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In Midrash
The remarkable contradiction between the two above-quoted passages of Genesis could not escape the attention of the Pharisees, to whom the Bible was a subject of close study. In explaining the various views concerning Eve's creation, they taught[3] that Adam was created as a man-woman (androgynous), explaining Genesis 1:27 as "male and female" instead of "man and woman," and that the separation of the sexes arose from the subsequent operation upon Adam's body, as related in the Scripture. This explains Philo's statement that the original man was neither man nor woman.

This doctrine concerning the Logos, as also that of man made "in the likeness,"[4] though tinged with true Philonic coloring, is also based on the theology of the Pharisees. For in an old Midrash[5] it is remarked:

'Thou hast formed me behind and before' (Psalms 139:5) is to be explained 'before the first and after the last day of Creation.' For it is said, 'And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters,' meaning the spirit of the Messiah ["the spirit of Adam" in the parallel passage, Midr. Teh. to cxxxix. 5; both readings are essentially the same], of whom it is said (Isaiah 11:2), 'And the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him.'

This contains the kernel of Philo's philosophical doctrine of the creation of the original man. He calls him the idea of the earthly Adam, while with the rabbis the spirit of Adam not only existed before the creation of the earthly Adam, but was preexistent to the whole of creation. From the preexisting Adam, or Messiah, to the Logos is merely a step.

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Pauline Christianity

The above-quoted Midrash is even of greater importance for the understanding of the Pauline Christology, as affording the key to Paul's doctrine of the first and second Adam. The main passage in Pauline Christology is 1 Corinthians 15:45-50. According to this there is a double form of man's existence; for God created a heavenly Adam in the spiritual world and an earthly one of clay for the material world. The earthly Adam came first into view, although created last. The first Adam was of flesh and blood and therefore subject to death—merely "a living soul"; the second Adam was "a life-giving spirit"—a spirit whose body, like the heavenly beings in general, was only of a spiritual nature.

As a pupil of Gamaliel, Paul simply operates with conceptions familiar to the Palestinian theologians. Messiah, as the Midrash remarks, is, on the one hand, the first Adam, the original man who existed before Creation, his spirit being already present. On the other hand, he is also the second Adam in so far as his bodily appearance followed the Creation, and inasmuch as, according to the flesh, he is of the posterity of Adam.

With Philo the original man is an idea; with Paul he is the personality of Jesus. With Philo the first man is the original man; Paul identifies the original man with the second Adam. The Christian apostle evidently drew upon the Palestinian theology of his day; but it can not be denied that in ancient times this theology was indebted to the Alexandrians for many of its ideas, and probably among them for that of preexistence. The Midrash thus considered affords a suitable transition to the Gnostic theories of the original man.

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So, this is just pot-smoking talking, right? 

Post Edited (One Love) : 3/26/2009 12:53:56 PM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (One Love) : 3/26/2009 3:06:50 PM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (One Love) : 3/27/2009 8:50:12 AM (GMT-5)

Does this make sense?

D: Ok, Tom. You can help me here. I want to say that Christ the Creator Logos is the "intersubjectivity" of all created relationships, including all emergent subjects.  As Archetype for Creation, I want to say that Christ-the-Logos is the grounding "interiority" of all things as well as the continuous sustainer and guider of all "exteriority" by His Holy Spirit. In this way, Christ is the grounding consciousness of all Creation, being the very conscious "interiority" of all created things as Creator Logos via the logoi. As being a part of the creative will, God the Son, in the role of Creator Logos and Archetype for Creation, necessarily antedates Creation itself. In a way, it would be like saying that God AND humanity eternally co-created Creation in and through the Creator Logos, who would be the Incarnate Word.

Tom: I’m OK it seems up to the last (bold) sentence. I think that destroys the freedom and contingency of the choice to create by locating ‘humanity’ too deeply into God, as definitive OF God. And you can’t avoid destroying divine freedom by conceding that creation is actually unnecessary because it comes into being at some point in time and isn’t itself eternal. It’s still the case that you build creation right into the very divine act of God’s being God. You can no longer conceive of God apart from his creating and incarnating. Thus aseity is gone.

D: …then the Presence of Christ does seem to form the intersubjectivity for all created relationships, especially in a panexperientialist context.

Tom: I’m cool with omnipresence. Anybody who believes in anything like divine omnipresence has to posit the real ‘presence’ of God as definitive of every created event. I can say that. There’s no capturing the totality of any particular entity or the event of its being without bring God into the picture. You can’t define what a thing is without mentioning God. That’s straight up Orthodox stuff. This is Torrance’s “objective interiority.” I’m not sure what you’re trying to say beyond this.

My only concern is that this doesn’t get used to say God is the subject of my experience, which we’ve talked about before.

At some point, D, our language is going to run out of runway here. Can we really nail this down and find a language to circumscribe the lowest common denominator in the relationship between God and the world? I don’t think so.

D: God the Logos: God the Son as expressing Creator Word of God the Father, the Uncreated Creator.

"Adam Kadmon": God the Son as expressing continually actualized "Divine Disposition of Creative Will", the "living boundary" of uncreated and created, via the logoi.

Jesus of Nazareth: God the Son as expressing actualized human disposition, "Mary's Baby", complete with mind/brain relational unity.

Does this make sense?

Tom: I’ll repeat what I first said above. It looks like you destroy the freedom and contingency of God’s choice to create. You’ve got a “continually actualized” creativity which (it sounds like) you’re saying is a) a necessary feature of God’s being, and b) is unintelligible apart from the eventual creation of a non-divine world and God’s incarnation into that world.

Of course, what’s not said here is how the three relate. This is McCormack’s mistake. He ends up eviscerating the logos asarkikos by claiming that incarnation (the will and intention to incarnate) is definitive of the Logos so that there is ‘incarnation’ in the very act of God’s being God. That’s a problem. We start out saying "there's no world that's possible without God" and end up with "there's no God that's possible without a world and God incarnate in that world." Even if we say there's no ACTUAL world at all times, we're still saying there's no actual God apart from God's intention to create and incarnate.

I’m cool with (a). You know I’ve argued that God is ‘necessarily creative’. But this has to be done without (b), without destroying the freedom and contingency of God’s choice to create a non-divine world. So you can’t include anything about the created order (including incarnation) into the act by which the triune God is God, which is what it looks to me like you're doing. Aseity means the triune relations SANS creation (or any consideration of EVENTUAL creation) fulfill all the necessarily exercised divine dispositions to be God, including creativity (if God is necessarily a ‘creative’ being). This is McCormack’s mistake. He argues it a bit different than your do, but he arrives at the same place.

T

Post Edited (Tom) : 3/27/2009 11:10:12 AM (GMT-5)

Get it? 

Post Edited (One Love) : 3/27/2009 12:13:01 PM (GMT-5)

D: You seem to forget Greg's dispositional ontology. I'm saying that being the Creator Logos is a "constitutive" (NOT "definitional" ) tendency only inherent in the divine Person of God the Son.

Tom: Didn’t forget it. I actually had it in mind. It seemed to me that you were saying the disposition to envision creation and incarnation (i.e., to choose to create & incarnate) was a definitional disposition. I thought this because you said “the created consciousness of the incarnate Logos was that out of which all created things emerged.” So do you want to strike “created consciousness” from this?

On a different note, how do you restrict ‘creativity’ ONLY to the Logos? If the Son is (definitionally) everything the Father is with the sole exception that the Son is “derived," how does creativity inhere ONLY in the Son? You’d have to locate ‘creativity’ in ‘derivativeness’ per se. How do you do that?

I on the other hand think creativity is an essential definitional aspect of God’s being, so that God is always creatively expressive. The very act by which God is God entails creaetive expression. But for me (and Greg, I zeroed in on this with him) this creativity obtains INTER-personally; it's a creative expressing and re-expressing of divinity between the divine persons which does not necessitate a non-divine world.

D: In other words, God the Son would exist without a Creation. But given the divine will to create, the God the Son actualizes that potential of being the Creator Logos (and "Adam Kadmon" and Incarnate Word) within his divine hypostasis, by the Holy Spirit. 

Tom: So long as “given the will to create” doesn’t refer to a primal, necessary choice to create the World, I’m cool with that.

BUT…I don’t get the connection to Jewish mysticism and the Adam Kadmon. Are you saying that non-Christian proponents of Adam Kadmon intentionally advocate personal distinction as constitutive of the One God? Or are you just saying that they’ve tapped into something that ought to predispose them to see the value of the Trinity?

D: God the Son IS the Great "I Am". At the same time, God the Son IS "I Am...Immanuel"…

Tom: So long as “is” here means something different in the two cases you use it, for in the first “is” has to refer to the very act by which “God is God” whereas in the second case it cannot refer to this. Right?

D: …and he is only so by way of Creation.

Tom: Right.

D: God the Son was always "I Am" even before he was "I Am...Immanuel." But as the risen Jesus, "I Am...Immanuel" is truly constitutive of God the Son's personal experience...and will ever be so.

Tom: I think so, yes.

T

The Names of Jesus

Jesus - Son of God (part 2)

Posted March 27, 2009

Jesus is the ONLY begotten Son and is ontologically related to God the Father unlike any other being.

Play in popup Download Direct link

Glad we're good on the other stuff. 

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Tom:
What about the possible link between this and Adam Kadmon? Do you think proponents of belief in Adam K. are in fact arguing the interpersonal nature of the One God? Or are you just saying, "Hey, look how close this gets to the truth"?

The second. I think it comes VERY close to the truth. 

Post Edited (One Love) : 3/28/2009 12:39:55 AM (GMT-5)

The Universal "Heart"

God became Humanity so that Humanity could become "god."

(Tom, PLEASE note the intentionality of the Big G/little god distinction!! )

Post Edited (One Love) : 3/28/2009 7:31:42 AM (GMT-5)