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One Love
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Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
|  Posted 12/11/2008 8:00 AM (GMT -6) |   | Self-Renunciation
by John Angell James (1785-1859)
Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.
1 Corinthians 6:19-20
Some of the writing...
The apostle Paul teaches this important duty, by the following awakening and impressive appeal: "Don't you know that your body is a sanctuary of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God? You are notyour own, for you were bought at a price; therefore glorify God in your body." (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). What is intended in these words is, that through the vicarious sufferings and death of Christ, as an atonement to Divinejustice for human transgressions—all who believe in him are freed from the curse of the law, and the dominion of sin, and are both justified and sanctified. The Christian is thus a bought man, a captive redeemed by price. Itis in this sense the whole church is called the "purchased possession," Eph. 1:14. Yes, and what an idea! I repeatit—a believer is a purchased man! And at what price has he been bought! All the jewels which adorn and enrichthe crown and scepter of the British monarch; with all the others that compose the regalia of all the sovereignsof the Eastern or Western world, are of no more worth in the redemption of the poorest widow in the church ofGod, than the dust of the street. Nothing but the blood of the Son of God could purchase a single soul.
How obvious is the inference! "You are not your own, for you were bought at a price!" How is it possible you should be your own—if you have been bought? In what sense a Christian is not his own, is explained to you by another portion of Scripture—"None of us lives to himself," Rom. 14:7. Do enter very seriously, and solemnly,and deeply, into these two impressive passages—
"You are not your own."
"None of us lives to himself."
It is for you to recollect that the renunciation of SELF, as well as of SIN, was one of the solemn transactions ofthat scene, and that time, when you bowed by faith at the foot of the cross, received mercy through Jesus Christ,and yielded yourselves to God. You then abjured—not only self-righteousness, but self-seeking, self pleasing, self-living. Self, as a supreme object, was in every view of it renounced. Self, until then, had been your loftiest aim; self-love your highest affection; but then you transferred your aim and your affection to another object.The Christian has no right to ask what he will do with himself; or to what he will give himself; or how he willemploy himself. He is no longer at liberty to inquire how he shall spend his energies, his time, his properly, hislabor, and his influence; for he is not his own, he is bought with a price.
He is not to live for fame—and please himself with the applause of his fellow creatures. Nor is he to live forriches—and please himself with increasing wealth. Nor is he to live for health—and please himself with theglowing energies of a sound body. Nor is he to live for taste—and please himself with the pursuit of literature,science, or the arts. Nor is he to live for social enjoyment—and please himself with an agreeable circle offriends. Nor is he to live for ease—and please himself with unmolested quiet. In short, he is not to considerhimself as his own master to please himself supremely in any way, nor his own property to employ himself onhis own account, and for his own benefit. He is not to imagine that personal gratification is to be his end and aim, for the accomplishment of which he may lay down his own schemes, select his own course, and pursue hisown methods, as if he had an independent and sovereign right over himself.
Self is "the old man" to be crucified with Christ; the body of sin to be destroyed; the corrupt nature to be putaway; the law in our members to be resisted; the lusts of the mind to be subdued. Self is the enemy of God to befought against; the rival interest with Christ in our soul to be put down; the means by which the devil wouldhold us in alienation from holiness to be opposed. SELF is the most subtle, the most stubborn, the mosttenacious foe with which grace has to contend, in the soul of the believer. It lives, and works, and fights,when many other corruptions are mortified. Self is the last stronghold, the very citadel of Satan in the heart,which is reduced to the obedience of faith.
Why do believers murmur at the painful dispensations of Providence, and find submission so hard anachievement? Because self is disturbed in its enjoyment! Why are they so easily offended, and experience suchdifficulty in showing forgiveness? Because self-esteem has been wounded! Why are they covetous? Becauseself is gratified by its increasing stores.
What is vanity—but the indulgence of self-love? What is ambition—but the exultation of self? What is pride—but the worship of self? Why are they so reluctant to give their time and labor for the good of others,and the glory of God? Because they want it for ease, and the enjoyment of self! Why are they peevish,quarrelsome, and discontented with the little annoyances of life, which are everywhere and continually occurring? Because they want to settle down in unmolested ease, and undisturbed quiet, to enjoy themselves!
But is this right? Is not this living as if we were our own? Is not this living for ourselves? Is not this forgettingthat we are purchased property, belonging to another? My dear friends, do consider this subject. Weigh well theimport of the condition of Christian discipleship, as laid down by our Lord: "If any man will come after me, LET HIM DENY HIMSELF." Self-denial, not self-pleasing, is your business; and the evidence of our beingdisciples is in exact proportion to our disposition thus to take up our cross. If we are coveting ease, quiet, soft indulgence, luxurious gratification; and are dissatisfied, and discontented, and contentious, and peevish, becausewe cannot please ourselves, nor get others to please us, as the supreme end of life, how can we dream that weare the disciples of Him, of whom it is declared, "he pleased not himself;" especially since it is said, "Let the same mind be in you which was in Christ Jesus?"
For whom then are we to live, and whom are we to please, if not ourselves? Who is to come in the place of self? GOD! And for this obvious reason. We are God's! God's servants! God's property!
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Father...kill me. Kill all of us.
Make us the walking dead to this crazy culture of self-deification, self-concern, and self-indulgence.
Unlike what Virgin Mobile says, we DO NOT "rule". YOU rule, Father. YOU do!
Put our "selves" to death by the Spirit...that we may be reborn by the Spirit to You and You alone.
In the Name of Your Son, by the Power of Your Spirit, for Your Glory and Honor.
Beloved Triune God, hear our prayer.
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) : 12/11/2008 7:05:16 AM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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Asher
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Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 477
| Posted 12/12/2008 1:51 AM (GMT -6) | | Jules Lequier - French Open Theist philosopher
"God, who created me creator of myself"
God save us from the reductionist neo-mystic enslavement of collectivist-trinitarian-monism; and establish us as I-Thou individuals, as Kierkegaard's Single One before your Presence. | | Back to Top | | |
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Tom
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Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 12/12/2008 7:55 AM (GMT -6) | | |
Christian de Quincey: “The second meaning of intersubjectivity, and the one I want to emphasize here, focuses on the second-person perspective as mutual engagement or co-creativity of consciousness. It’s the difference between intersubjective agreement (where my language about the world conforms to yours, through exchange of conceptual and linguistic tokens) and intersubjective co-creativity (where my experience of myself shows up qualitatively differently when I engage with you as a reciprocating center of experience). In this second, ‘stronger’, Buberian sense, intersubjectivity happens via ‘participation’, and ‘mutuality’, and we don’t even have to agree.”
This is the ‘interpersonal’ model as I understand it. I participate in your life when I can’t say ‘who’ I am without saying ‘who’ you are, when there’s no ‘being me’ without your ‘being you’ to me, so that who you are gets expressed/reflected in who I am. But this is not to conflate identities or subjectivities so that I’m justified in saying “I am you.” I object to D’s claim that first-person beliefs I hold about myself also (via intersubjectivity) come to be first-person beliefs God holds to be true about Godself. I think that’s false and reduces us to neo-pantheism.
de Quincey: “I am not claiming that just because we ‘share’ experience that therefore we have identical experience. No, not at all. Each of us remains a unique center or node of subjectivity…
and
“This does not mean that whatever beliefs I may hold somehow become beliefs you also hold. I am saying, however, that the notion of ‘my’ experience (in the independent Cartesian sense) is an illusion. ‘My’ subjectivity simply does not exist independently of ‘your’ subjectivity—even though we retain a unique identity. So I would not say that I have ‘your’ experiences or you have ‘my’ experiences; but I am saying that we are sharing experiences and meanings (otherwise it would be impossible for us to ever communicate).”
I’d say it this way then. My experience of you experiencing me comes to constitute my own understanding of who I am. Equally, your experience of me experiencing you comes to constitute your understanding of who you are. Thus, personhood (‘who’ we are, the ‘meaning’ of our presence in the world) can only be constituted intersubjectively. That is how I come to constitute who you are and you come to constitute who I am. Consequently there’s no stating who you are without me being part of your meaning in the world and no stating who I am without you being part of my meaning in the world. We mutually define one another’s meaning, person, or identity.
I was thinking about the Bible’s use of ‘naming’, from Adam’s being empowered to ‘name’ the creatures in Genesis to God’s rewarding the faithful with a ‘new name that only the one receiving it knows’ in Revelation.
I’d say that ultimately only God can ‘name’ you. Only God can tell you ‘who’ you are. And as inevitably intersubjective as we all are, we are bound to ‘name’ each other all the time. It’s what God created us to do, with each other and the created order—name it, define it, call its ‘being’ and ‘identity’ forth. Of course, our naming each other was supposed to be done within the larger framework of God’s naming us, so that the unique ‘who’ I help to constitute in you (through free relations) is who you are in Christ. I call forth ‘that’ person.
But only God can name us, identify us, tell us who we are. As far as I can tell, D thinks the ‘person’ God says we are just is God. And that’s why I see him essentially in pantheistic terms. I don’t think D believes God can call personhood in us into being. I’d totally agree these persons are constituted as intersubjectively as I described above, so that there’s no saying who ‘I’ am without saying who ‘God’ is, and all the rest I say above about the person I am being constituted by 'me experiencing God experience me' and 'me experiencing myself (as it were) experiencing God'. But that doesn’t conflate subjectivities. Co-created subjectivities are not conflated subjectivities.
‘Self-denial’ then is just the refusal to name myself, the refusal to imagine that ‘who’ I am, my ‘meaning’ in the world, is something ‘I’ can establish independently of God. That’s all. It’s not the refusal to be a self, or the willing assumption of my self into the divine self (assimilation = pantheism). It’s the ‘naming’ of the self that’s at issue.
Heck, I’d being will (I’ve said this before) to agree to the asymmetrical nature of divine-human intersubjectivity. God tells us ‘who’ we are. We cannot tell God ‘who’ he is (because the fullness of ‘who’ he, the fullness of personal being, is necessarily constituted interpersonally via trinitarian relations). That’s a given. So the God-world relationship isn't co-creative (as I'd be open to agreeing human-human relations are). But since we’re contingent beings, only God—the source and ground of personal being—can ‘name’ us, tell us ‘who’ we are. But that ‘who’ is someone ‘other’ than who God is even if that someone can only be constituted by relating to who God is, freely choosing to accept God’s naming of them.
However, I think we can affect God in the sense of contributing to God’s experience of Godself. But this experience doesn’t tell God ‘who’ God is. It doesn’t undermine the necessary and infinite fullness of personal being (divine aseity), but it does constitute an influence or effect of creation upon God (freely allowed by God when he choose to create). That is, God experiences himself experiencing us. That may not be constitutive in God’s mind of ‘who’ God is, but it is constitutive in God’s mind of his experience of us, of what it is who God is is experiencing. And that's not less than meaningful. At the same time, our experience of God’s experience of us DOES inform our understanding of ‘who’ we are. We see ‘who’ we are meant to be by observing God’s experience of us, for in that experience (creation, judgment, mercy, incarnation, cross, resurrection, etc.) God declares our value to him, our meaning to him, his love of us, our place in his heart, etc.
Tom Post Edited (Tom) : 12/12/2008 7:03:12 AM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 12/12/2008 8:01 AM (GMT -6) | | Asher:
God save us from the reductionist neo-mystic enslavement of collectivist-trinitarian-monism; and establish us as I-Thou individuals, as Kierkegaard's Single One before your Presence.
Oh, we're going to talk about Kierkegaard's Single One, then? Ok...
Commentary on SK's "The Single Individual"
and...
De Quincey (in his "Intersubjectivity") talking about SK...
And there is yet a third approach to self-inquiry: intersubjective empiricism, which avoids the Kantian impossibility of the "I' reflecting itself without objectifying itself as "me." By encountering others as loci of experiencing selves, just like our self, we can, indeed, come to know ourselves reflected in the other. Unlike the failed Cartesian one-way mirror-model of self-consciousness, the intersubjective approach involves a kind of "two-way mirror," where not only can we "see through" to the other self, we see our own spontaneous self reflected back through them--and this experience is itself constitutive of the experiencing "I." Part of who I am, who I experience myself to be, is formed, perhaps even created, by engaging with "you." This was Fichte's approach, modified by Humboldt and Kierkegaard, and taken up later by Habermas.
Fichte's self-positing self. Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1907) attempted to augment Kant's transcendental ego by the notion of the "self-positing self." For Fichte, the ego creates itself through an existential act of self-choice and achieves individuality through intersubjective encounters with other egos. Its uniqueness is shaped by these encounters. Thus Fichte's existential self-positing-intersubjective ego has both transcendental and immanent aspects. It also presupposes a pre-existing self that engages other pre-existing selves. Thus Fichte's approach opens the way to account for what happens to the self-positing-self, to its forms or contents (weak/psychological intersubjectivity), but it does not advance our knowledge of consciousness or self as an ontological context (strong/philosophical intersubjectivity).
Both Søren Kierkegaard and Wilhelm von Humboldt (see below) argued that Fichte's transcendental-immanent ego led to contradictions and paradoxes, and did not resolve the paralogisms of self identified by Kant. The problem, they believed, resulted from the notion of the transcendental ego. They rejected the transcendental ego altogether, and instead proposed a wholly immanent self, situated in the concrete world of life events and life histories (a view developed later, and along very different lines in John Dewey [1949], and Martin Heidegger [1978]).
Kierkegaard's existential self-choice. Kierkegaard (1987) retained and reworked Fichte's notion of self-positing into an existential theory of self-choice--a self that authentically chooses its own particular life history, and thereby establishes its unique individuality. Kierkegaard's "self-choice" involves a performative rather than a descriptive concept of individuality, an idea later taken up by Jürgen Habermas (1992).
In other words, when I choose myself as this person with this particular life history, and simultaneously assert and project myself into the world, what matters is not any third-person (or first-person) description of this self, but my claim to radical authenticity. Self, then, becomes not something to be described, but something to perform. The self is a claim: "I am who I am." But as a claim, the self must then be recognized or acknowledged, accepted, or rejected by other selves--by Other. For Kierkegaard, this Other was God (Kierkegaard, 1987).
As you probably already know, Loder (and Shultz) talk about Kierkegaard extensively.
At any rate, Tom is RIGHT. There is no simple "self-creation by choice" going on. No. Without God grounding and sustaining the process, one could not be a self at all BEFORE GOD. The Knight of Faith, the Single Individual Before God par excellence, is only what he is as he "buys up the acceptable time at the dearest price, for he does not to the least thing except by the virtue of the absurd (the God-Man Christ!)."
Do you really believe that what's being said by SK is MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE from what Angell's saying about self-renunciation?
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) : 12/12/2008 7:04:43 AM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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Tom
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Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 12/12/2008 8:06 AM (GMT -6) | | I'm stuck in Baghdad. Pray I get out of here tomorrow or Sunday at the latest!
;o) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 12/12/2008 8:08 AM (GMT -6) | | Talk about De Quincey's "third" version (2b) and how God's experience of that works. With his being the "objective inwardness" (Torrence) and the ground of all intersubjectivity, I mean.
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) : 12/12/2008 7:13:27 AM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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Tom
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Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 12/12/2008 8:12 AM (GMT -6) | | I talked. Posted some of his personal comments to me. That's good for now.
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One Love
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| Posted 12/12/2008 8:46 AM (GMT -6) | | Tom:
Only God can tell you ‘who’ you are.
Then "who" does God tell us we are? (Hint: "I have said, 'you are gods." )
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.
"I love, therefore I am in I Am." | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 12/12/2008 8:49 AM (GMT -6) | | Tom:
‘Self-denial’ then is just the refusal to name myself, the refusal to imagine that ‘who’ I am, my ‘meaning’ in the world, is something ‘I’ can establish independently of God. That’s all. It’s not the refusal to be a self, or the willing assumption of my self into the divine self (assimilation = pantheism). It’s the ‘naming’ of the self that’s at issue.
The fulfilment of the self (per SK and Torrence) is when the Divine Presence (Spirit of Christ-the-Logos) can INDWELL THE [created] SELF (no assimilation, no henosis) by the perichoretic sharing of the Holy Spirit and human spirit. That's the ETERNAL difference between "I, not I, but Christ" and "I, Christ"
Why do I feel like I'm not being heard here?
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) : 12/12/2008 7:52:20 AM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 12/12/2008 8:50 AM (GMT -6) | | Tom:
But only God can name us, identify us, tell us who we are. As far as I can tell, D thinks the ‘person’ God says we are just is God. And that’s why I see him essentially in pantheistic terms. I don’t think D believes God can call personhood in us into being. I’d totally agree these persons are constituted as intersubjectively as I described above, so that there’s no saying who ‘I’ am without saying who ‘God’ is, and all the rest I say above about the person I am being constituted by 'me experiencing God experience me' and 'me experiencing myself (as it were) experiencing God'. But that doesn’t conflate subjectivities. Co-created subjectivities are not conflated subjectivities.
Dammit.
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.
"I love, therefore I am in I Am." | | Back to Top | | |
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Tom
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| Posted 12/12/2008 8:51 AM (GMT -6) | | There’s overlap between de Quincey’s 2a and 2b. That’s why they’re (a) and (b) of ‘2’ and not ‘2’ and ‘3’. This is why he can say “In the second (and third) sense, intersubjectivity happens through participation and mutuality, and we don't even have to agree….”
de Quincey: “Intersubjectivity-2b (strong-experiential meaning): ‘mutual co-arising and engagement of interdependent subjects, or intersubjects, which creates their respective experience.’ It is ontological. Strong or ontological intersubjectivity relies on co-creative nonphysical presence, and brings distinct subjects into being out of a prior matrix of relationships.”
Tom: I don’t have a problem with this. I rather like it. My only concern was whether he thought his ‘strong’ intersubjectivity also amounted to conflated (or identical) first-person beliefs (as you argue is the case). I misrelate by stealing money and you believe God’s experience of my misrelation grounds God’s first-person belief, “I, God, have just misrelated by stealing money.” I think that’s seriously mistaken. If God can’t distinguish between Godself and the world, then there IS no distinction between Godself and the world (assuming God’s beliefs are always true), and that’s pantheism. So long as you conflate subjective beliefs like this you open yourself up to the charge of pantheism, regardless of whatever else you might insist on regarding the ontological distinction between God and the world.
de Quincey: “The basic difference to note here is between intersubjective agreement (1), where my language about the world conforms to yours, through exchange of conceptual and linguistic tokens, and intersubjective participation (2a), or intersubjective co-creativity (2b), where my experience of myself shows up qualitatively differently when I engage with you as a reciprocating center of experience.”
Tom: Absolutely to that bold-italicized portion.
You asked how God experiences this (2b). I’m sure neither of us can say with absolute assurance. But I commented on what I think is the case. de Quincey doesn’t discuss it. But all I’d say is that God’s personal identities as Father, Son, and Spirit do not depend upon his relations to creation. God doesn’t come to learn who God is from us. But we do come to learn who we are from him. So that’s the asymmetry I’m happy to concede.
Now, I might be wrong about de Quincey. He might be a hardened pantheist (though he’s admitted only to being a panentheist, which we both know can sometimes just mean ‘confused pantheist’). But as far as I can tell right now, it looks good. It wanted to order his Radical Nature but it’s like $80.00.
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Tom
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| Posted 12/12/2008 9:01 AM (GMT -6) | | D: Then "who" does God tell us we are? (Hint: "I have said, 'you are gods." )
T: On this, and the Galatians passage, I believe Bethel U has some hermeneutic courses you might benefit from taking. ;o)
D: Dammit.
T: Well, to be fair, let me also say it's your conflating of divine and human subjectivites so that God comes to believe about Godself everything we believe (rightly or wrongly) about ourselves. That kind pushes it over the edge for me.
D: The fulfilment of the self (per SK and Torrence) is when the Divine Presence (Spirit of Christ-the-Logos) can INDWELL THE [created] SELF (no assimilation, no henosis)...
T: I'm just on de Quincy right now. But I think he'd say "divine indwelling of the human self" would simply be the self's perception of God's meaning in constituting the self. So when the self looks at itself, it sees God. Yes. I've never denied that. It'd be roughly equivalent to God's 'naming' us and our perceiving it. Just as I cannot name myself and not see my earthly father, I can't look at the name/identity God gives me and not see God.
Gee. I actually thought you'd be really happy about my post. Oh well.
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One Love
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| Posted 12/12/2008 9:57 AM (GMT -6) | | I was happy about it, Tom. It's just frustrating that you still see me as a straight up pantheist...and not a panentheist. I try to give the eternal distinctions...and they don't seem to be working. I was just frustrated...that's all. No worries, dawg. 
Tom:
My only concern was whether he thought his ‘strong’ intersubjectivity also amounted to conflated (or identical) first-person beliefs (as you argue is the case). I misrelate by stealing money and you believe God’s experience of my misrelation grounds God’s first-person belief, “I, God, have just misrelated by stealing money.” I think that’s seriously mistaken. If God can’t distinguish between Godself and the world, then there IS no distinction between Godself and the world (assuming God’s beliefs are always true), and that’s pantheism. So long as you conflate subjective beliefs like this you open yourself up to the charge of pantheism, regardless of whatever else you might insist on regarding the ontological distinction between God and the world.
Look back at what Merton said...about the false self. How it is self-relational.
For example, you, "Tom", are familiar with the perspective "I am a self who misrelates to God by commiting X action or having X belief."
I'm sure a lot of human beings have had that experience.
But God would never have that experience...and Jesus never had that experience.
That condemns "sin in the flesh"...doesn't it?
In other words, it is not a necessary feature of human perspective to fundamentally ground one's own thinking about oneself on the basis of "I can be misrelated to (and therefore alienated from) God by committing X action or having X belief.
Also there is the idea "I always relate rightly to the God by my love of the God" which Jesus demonstrated in true humanity.
So, what of this "self" by grounds it's very being on the idea of posssible alientation from God?
Is it a false self?
Maybe?
What were those "points of nothingness" that Merton was talking about again...over and against the false "self"?
What is the true human being WITHOUT the "false self"...but the "self-as-spirit"?
So, I will say yes, God is NOT "false selves". No. Gods perceives the perspective as it's ultimate ground, but not as God's "own."
Is that what you are saying, Tom?
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) : 12/12/2008 9:02:41 AM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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Tom
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| Posted 12/12/2008 10:27 AM (GMT -6) | | D: It’s just frustrating that you still see me as a straight up pantheist...and not a panentheist. I try to give the eternal distinctions...and they don't seem to be working. I was just frustrated...that's all. No worries, dawg.
Tom: That’s cool. I guess I still see you as a pantheist because after asking ‘many’ times whether you think every creaturely first-person belief of the form, say, “I committed X…” grounds an equivalent first-person belief in God of the same form, “I committed X” so that the creature’s subjective belief states about the creature constitute God’s own belief states about God, you kept arguing this IS the case. That marks you as a pantheist in my book whatever other eternal distinctions you make.
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Tom: My only concern was whether he thought his ‘strong’ intersubjectivity also amounted to conflated (or identical) first-person beliefs (as you argue is the case). I misrelate by stealing money and you believe God’s experience of my misrelation grounds God’s first-person belief, “I, God, have just misrelated by stealing money.” I think that’s seriously mistaken. If God can’t distinguish between Godself and the world, then there IS no distinction between Godself and the world (assuming God’s beliefs are always true), and that’s pantheism. So long as you conflate subjective beliefs like this you open yourself up to the charge of pantheism, regardless of whatever else you might insist on regarding the ontological distinction between God and the world.
D: Look back at what Merton said...about the false self. How it is self-relational. For example, you, “Tom,” are familiar with the perspective “I am a self who misrelates to God by commiting X action or having X belief.” I'm sure a lot of human beings have had that experience. But God would never have that experience.
Tom: If God can’t have that experience then how is God the subject of that experience? Why insist, as you do, on saying God is the subject of “I am a self who misrelates to God by committing X” spoken by me? If God can’t be the subject of other subjects’ experience, then why do you say this is the case? You do realize that you say this don’t you? We argued about it for pages. You insisted that God shares our subjectivity, i.e., you argued that all our first-person belief states share in constituting God’s own first-person belief states.
So let me ask now, if you don’t think God can have that experience, how do you suppose God can share the subjective perspective that constitutes that [subject's] experience (the experience you just said God can't have)?
D: In other words, it is not a necessary feature of human perspective to fundamentally ground one's own thinking about oneself on the basis of “I can be misrelated to (and therefore alienated from) God by committing X action or having X belief.”
Tom: Dude, you’re going left of field. I’m just talking about first-person beliefs—whether right or wrong, whether expressive of the sort of misrelation you agree God can't have or expressive of freely chosen love. I’m not talking about “fundamentally grounding my thinking about myself on…” whatever. I’m just here talking about distinct first-person subjective perspectives per se. I say this distinction is part of the ‘personal distinction’ between us and God. You previously argued that God has our first-person experiences and beliefs. I say if that’s true, then God can’t also believe we’re ‘personally distinct’ from God. In fact, I wouldn’t know how God is able to make any meaningful distinction between us and Godself.
D: So, what of this "self" by grounds it's very being on the idea of posssible alientation from God? Is it a false self? Maybe?
Tom: I’m not denying ‘false selves’ per se. Of course, D. When we insist on naming ourselves independently of relationship to God we construct ‘false selves’ or ‘false identities’. Of course we give these up in coming to Christ. And in turn we let God name us.
TPost Edited (Tom) : 12/12/2008 9:37:02 AM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 12/12/2008 11:37 AM (GMT -6) | | Tom:
However, I think we can affect God in the sense of contributing to God’s experience of Godself. But this experience doesn’t tell God ‘who’ God is. It doesn’t undermine the necessary and infinite fullness of personal being (divine aseity), but it does constitute an influence or effect of creation upon God (freely allowed by God when he choose to create). That is, God experiences himself experiencing us. That may not be constitutive in God’s mind of ‘who’ God is, but it is constitutive in God’s mind of his experience of us, of what it is who God is is experiencing. And that's not less than meaningful. At the same time, our experience of God’s experience of us DOES inform our understanding of ‘who’ we are. We see ‘who’ we are meant to be by observing God’s experience of us, for in that experience (creation, judgment, mercy, incarnation, cross, resurrection, etc.) God declares our value to him, our meaning to him, his love of us, our place in his heart, etc.
Ok, Tom. All you just described is the distinction between God's "essential existential experience" (I Am [That I Am] ) and God's "contingent expressive experience" as Creator (I Am...Immanuel). Further question. "Who" is the divine Person who UNIFIES these two realms of experience for God? And "Who" is the divine Person who naturally indwells the Son and the Father? And "Who" is the divine Person who produces "our experience of God's experience of us" that constitutes the true "us"? And "who" is the only divine person who naturally "knows the thoughts of God" for the self of divine self-revelation?
All the same divine Person, right?
"Who" is that, Tom?
Hint...fill in the blank.
Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the ____ _____, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.
1 Corinthians 6:19-20
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 12/12/2008 12:31 PM (GMT -6) | | Let me use DeQuincey's language...mixed with Loder.
There can be a foreground-background reciprocal reversal between "insubjectivity" (Holy Spirit realm) and the "personal" (human spirit realm) such that TRANSpersonal consciousness is normalized (as "interdependent self-definition" [Loder] ), and unitive consciousness (a true integration of perspective) is always present. This transpersonal consciousness is ONLY maintained by the Holy Spirit "bearing witness" with OUR spirits, as the two spirits related in perichoretic, bi-polar assymmetrical relational union with one another. This is Loder's "mundane esctasy" and Nesteruk's "perceiving nature by the logoi"
This is basically a THEOCENTRIC, ONE-STORY UNIVERSE view of the human "self-as-spirit."
This is what I believe.
I do not conflate the human spirit and the Holy Spirit. I do not conflate the "unities of consciousness" of the two ontologically distinct realities. I do not conflate "I, Christ" (the Only Begotten Son, Divine Center, Incarnate Word) with "I, not I, but Christ" (unincarnate human "self-as-spirit" ) Christ is the divine person incarnated into humanity from whom the "theandric energy" comes...and "we" (I, not I, but Christ) are the human beings created in his image that indwell that energy...and become as he is.
I really don't know what more I can say on that.
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D: Gods perceives the perspective as it's ultimate ground, but not as God's "own."
T: Still not sure what you're affirming and/or denying. I think my questions are pretty clear.
The only thing I can imagine that would explain your reluctance to come out and just say, "Hey, God doesn't have my experiences and my first-person belief states aren't God's first-person belief states" is the belief that God does share our subjectivity in this [pantheistic] sense.
God's the ultimate ground of everything, so of course God perceives all things 'as their ultimate ground'. The question is, can God perceive our dependency upon him and also distinguish between his and our subjective perspectives? I say, of course God does this. I'm so sure about you.
and...
I guess I still see you as a pantheist because after asking ‘many’ times whether you think every creaturely first-person belief of the form, say, “I committed X…” grounds an equivalent first-person belief in God of the same form, “I committed X” so that the creature’s subjective belief states about the creature constitute God’s own belief states about God, you kept arguing this IS the case. That marks you as a pantheist in my book whatever other eternal distinctions you make.
Let me use DeQuincey's terms again. For every "personal" perspective that takes on the belief "I commited x...", the realm of intersubjectivity (which is the SELF-AWARE "context" and ground for all consciousness) PERMEATES that personal perspective. Intersubjectivity is the "objective inwardness" (Torrence) of all things, indwelling, experiencing and grounding all consciousness in a transcendenly immanent way. To me, there is only ONE GROUND of intersubjectivity, God the Holy Spirit of Christ-the-Logos.
To me this is just like how our ONE human spirit immediately "experiences" yet transcends our bodies's own experience of diversity (via brain activity). Our human spirit "experiences" our human body (in all of its parts) from the inside, but that experience is DISTINCT from the body's own experience of itself. The human spirit knows the depths of human being. In other words, when we say "I am cold", we are really saying "The various organs of my body that constitutes the corporeal element of my soul/body unity is experiencing the sensation of cold." Somehow, we confused the "I" with the body's experience of cold. But remember. We ARE embodied (the very term "I" is a cultural tool of expression)...and we HAVE a body (the experiential center USES and TRANSCENDS the body).
"It chilled my body...but not my soul. God's gonna trouble the water..."
Does this make sense?
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) : 12/12/2008 11:43:57 AM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 12/12/2008 12:36 PM (GMT -6) | | Something else...now, that we have that "who" down...
Ask yourself this question...is the activity of the "human spirit" IN AND OF ITSELF truly personal...or does it take the continously empowerment of the Holy Spirit for "personhood" to be unleashed from the creativity of the human spirit?
Said another way, in deQuincey terms, can "Cpersonal/Creflexive" consciousness truly be INTERPERSONAL (not merely dissociated in egocentrism ) without any sustained relationship to intersubjectivity?
Said yet another way, in Zizzy's terms, is the "biological hypostasis", in and of itself...truly personal ("ecclesial" ) without the continuing presence of Christ-the-Logos via the Holy Spirit?
Or...Are we truly "human" until we "become" Love through indwelling Love (God is Love)?
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For Kierkegaard, the culturally-embodied "I,", the loop of self-reflection (OL's Note: Hofstadter's "Strange Loop" of self-relationality) is not the self, although it may masquerade as such.
James Loder. The Transforming Moment. Page 78.
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"There is an irreducible opposition between the deep transcendent self that awakens only in contemplation, and the superficial, external self which we commonly identify with the first person singular. We must remember that the superficial "I" is not our real self. It is our "individuality" and our "empirical self" but it is not truly the hidden and mysterious person in whom we subsist before the eyes of God. The "I" that works in the world, thinks about itself, observes his own reactions and talks about itself is not the true "I" that has been united to God in Christ. It is at best the vesture, the mask, the disguise of that mysterious and unknown "self" whom most of us never discover until we are dead. Our external, superficial self is not eternal, not spiritual, far from it. This self is doomed to disappear as completely as smoke from a chimney."
Thomas Merton
More Merton...
Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self.
This is the man I want myself to be but who cannot exist because God does not know anything about him. And to be unknown of God is altogether too much privacy.
My false and private self is the one who wants to exist outside the reach of God's will and God's love . . . outside of reality and outside of life. And such a self cannot help but be an illusion.
For most people in the world, there is no greater subjective reality than this false self of theirs, which cannot exist. A life devoted to the cult of this shadow is what is called a life of sin.
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All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my own egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality to which everything else is ordered. There I use up my life in the desire for pleasures and the thirst for experience, for power, honor, knowledge and love to clothe this false self and construct its nothingness into something objectively real. And I wind experiences around myself and cover myself with pleasures and glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world, as if I were an invisible body that could become visible only when something visible covered its surface.
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The life of "mere existence" (Fr. Stephen)
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) : 12/12/2008 11:49:25 AM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 12/12/2008 12:47 PM (GMT -6) | | Tom:
I'm just on de Quincy right now. But I think he'd say "divine indwelling of the human self" would simply be the self's perception of God's meaning in constituting the self. So when the self looks at itself, it sees God. Yes. I've never denied that. It'd be roughly equivalent to God's 'naming' us and our perceiving it. Just as I cannot name myself and not see my earthly father, I can't look at the name/identity God gives me and not see God.
Are you really understanding how deep this goes? God giving his very self-understanding to us through his Spirit? and how THAT impacts our own self-understanding (which is inseparable from our human spirit)?
"Abba, Father" ?
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) : 12/12/2008 11:51:44 AM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 12/12/2008 12:58 PM (GMT -6) | | Dallas Willard (Renovation of the Heart) quoting George Mueller...page 71.
There was a day I died: died to George Mueller, his opinions, preferences, tastes and will; died to the world, its approval or censure; died to the approval or blame of even my brethren and friends, and since then, I have studied only to show myself approved unto God.
Somehow that sounds familiar...
"I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me."
Just as Paul died to "Paul" to live only by God...George Mueller died to "George Mueller" to live only by God.
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) : 12/12/2008 12:01:33 PM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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Tom
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| Posted 12/12/2008 1:22 PM (GMT -6) | | Just thought I give it one last shot, for old time's sake.
Blessings,
Tom | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 12/12/2008 5:53 PM (GMT -6) | | Well, I guess it was as good a try as any, Tom. Thanks for the attempt.
Tom:
The only thing I can imagine that would explain your reluctance to come out and just say, "Hey, God doesn't have my experiences and my first-person belief states aren't God's first-person belief states" is the belief that God does share our subjectivity in this [pantheistic] sense.
God's the ultimate ground of everything, so of course God perceives all things 'as their ultimate ground'. The question is, can God perceive our dependency upon him and also distinguish between his and our subjective perspectives? I say, of course God does this. I'm [not] so sure about you.
I agree that God can perceive the distinctions between uncreated subjective perspective (triunity of God in three person) and created subjective perspective. (Creation) I'm just trying to describe the reality of God truly being the "objective inwardness" of all experience. The Spirit of God indwelling creaturely subjectivity...even as it is not to be confused or directly identified with creaturely subjectivity. If God is "on the inside" of a person's most interior 1st person experience, actively empowering that experience to happen, what does that imply? Maybe all I want to say is that God is "transcendently immanent" in our 1st person perspectives such that God's experience of Himself as Creator and Sustainer of all things INCLUDES our his perception of our 1st person perspectives from the inside.
This is NOT about trying to say that God sees himself is a sinner in a sinning human being...like the "I, God, am misrelating to myself right now." It's about what it means that God knows himself as the empowering context and deepest interiority of the 1st person experience of the sinning human being. I don't know how to articulate this well. In de Quincey's language, I would be saying that God is the uncreated "experienced interiority" ("objective inwardness" of Torrence) of the intersubjectivity that PRECEDES and INDWELLS all creaturely subjectivity, including 1st person creaturely subjective experience .
Thanks for the try, though.
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Tom:
‘Self-denial’ then is just the refusal to name myself, the refusal to imagine that ‘who’ I am, my ‘meaning’ in the world, is something ‘I’ can establish independently of God. That’s all. It’s not the refusal to be a self, or the willing assumption of my self into the divine self (assimilation = pantheism). It’s the ‘naming’ of the self that’s at issue.
I don't disagree. I would just use Kierkegaard's language for the removal of despair...from "Sickness unto Death"
The formula that describes the state of the self when despair is completely rooted out is this: in relating itself to itself and in willing to be oneself, the self rests transparently in the Power that established it.
It amazes me how close we are, yet how far we are. For real.
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Tom:
Heck, I’d being will (I’ve said this before) to agree to the asymmetrical nature of divine-human intersubjectivity. God tells us ‘who’ we are. We cannot tell God ‘who’ he is (because the fullness of ‘who’ he, the fullness of personal being, is necessarily constituted interpersonally via trinitarian relations). That’s a given. So the God-world relationship isn't co-creative (as I'd be open to agreeing human-human relations are). But since we’re contingent beings, only God—the source and ground of personal being—can ‘name’ us, tell us ‘who’ we are. But that ‘who’ is someone ‘other’ than who God is even if that someone can only be constituted by relating to who God is, freely choosing to accept God’s naming of them.
I just can't say this any better than my man here...
I ask a sensual man, “Who are you?” and he replies, “I am I,” and he thinks of his body.
I ask a thinking man, “Who are you?” and he replies, “I see two sides in myself and I make my way between them, associating first with one and then the other,” and he is thinking of his instinctive and conscious soul.
I ask a spiritual man, “Who are you?” and he replies, “There is someone in the depths of my soul. I stretch out my hand to grasp him but see that to do that I would need arms longer than the universe. Ask him who I am."
St. Nicholai of Zicha (Velimirovich)
Dangit, Lord. Make this easier! Oh well.
Feliz Navidad. 
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) : 12/12/2008 5:04:45 PM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 12/12/2008 8:56 PM (GMT -6) | | Ok. I'm crazy, alright? I am. (I don't think I'm a pantheist, but I'll be open to see more. Really.) Just humor me, ok?
Tom:
I'm just on de Quincy right now. But I think he'd say "divine indwelling of the human self" would simply be the self's perception of God's meaning in constituting the self. So when the self looks at itself, it sees God. Yes. I've never denied that. It'd be roughly equivalent to God's 'naming' us and our perceiving it. Just as I cannot name myself and not see my earthly father, I can't look at the name/identity God gives me and not see God.
Here's the thing.
1) Without the empowering of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit giving God's self-understanding to the human person in "Spirit-to-spirit" communication (by faith through grace), the human being cannot receive or understand God's meaning at all. Previent Grace, right? I say that this is connected to the Holy Spirit of God, the Absolute Unity of Being...who renew, sustains and fulfills human being into "Christification".
2) What is your name? What is the name that God has given you? It's not "Tom"...so what is it? Being dead serious? Who are you? Tell me. Who are you?
From an email I just got today...my man Marty...
Third Sunday of Advent Year B
Dec 14, 2008
Isaiah 61: 1-2a, 10-11
Responsorial Psalm: Luke 1:46-48, 49-50, 53-54
1 Thes 5: 16-24
John 1:6-8, 19-28
“Who are you?” “Who are you that we may give an answer to those who sent us?” It is a question that we can contemplate for years, and one that we answer by the way we live every moment of every day. “Who are you?” Most of us would begin by answering that with our name, but is that who we are? Sometimes people begin with their sociological title coupled with their name….but I have a dear friend who, years ago while in the midst of professional transition, so graciously reminded me; “Marty, remember you are NOT what you do; because what you do can change in a moment, you are more, way more than what you do.” So how do we answer the challenge of the Gospel this week?
Steven Covey, in his book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and in his book, First Things First reminds us of one way to help us to explore the answer to the question of the Gospel. He put it something like this; ‘Begin with the end in mind…..what do you want the epitaph of your headstone to read?’ I have contemplated that simple statement for years since I read his book. I have come to one conclusion. I want my headstone to read: “A Friend of God”--- I think I may even try it out, next time someone asks me the question: “Who are you?” If someone asked you, what would you say?
Through, with and in our Lord,
Sincerely,
Rev. Marty Shanahan
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Man, is the Spirit working or what?
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.
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