ontology of a single quantum event for us and put your finger on the dividing line between the divine and the non-divine in that event. If we can’t do that for the simplest of created events, how are we supposed to do it for the most complex of created events—human self-consciousness?

I’m not saying let’s not try to figure things out. I think Zizy is right. Trying to explain it all is the drive that defines human being. It’s the search for ‘who’ we are, to know our meaning and place in the universe. I’m just saying, let’s stay humble and hold these speculations in our hands ‘lightly’, as if they might turn out to all be false, ‘cause they might be false.

A Hart quote came to mind (The Beauty of the Infinite):

“One cannot…take the route of the transcendental tradition and simply ascribe the unity of experience to the synthesizing activity of the transcendental Ego….”

Yep. Oh, what’s that? Hart’s Eastern Orthodox? Naaaaw. How’s that possible?

------------------------

PART B

From 4/12/2008

Papanikolau:

“As Zizioulas himself says, ‘[...] the Christian God does not create because God loves the beautiful and wishes to give form and beauty to the cosmos. God creates because God wishes to exist something other than God’s own self, with which…God wishes to be in communion’.”

At the time D said he was fine with this. He said:

“As far as AP's quote of Zizy, I'm fine with it. God wanted something ‘other’ than Godself to exist, including non-divine, created ‘I’s. No biggie there.”

But it IS a biggie, as I then argued. D went on to add that the real question was ‘how’ we have communion:

“To me, the interesting thing is HOW God wants to have communion with the non-divine. When we look at the hypostatic union in Christ-the-Logos of the divine and human natures in one person....”

There you have it. Divine and human relating “in one person.” THAT explains ‘how’ WE relate to God as created I’s. In reviewing that thread again I saw how differently D and I view things. And I don’t think things have much changed since that thread. D wanted to explain the ‘how’ of divine-human relationship as we know and experience it in terms of the ‘how’ of the Incarnation.

I replied:

“If we relate to God by becoming Christ himself (as you say), then we’re not selves ‘other than God’s own self’ (as Zizy says). But you just said you’re cool with Zizy’s quote. So there’s a problem here. If you’re going to grant that we are ‘personally distinct’ from the divine ‘persons’, THAT affirmation will constrain your options for explaining HOW God and we enjoy this relationship… So long as you limit the HOW of divine-human relationality [as we know and experience it] to the HOW of the incarnation, you CANNOT be fine with God’s wanting to have persons other than God with whom to have interpersonal communion. Why? Because in Christ there is no non-divine person with whom God has fellowship.”

So long as D limits the ontology of divine-human relationality as instantiated by us to that instantiated by God-incarnate, any talk from him of our being what Christ was not (viz., non-divine persons-in-relation to God) is gonna remain vacuous to me.

D will not go for this because he can’t step outside the hypostatic union in explaining ‘how’ it is we are ‘non-divine’ persons. D is interested in ‘how’ we relate to God as created “I’s.” And what explains that ‘how”? The hypostatic union, the union of the divine and the human “in one person.” There ya go. But how can divine-human relationality that is NOT interpersonal (the hypostatic union) explain the how of divine-human relationality that IS interpersonal (us)? This is why I don’t take D seriously when he says he’s cool with our being non-divine persons. How’s he get ‘non-divine persons’ from the hypostatic union?

More work needed here.

----------------------------

PART C

Let me try this, D.

We want a description of divine-human relationality that doesn’t:

(a) abolish the uniqueness of each person’s subjective perspective constitutive of that person’s own experience (and so conflate subjectivities), or

(b) effectively banish God’s sustaining presence from some corner of creation.

We want God to be an all-inclusive subject (b) AND we want non-divine nodes of self-perception who are unique subjects (a).

We want to say that God is ‘where’ the world happens, where ‘we’ happen, AND that we are not God, which means the event that is us, ‘our happening’ (in God) is non-divine.

I’m smiling as I type because it seems so ludicrous to suppose that we can really explain scientifically or psychologically how both these are true. We can’t even explain the simplest of created events, a quantum event. Heck, we can’t explain really say what ‘consciousness’ is? Do you know how controversial defining that is? Gosh.

I do like Torrance’s “objective interiority” though, as an attempt to get at joining (a) and (b). It’s the right “phrase.” I’m not sure how much it explains though. It essentially just restates what it is we want in an answer.

Heck, let’s try music again.

My Daniel plays Mozart on the piano. Daniel isn’t Mozart, and Mozart isn’t Daniel. But you can’t hear Daniel without hearing Mozart. They’re one, but not identical. Daniel’s unique identity emerges from relating to Mozart’s music and life’s story.

Let’s say Mozart defines the “objective interiority” of Daniel in the sense that Mozart defines the possibilities and limitations wherein Daniel must determine himself and express his identity. If Daniel’s interiority were a room, the walls would be music staffs and scores of Mozart’s music would be strewn around the floor, and there’d be nothing else in the room but a piano and a bust of Mozart. The possibilities (and with them limitations) for becoming would be ‘given’ by Mozart. In that sense Mozart would be the “objective interiority” of Daniel’s consciousness. Mozart defines the ‘where’ and ‘how’ with which Daniel must choose to ‘become’. Mozart does this by setting limits and defining possibilities. This is the environment in which Daniel, in relating to Mozart, brings his own freedom to bear upon what’s merely ‘given’ and in a creative act that becomes definitive of his uniqueness, interprets Mozart and ‘gives’ it back. So ‘who’ Daniel becomes is a creative achievement, an “identity that emergences from relationship” (Zizy) of which BOTH (a) and (b) hold true.

I want to say that ‘who’ we are is ‘unique’ (b).

D wants to say that ‘who’ we are is ‘given’ (a).

Both can be true IF we view who we are as our interpretation of who God is.

We are interpreters of God, and our lives are interpretations of God. Our identities are interpretations of God. What’s John say in his gospel? Christ “exegetes” (interprets, explains, “makes known”) the Father. Similarly, just as in listening to Daniel play you see and hear Mozart, so in observing each other’s living we see God. I’m not God. And God isn’t me. But my life is an interpretation of God.

The word “interpretation” itself presupposes BOTH D’s “givenness” and my “uniqueness.” Without both you don’t have an “interpretation.” Interpretation is a well suited notion for pulling both (a) and (b) together, being a single event that’s relational at heart, requiring an ‘other’ that is interpreted and an ‘interpreter’ who actualizes that unique expression. It only remains to switch the analogy from music (where the interiority of Daniel’s world was constructed out of music staff walls, scores, and a piano) to the more fundamental components of human subjectivity and all the a priori (i.e., ‘given’) beliefs that shape (constitute?) self-perception:

the belief that we must be free to choose

the longing for to love and be loved

the drive for a unique identity

the thrill of risk

the appeal of beauty

the preference for pleasure

the desire for justice (and power, kindness, service, and on and on).

All these are God in the sense that they are OF God. They’re God’s music, and they’re divine inasmuch as they’re descriptions of who God is and what God is like. They’re not God essentially, that is, they’re not God’s own first-person subjectivity. No, it’s Mozart’s creative acts, his music, that are inside Daniel. But those acts are Mozart in the sense that any artist’s work is the artist. Likewise, these fundamental components of human subjectivity are each actually God-speaking some possibility (God’s subjective aim) into the event of my conscious becoming. We probably can’t parse it any further than that, D. So these ‘givens’ become the walls, windows, floor, and furniture of my interiority. God knows what’s in there not because what happens there is part of God’s own person-defining subjective experience, but because God knows what he’s “spoken” into being, into our being. But that act of God is just the BEGINNING of who we become, not the END.

That’s as close as I can get to explaining how God might be the “objective interiority” of creaturely consciousness, and it sucks I know. Hey, who cares! I’m stuck in Kuwait with nothing better to do.

D won’t like it I don’t think. He wants our “I am” to BE God’s “I am.”

----------------------

PART D

D has asked me a hundred times, “What’s unique about you, the REAL you? It can’t be your name or your skin color, etc.” The assumption is that there is nothing ‘unique’ about ‘who’ we are.

Let me answer with a question. Do I mean anything ‘unique’ to God? Do I mean something to God that, say, D does not mean to God? Likewise, does D mean something to God that I don’t mean to God? I think the answer to these questions is clearly yes, and the uniqueness is of a personal nature too, not just incidental crap. What’s unique about me in ‘personal’ terms is what I mean to God that no one else means to God when I relate in love to God. And surely there’s content to that. It would be like asking Mozart if Daniel’s rendition/interpretation of his music meant anything special to him, even though thousands of others have done the same thing (viz., interpret Mozart). Of course Mozart can say, “Nobody has ever interpreted me quite THAT way before.” See both the ‘givenness’ and the ‘uniqueness’? And that creative offering uniquely shapes what Daniel ‘means’ to Mozart in. It’s Mozart who is ‘given’ to Daniel to ‘uniquely’ interpret. The end product is a uniquely shaped givenness. A uniquely shaped identity. The given of ‘sonship’ common to us all is uniquely determined by me so that I become a unique son, a unique person.

[Digression: This is why (a) I think ‘creativity’ is a necessary attribute of God and (b) I define human destiny in the eschaton in terms of unending, free creative expression. With regard to (a), the Son does more than ‘simply’ empty (kenosis) or surrender himself to the Father eternally. He does that, yes. But the Son’s kenotic gift of himself to the Father and the Father’s love of the Son are mediated (I’m smoking pot here, OK?) via the ‘Creative Spirit’. The Son forever offers himself to the Father via the Spirit in creative expression. So it’s ‘creative kenosis’, D, NOT the ‘kenosis of creativity’. And this is also why (b) I fought so hard to define human destiny in terms of ‘unending free creative expression’, unlike D who chose to express our destiny in terms of relinquishing all such expression in favor of sheer kenosis. That’s because sheer/absolute kenosis is all D sees occurring Son-to-Father in the Trinity I guess. But if the gift of one’s self to the other is mediated by the Spirit, you get an ‘unending creative gift of self to the other’. So, interpersonal love is necessarily creative. The Process folk are right in a way—contingency is a necessary feature of God’s essential life. It’s just that this isn’t fulfilled by a non-divine creation. It can be fulfilled by the infinitely creative re-expressing, re-posturing of divine persons vis-à-vis each other in the dance of love. There can be contingent states of affairs that contribute to defining God as the infinite plenitude of personal being. I’m saying that God is the infinite plenitude of ‘creative’ personal being.]

“Who I am” then is “what I mean” to God, and “what I mean to God” is the combined product of what God gives and what I make of it and give back to God. In the end it’s just “the effect I have upon God” given what I do with the possibilities inherent in what God gives me. My ‘person’ is my ‘identity’ and my ‘identity’ is my ‘meaning’ in the world. Nobody is ‘who’ I am because nobody has the exact same “effect I have upon God.” Nobody else has “my meaning to God” but me.

Now, since this all happens through Christ and in the context of being a ‘son’, that in itself isn’t unique of course. ‘Sonship’ is where we all stand, relationally, in Christ before the Father. I’m a son. D’s a son. We’re all sons and daughters of God. Nothing ‘unique’ there. We all mean that to the Father. But D stops there. This is why he keeps asking me “What the heck can be personally unique about you, Tom?” D never got beyond the ‘commonality’ of sonship in Christ to our meaning anything MORE.

I have two sons (so does D). Both are ‘sons’, but both are unique to me—personally unique. ‘Sons’ isn’t the END of what they are. ‘Sons’ is just the BEGINNING of what they are. I don’t think D sees this. Each is a unique son, and the uniqueness of each is contained in how they determine themselves as sons. The unique ‘who’ we are IN Christ is the unique ‘interpretation’ we are OF Christ. The Father says, “Nobody’s ever quite interpreted me THAT particular way before.” We come to mean something unique to God. I have four children and I can easily imagine having 100 million more (if Anita was open to the idea!) and still having room to find each one a unique child, uniquely meaningful to me. End deal: God let’s us determine some of what we mean to him within the givenness of the sonship common to us all. That’s how we’re all “sons in the Son” and why Jesus was NOT a “son in the Son” but was rather just “the Son.”

But this requires a different ontology to explain why divine-human relationality in our case is interpersonal (between persons) but is not interpersonal in the case of the hypostatic union.

I predict several Loder quotes, one Nesteruk quote, a line or two from Maximus, several “I, not I, but Christ” quotes (wrenched from context ever since—Who was it?—Justin Martyr or Eusebius first misapplied those words along with “Have I not said, ‘You are gods’?”), and an appeal that runs something like, “But if we consider the ontology of the incarnation of the Logos and divine-human relationality as instantiated by the Son, we….” and there you have it. But I’ve been just as repetitive in what I’ve written here, so I guess it’s all par for the course!

Pax,

Tom

1) Tom said:
This is why (a) I think ‘creativity’ is a necessary attribute of God and (b) I define human destiny in the eschaton in terms of unending, free creative expression. With regard to (a), the Son does more than ‘simply’ empty (kenosis) or surrender himself to the Father eternally. He does that, yes. But the Son’s kenotic gift of himself to the Father and the Father’s love of the Son are mediated (I’m smoking pot here, OK?) via the ‘Creative Spirit’. The Son forever offers himself to the Father via the Spirit in creative expression. So it’s ‘creative kenosis’, D, NOT the ‘kenosis of creativity’. And this is also why (b) [bI fought so hard to define human destiny in terms of ‘unending free creative expression’, unlike D who chose to express our destiny in terms of relinquishing all such expression in favor of sheer kenosis. That’s because sheer/absolute kenosis is all D sees occurring Son-to-Father in the Trinity I guess.

Repost for correction.

-----------------------

Posted By : One Love - 7/3/2008 7:48 AM

My thought:

In theosis, the human soul is "filled" with God and "satisfied" with "eternal life." The fullness of this "fulfilled" life is infinitely expressible without the possibility of being exhausted or exhaustible. One is "satisfied" in God...but ever "straining forward" to express the beauty of that satisfaction in new, free, creative ways...ever and on.

This actually goes well not only with EO (Ware, etc) but also with GREG'S METAPHYSIC. It demonstrates how we are in the image of God. Just like God is unsurpassably satisfied with the "infinitely intense" beautiful experience of his own self-relationality, and only EXPRESSES that unimaginable satisfaction infinitely in Creation in inexhaustible ways...so we also, once "satisfied" with our freely chosen relationship to our Divine Ground (Christ-the-Logos) and the "infinitely intense" FILIAL relationship with Trinity we have in that Ground, we have infinite possibility and potential to EXPRESS this "pearl of great price" in which we abide.

Make sense?

-------------------------------------

Posted By : Tom - 7/3/2008 2:27 PM

D: The fullness of this "fulfilled" life is infinitely expressible without the possibility of being exhausted or exhaustible. One is "satisfied" in God...but ever "straining forward" to express the beauty of that satisfaction in new, free, creative ways...ever and on.

T: Hayell yes.

T

-----------------------------------------

Posted By : PotOnWheel - 7/3/2008 2:56 PM

ditto.


-----------------------------------------


Again, for clarification.  

Tom also said...

Who I am” then is “what I mean” to God, and “what I mean to God” is the combined product of what God gives and what I make of it and give back to God. In the end it’s just “the effect I have upon God” given what I do with the possibilities inherent in what God gives me. My ‘person’ is my ‘identity’ and my ‘identity’ is my ‘meaning’ in the world. Nobody is ‘who’ I am because nobody has the exact same “effect I have upon God.” Nobody else has “my meaning to God” but me.

Now, since this all happens through Christ and in the context of being a ‘son’, that in itself isn’t unique of course. ‘Sonship’ is where we all stand, relationally, in Christ before the Father. I’m a son. D’s a son. We’re all sons and daughters of God. Nothing ‘unique’ there. We all mean that to the Father. But D stops there. This is why he keeps asking me “What the heck can be personally unique about you, Tom?” D never got beyond the ‘commonality’ of sonship in Christ to our meaning anything MORE.

I know I've said this before. I've SPECIFICALLY talked about this before. I said this: what is most unique about you is your perception (or "interpretation" if you wish) of God's unique working with YOUR unique spirit through His Spirit. No one can experience that experience but you and God. Like I said, I could completely clone all of you as a full adult (including memories and whatnot)..but your own love experience that YOUR human spirit has with God could NOT be duplicated or "split" among your exact clones and you. There IS uniqueness in relationship with God...and I've said this before.  I was asking the question about "what is personally unique about you, Tom" to illustrate that it is NOT by the biological hypostasis that you are personally unique.

Post Edited (One Love) : 12/16/2008 7:58:28 AM (GMT-6)

D: Tom wants so say that human ego (empowered by the Holy Spirit) actually becomes its own full person…

T: I want to say that we become non-divine persons-in-relation to God, yes. I don’t think the ‘ego’ considered in its functionality only is that person. But the ego can rest permanently, in Christ, from its search for an enduring and unique identity.

D: …exhibiting its own personal underivative creativity…

T: Not non-derived. Nothing we have or are can be non-derived.

D: …having a face-to-face personal relationship with the Person of Christ…

T: Yes.

D: …giving its own love for Christ to Christ…

T: If by “own” you mean “freely determined,” then yed. But if you mean something like unrelated or self-sufficient, then no.

D: …distinct from being a nothing more than transparent window that Christ’s Person shines through.

T: Yes, we’re more than that IF we’re persons.

D: Here, the deified human person is not united in person with Christ by any means, but is unified with Christ by created person-to-Uncreated Creator love relationship empowered by the Holy Spirit.

T: Either ‘person’ is indivisible and incommunicable or it’s not. ‘Nature’ was divisible and communicable, not ‘person’. So no, we’re not united to Christ’s ‘person’, that is, we don’t become the person of the Son.

D: Tom doesn't believe that my view allows for divine/human interPERSONAL relationship, because the "person" we become, for all intents and purposes, IS Christ.

T: Right. Interpersonal means “between two or more persons.”

-----------------------

D: 1) In your view, how does the “Christ-in-us,” the real Presence of Jesus via the Holy Spirit, work within the deified, transfigured human who has become fully “person”?

T: Ask me after I’m deified. Ha! And you said you didn’t want to dissect things!

How’s the living Christ ‘work’ within the deified person? I’m sure I can’t parse that for you. I can tell you how I experience things. I hear the voice of Christ speaking to my consciousness, addressing me and saying, “What the heck did you do that for? That’s not the real you” or “I love you” or “I’d like you to help me fix Dwayne’s theology. He’s pretty jacked up.” And then I do it.

D: In other words, what relationship does the Spirit of Jesus within us, continually filling us, have with our own ability to love, choose, and self-understand? In this state, does the human will (inseparable from human spirit) always freely “conform” to the divine will (inseparable from Christ's Holy Spirit)?

T: We wouldn’t have an ability to love or choose if not for the sustaining presence of God. Yes, the human will will always conform to the divine will in glorified human being. That’s not the question. The question is, Will the divine will always prescribe specific means and specific outcomes, or will God will free and creative expression?

D: 2) Whenever the "Christ-in-us" prays to God the Father through us, what is happening?

T: I can’t parse that ontology for you. Sorry. I imagine the Spirit is informing our spirit, motivating, probing, prodding, etc. But not displacing our identity.

D: Is God both the prayer receiver and the pray-er himself?

T: On your view it would seem to be so, yes.

D: Is this a situation where we “put God ‘subjectively’ on both sides, on ALL sides of every interpersonal engagement (prayer), every address and response (in prayer), so that there’s no address which is not addressed TO God (the Father) and no response which is not a response FROM God (the Son via the Spirit)?”

T: It would be. And that’s to be avoided I should think, at least as a policy for interpersonal relations.

Here’s the thing, D. I don’t deny that we ever give ourselves over to be used by the Spirit in ways that pretty much determined exclusively by the Spirit. When that happens, there are times and circumstances that require it. The question is whether this is a sort of divine policy for how God wants to relate to us in the goal for glorified existence. I think not.

D: 3) When Father Stephen talked about the "transparency" of Jesus to the Father (which would basically be the Son's spiritual and kenotic identification with and introjection of the Father's Person), does that make sense to you?

T: Not really, no.

D: If it does, is it possible for human persons to be "transparent" to Christ-the-Logos in a like manner?

T: Check out the blue “Digression” in my immediately preceding post.

D: 4) Is there any room in your view for the EO view of epicletic transformation of earthly elements into the "Real Presence" (Body and Blood, too) of Christ? I believe in this strongly.

T: Right now I don’t need the bread and wine to become the actual blood and body of Christ.

Dude, when you get the time, check out:

http://www.opentheismboard.org/default.aspx?f=10&m=98660.

Soooo much of what you’re asking is in that thread. I was reading through it all today.

Zizy: This adoption of man by God, the identification of his (human) hypostasis with the hypostasis of the Son of God, is the essence of baptism.

T: If he means the person we become IS the person of the Son, then ‘person’ IS divisible and communicable. But Zizy has everywhere argued ‘hypostasis’ is NOT divisible or communicable. You can’t give ‘who’ you are to another entity so that it becomes ‘who’ you are as well. Not possible.

Zizy: It is characteristic that according to the Fathers, every baptized person becomes “Christ.”

T: Hey, what can I say. If you’re Christ, then you should know all this stuff and not have to ask me.

-----------------------

D: In other words, you and Moore would say that, in the Eschaton Presence of God, unless my ego has a continuing memory of my earthly existence, a stream of created 1st person subjective memory detailing the historical, emotional, and psychological development that lead to the deification of my human hypostasis...it cannot be said that I am still “my own person.”

T: You don’t have to say “my own person.” You can just say “I am still a person.” The word “own” doesn’t add anything, since every ‘person’ is by definition the person he/she is.

I don’t see how human personhood/identity can develop without memory. But that’s not to say you HAVE to remember you were born as Dwayne in 1974 in order to ever be or become a person. You could have amnesia and never remember that bit of information. Heck you could forget everything about your past. But you’ll have to begin a new history of experiences and memories that will become the context for the emergence of a personal identity. Personal relations having no ‘tenure’ would be atemporal, and that doesn’t hold any meaning for me.

-----------------------

You posted something from me:

“What I’m saying is that WHEN FULFILLED, when the ‘ego has landed’ and is at home in Christ, the human becomes fully personal, becomes ‘a person’ in relation to God as a personal ‘other’. So agreeing that the “ego” isn’t destroyed doesn’t tell me you agree we become free, non-divine persons in relation to God as a personal other. I need Loder to say ‘we become human ‘persons’ in relationship to God and this ‘person’ is not destroyed’. When all said and done, I think you really believe that it’s the divine side of the relationship that provides the PERSON while the human side of the relationship provides anything BUT person; the latter assumes the personal identity from the former but in unique ways determined by my free ‘ego’, so that the PERSON of the Son gets expressed in my unique context (or something along those lines) in ways determined by me. This is NOT interpersonal divine-human relationality.”

Yep. That’s how I see things.

I like the Torrance you referred to. I do agree that we can speak of ourselves as persons only in a derivative way. Dude…listen…ALL personhood (even divine) is derivative. If personhood is by definitive intersubjective, then it’s necessarily derivative. A person is an identity that emerges from relating to others. That goes for the F, S, and Sp too. I know this might mess with the monarchy of the Father, but read Papanikolau on it. He argues all divine persons are causally related to one another. Let’s not make it a big thing right now, just let me say that I ‘MORE’ than agree with you that our personhood is derived. But I believe all personhood is derived.

So yes, we are ‘personalized persons’. But again, in a sense all persons are ‘personalized’. That is, they ‘get’ their identity FROM relating to other persons. And we can be ‘personalizing’ as well, but only with other ‘human persons’, to the extent that in relating to them we call their true identity in Christ into being. We become personalizing agents as it were. And certainly God is a personalizing person with regard to naming us. The only thing that cannot be the case (Torrance’s concern after all) is that WE ‘personalize’. That’s not possible. God is essentially the fullness of personal being as Trinity long before we arrive on the scene.

D: What if we used Torrence's language, Tom...and we said that the Personalizing Person (Divine Presence) takes our natural ego-centering human tendencies towards identity formation (as part of our human meaning-making mental activity)...and, through His working, brings forth "personalized persons" who are ONLY SUCH because of the Personalizing Person's personal being and continuous activity in the personalized persons? Wouldn't that work?

T: As far as I understand it, yes. It’d work for me, if you’d add that the exercise of freedom on our part is necessary to shaping our uniqueness as persons. Like I said in the previous post, God provides the ‘given’ of sonship that’s common to all. But that’s just the beginning of who we are. He also invites us to uniquely develop and shape ourselves within that.

D: That way, we could say “We become personalized human beings in relationship to the Personalizing Person, and it is only in said Personalizing Person that a human being remains in personalization, and not mere self-reflective mentation.”

T: If by “in said Personalizing Person” you mean, “in-relation-to…” then ‘yes’. But if you mean “in asymmetrical bipolar schizophrenia” (just kidding), some “I, not I, but Christ” Loder-lingo, then probably not. ;o)

D: Said another way...we become human ‘persons’ in relationship to God and this ‘person’ is not destroyed by God's Absolute Presence, but spiritually recentered, regrounded, fulfilled by that Presence.

T: Oops, there he is. Maximus raises his head. The ‘absolute presence’. You know what Moore said about this. You know what this ‘absolute presence’ ends up doing to us.

I don’t mind saying God is absolutely present if we’re careful. I mind what it comes out looking like when you’re done recentering us. There’s no ‘person’ left that I’ve noticed. It’s “only God who lives and acts.” I say, no, it’s not only God who lives and acts.

D: In other words, Tom, ego functionality (including memory of self-reflective experience) is NATURAL human tendency...and can only become truly "person" when...as you said...the ego has landed, and is at home with Christ-the-Logos via the Spirit. And ego functionality is NOT FULLY "HUMAN" OR "PERSON" to the degree this is not happening.”

T: Right. So long as what you think being “at home with Christ via the Spirit” means, I’m cool. But in your hands, that has always ended up effectually erasing personal uniqueness. For me, the ego ‘lands’ when it accepts the gospel and agrees that that its loved by God and valued and that its destiny is secure when it rests in this love. Then it says, “I’m a child of God” and nothing can take that away from me.

D: Will you agree with me that human ego functionality (the biological hypostasis arena) is NOT "person" in and of itself...but only a POTENTIAL for human personhood designed into the human hypostasis that can ONLY be fully released by the working of Christ's Spirit with our human spirit through faith and grace. Can you agree with me on that, given all that you've said on this before?

T: I agreed months and months ago that ego functionality isn’t ‘person’ in and of itself but that it’s a potential for personhood. No disagreement there.

But if you refer to my immediately preceding post, I know that you’re interested in “how” we related to the divine interpersonally, and to explain that “how” you go to the hypostatic union. THAT’S how. But that’s the problem. The ‘how’ of the hypostatic union doesn’t give you a human person in relation to divine persons, it just gives you a divine person who’s disposing his identity in a human way, through human natural capacities. If we want to say that we become non-divine ‘persons’ in relation to God, then you have to step outside the hypostatic union to say it. And you don’t want to do that.

Remember this post?

So let’s go with Endokimov’s idea that ‘spirit’ (small ‘s’) is a quality of existence, better yet, a quality of the disposing of one’s perceived identity. That quality is alive and well when the disposing is done in loving relation to others. We might even say that ‘spirit’ is ‘the relational way’; spirit is that which qualifies/defines relational existence per se. To relate in love is to dispose of one’s self toward another and to receive another’s self as contributing to one’s own meaning/identity. This mutuality, in qualitative terms, is ‘spirit’. It’s human or divine given the ‘nature’ or ‘natural capacities’ through which the disposing of the identity takes shape/form. It’s ‘natural’ inasmuch as it arises from the exercise of nature (you only identify it and relate to it through such exercise) but ‘personal’ inasmuch as that nature is exercised by some ‘person’.

OK then. So Christ had/has a human spirit. But let’s not say that a ‘human spirit’ is just one among several other ‘parts’ that make up that ‘human nature’. I think this is where D has been thus far. But perhaps the human spirit isn’t exactly the ‘human person’ either (as Corey and I prefer to say). Might it be the case that a human spirit is the personalization of human nature by some person, the ‘way’ or ‘quality’ of experienced relational life concretely instantiated via human nature by some unique and unrepeatable person? But it matters not whether the person is human or divine; it might be either (this might be where we’ve been missing it for six months). What matters (for the human spirit) is that the ‘nature’ is human. THAT determines that the spirit in question is human. Thus we could say Christ has a human spirit, a human quality/way of disposing his identity as the Son.

Thus WE can be non-divine persons disposing of our unique and unrepeatable identities through human natural capacities, the act or content of which is ‘spirit’ (viz., a relational quality of life belonging to the person doing the disposing but disposed within the context of particular natural capacities) AND Christ can be a divine person disposing of his own unique and unrepeatable identity through TWO sets of natural capacities, one divine and one human. It’s just that on the divine side this quality just IS the Holy Spirit, eternally defined (two paragraphs ago). On the human side, however, it is the combined spiritual quality of life generated by the Son’s disposing of his identity in the flesh. No independent person generated there. In OUR case, however, God chooses not to insert himself personally, in the Son, into the process by which human identities emerge from the exercise of natural capacities in relation to others. That’s “let go” so that personal ‘others’ can come into being with whom God relates. 

The natural human search for identity and meaning inherent to human personal becoming (in us) which gives rise to striving and misrelation (because this process of becoming is deliberately ‘let go’ by God SO THAT a unique and unrepeatable person can emerge) never occurs in Christ because the identity is ‘given’ to it by the God the Son, who in ‘assuming a human nature’ precludes the process of ‘identity emergence’ which in OUR CASE yields novel identities.

You agreed totally to all this…for two pages. Then it all blew apart again. I still can’t figure that one out.

T

Post Edited (Tom) : 12/16/2008 10:26:22 AM (GMT-6)

Post Edited (One Love) : 12/16/2008 11:33:04 AM (GMT-6)

Post Edited (One Love) : 12/16/2008 7:26:45 PM (GMT-6)

T

T: The ‘how’ of the hypostatic union doesn’t give you a human person in relation to divine persons, it just gives you a divine person who’s disposing his identity in a human way, through human natural capacities. If we want to say that we become non-divine ‘persons’ in relation to God, then you have to step outside the hypostatic union to say it. And you don’t want to do that.

D: This is inaccurate. According to Zizzy...looking dead at the book right now...because of the hypostatic union of Christ, we can know...  1) authentic humanity only exists in the personal mode of existence...

T: Of course we know this from the Incarnation. I’m not disputing the claim that the Incarnation shows us that authentic human existence is personal existence, that human nature can only be fulfilled in hypostatic/personal existence.

D: 2) this personal mode of human existence is inseparable from (and impossible without) two natural realities (human spirit and Holy Spirit) inhering without fusion or confusion in one hypostasis.

T: If you mean the give-and-take that occurs between the human spirit and the Holy Spirit constitutes one person, AND you also mean that (a) THIS UNIQUE INTERACTION IN US CONSTITUTES THE UNIQUE NON-DIVINE PERSON WE BECOME, then of course yes (that’s what I’VE been arguing for over a year now; but the incarnation does NOT show us THIS, viz., the coming into being of a non-divine person), BUT if you mean (b) THE ONE PERSON THAT RESULTS FROM THIS UNIQUE INTERACTION IN US IS THE PERSON OF THE SON (no additional person comes into being), then certainly not; that’s not God’s purpose for us.

D: Using the hypostatic union as a guiding principle does NOT translate to all deified human beings being assimiliated human egos who function as "incarnations" of the Hypostasis of God the Son. Nope.

T: It does if you mean (b) above, for in the case of (b) there would be no other hypostasis save the hypostasis of the Son in any human being's particular existence, no coming into being of "a non-divine person" in relation to God. That would be to sticking to the Incarnation. If you can’t say about US anything OTHER THAN you say about the incarnation (like, “Oh look, there’s a non-divine person”), then our human egos MOST CERTAINLY are mere functions of ONE hypostasis, the Son. Who’s hypostasis are they a function of?

Yessir.

T

D: What I've been trying to articulate is the following:

When our ego peripheries "come to land" in Christ-the-Logos through continually indwelling (and being continually indwelt by) his Spirit…

T: Yes, go on.

D: …we become “persons” through whose hearts bear Christ's Presence such that any and all actions done by the believing “person” are NOT MERELY our own, but they are also God's (Christ's)…

T: Of course. No problem. But you DON’T HAVE THIS IN THE INCARNATION. You do not have the coming into being of a non-divine “person” through whose heart shines the logos. Jesus is not a non-divine person. BUT WE AAAAARRREEEE. So we’ve said something true that occurs in OUR case that does not occur in the case of Christ.

And I have no problem in saying my acts and free choices are not merely my own, even if I freely determine them, for I would ALSO say that this free exercise of my will IS GOD’S WILL FOR ME. I don’t think this is strong enough for you. You want more determination of will to ground you belief that are actions are also God’s.

D: …in a theandric manner. So JUST LIKE in the Person of Jesus…

T: But it’s not JUST LIKE Jesus, as I’ve showed you. It IS just like Jesus insofar as human nature is only fulfilled hypostatically, yes. But it’s not just like Jesus insofar as to the identity of the hypostasis who expresses that nature personally. In us the emergent identity, the PERSON, who comes to be is NEW (non-divine) and other than the Person of the Son. You don’t get THAT emerging in the incarnation. No sir.

--------------------------

D: “I, Christ” is where God inserts himself personally, in the Divine Person of the Eternal Son, into a particular human being

...while...

“I, not I, but Christ” is where, as you say, Tom...“God chooses not to insert himself personally, in the Son, into the process by which human identities emerge from the exercise of natural capacities in relation to others. That process is 'let go' so that personal 'others' can come into being with whom God relates.”

T: This might be it. Veeeery carefully, D. Three things:

1) Yes. But what you say establishes a discontinuity between the incarnation and us. You HAVE stepped outside the incarnation in saying (with me) that “God chooses not to insert himself personally, in the Son, into the process by which human identities emerge….” There’s the DIFFERENCE in relationality between us and the incarnation. You can’t go on saying that divine-human relationality in us is everything the incarnation is and nothing it is not. You just put your finger on something it is in our case that it’s not in Christ’s case. You HAVE to concede this if you want me to take you honestly anymore. I’m serious.

2) If by “I, not I, but Christ” you mean what I mean in the quote you post there, then we have no problem. I always too you to mean by this that there was the ONE hypostasis of the Son shinning through me ego (which was at rest in HIS hypostasis, not a hypostasis constituted in relation TO his hypostasis; if you mean this, then you DON’T mean what I mean in the words of mine you quote.

Look, D, get this from me, OK? HEAR ME say this:

ALLLLLLL ‘personhood’ is of the form “I, not I, but X.”

ALLLLLLL persons can only be persons if there’s SOME OTHER PERSON constituting their personhood, their own understanding of "I."

This is true on ONE level with me and Anita and others I love and know well. Even with me and you. So dearly do I love you I refuse to identify myself without reference to you. Don’t you get it? It happens on a higher, more permanent level with me and Christ, yes, where the ‘who’ I am is constituted and defined by its relationship to Christ. The connection (the give-and-take between Holy Spirit and human spirit) is the same in kind as all other interpersonal traffic, but THIS traffic in the case of us and God becomes the core and center of my identity, defining all other relationships I have. All other relationships I have (though they work the same way) can be lost if the person I know dies or is lost. But that can never happen with Christ, because he is risen, and has already defeated death, and his hypostasis/person is eternally enduring. He can't die or be lost. And if he can't be lost, neither can I.

3) BUT (a) I will not take the formula “I, not I, but X” that you’re using to describe interpersonal relations as an interpretation of Paul’s meaning in Galatians. I’ll agree to steal Paul’s language, but not call it an interpretation of him in context. And (b) I will not limit the formula to JUST my relationship to Christ. It’s definitive of all interpersonal relations. I’ll agree that in the case of Christ it’s central and permanent and definitive of other relations, but it’s not unique as a formula expressing a relational ontology. And (c) I will NOT agree that the formula “I, not I, but X” means I am not a person other than X. “Person” by itself, whether it’s “I” or “the Son” or any other person, is already ENOUGH in and of itself to contain the “other.” There is no need to say “not I but…” for “I” already, by definition, demands that another have already constituted my “I” interpersonally. This is why FOR ME, the form “I, not I, but X” is at best just an expansion of what ANY and ALL “I”s are, including the divine persons. And lastly, (d) we’ll continue to disagree on the intersubjective nature of our relation with God. I’ll agree God’s on the inside. But I won’t agree that God has my “exact” experience, that he has my experience of myself. If you need this to make everything work, then all bets are off.

T

In short, there is ONLY ONE TRUE PERSON per human hypostasis...those there can be different PERSONAE that occur in that human hypostasis for various reasons.

Post Edited (One Love) : 12/17/2008 7:22:50 AM (GMT-6)