Post Edited (One Love) : 4/28/2010 8:51:33 PM (GMT-5)

In other words, our future with God is so SURE...that we have every reason to live in that reality RIGHT NOW!  And that just makes sense because the One Triune God (including God's Uncreated Energy) is the SAME INFINITE, ETERNAL LOVE...yesterday, today, and forever!

Imagine everyone in the world FuturePacing God's Presence...and the Love, Joy, and Peace within that Presence...only to find that that FUTURE Presence actually exists NOW! (Seizing the Kairos through Nepsis)

Imagine everyone in the world waking up to the Truth of Divine Presence.

This could change the world.  Actually, it WILL change the world.  (See Eighth Day idea)

Just a matter of when. 

Post Edited (One Love) : 4/29/2010 1:42:43 AM (GMT-5)

In other words, when a person chooses to LIVE in the "leap of faith" (an event of thought and choice which can only be done in the present), the mental futurepacing that can take place in us by the power of the Spirit brings her into an apocalyptic "Now" where past, present, and future CONVERGE in "God's Time."

Loder describes...

...Kierkegaard, long before Carnap and Einstein, realized that thought about matters of ultimate existential importance cannot be grasped without distortion by any ingenuity of formal or discursive reason, and that is one is to understand the movement of the transcendent into time (as in the incarnation) with the full scope of one's existence (such as faith requires) one must, in contemporary scientific terms, abandon any conceptual point of "absolute rest," such as that which secured the Euclidian space in which Newton constructed the universe.  One must instead adopt a kinetic mode of reason; in his language, in "a moment" one must make the "leap of faith," which is just as surely an act of thought as it is an act of choice for radical change in one's whole being.  Yet thought and being must never be collapsed either way, for in the tension between them is the velocity and vitality of existence, "the spirit."  Thus, his kinetic claim regarding authentic existence: "Man (person) is spirit."

...

Kierkegaard's kinetic mode of reasoning suggests a theological analogy.  What if one were to travel, so to speak, as spirit in "the Spirit of Jesus Christ," and understand everything from the standpoint of the uncreated light of the Logos through whom all things, even created light, have been made?  This analogy would take us into the apocalyptic understanding of time, because to fully participate in the light of the Logos would be to see everything that has been made all at once--in a moment that contains the fullness of time.  As Luke put it, in that one moment which belongs to the Son of Man, "as the lightning flashes and lights up the sky from one side to the other, so will the Son of Man be in his day" (17:24).

James Loder
The Knight's Move: The Relational Logic of the Spirit in Theology and Science
Page 185-186

Kallistos Ware follows...

The "neptic" man...is gathered into the here and now.  He is the one who seizes the kairos, the decisive moment of opportunity.  God, so C.S. Lewis remarks in The Screwtape Letters, wants men to attend chiefly to two things: "to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present.  For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity.  Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience which God has of reality as a whole; in it alone, freedom and actuality are offered them."  As Meister Eckhart teaches, "He who abides always in a present now, in him does God beget his Son without ceasing."

The "neptic" man is the one who understands this "sacrament of the present moment", and who tries to live by it. He says to himself, in the words of Paul Evdokimov: "The hour through which you are at present passing, the man whom you meet here and now, the task on which you are engaged at this very moment--these are always the most important in your whole life."  He makes his own the motto written in Ruskin's coat of arms: Today, today, today.  "There is a voice which cries to a man until his last breath, and it says: Be converted today" (The Sayings of the Desert Fathers).

From The Orthodox Way, pp. 114-115

Post Edited (One Love) : 4/29/2010 3:17:19 AM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (One Love) : 4/29/2010 2:40:34 AM (GMT-5)

After their "surrender", the Prodigal Children will be allowed to return to the Father's Care. Will the Elder Children rejoice with the Father over that eventuality?

And I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb. By its light will the nations walk, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it, and its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night there. They will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations. But nothing unclean will ever enter it, nor anyone who does what is detestable or false, but only those who are written in the Lamb's book of life.

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb  through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him.  They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.

PS: If the Holy City's gates "never being shut" to outsiders is not a good symbol for the enduring OPPORTUNITY for loving relationship with God grants to those outsiders...I don't know WHAT is!!! 

Post Edited (One Love) : 4/29/2010 3:35:43 AM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (One Love) : 4/29/2010 3:48:59 AM (GMT-5)

Daniel: So God did not create a world in which beings have a real, and enduring, capacity to reject God?

Tom: That’s not what I’m saying. We have a real, enduring capacity to reject God. What we don’t have is the capacity to make a single irrevocable determination to reject God. That’s all.

Daniel: Doesn't this ultimately undermine the "riskiness" of creation?

Tom: Only if one thinks redemption and glorification makes whatever suffering one experienced prior to glorification something other than a risk.

Forget universalism for a sec. Just think about believers now. Thinking about those who really suffered unspeakable but are now believers. Now, Paul says that when we’re glorified and our bodies are redeemed (Rom), none of the suffering we’ve experienced in this life will be ‘worth comparing to’ the glory that we come to know. What’s THAT do the concept of risk? Does the fact that not of even the worst, most horrible suffering believers have experienced in this life will be comparable to the bliss and joy of glorification mean those sufferings didn’t constitute a risk (considered pre-creation as possibilities by God)? I don’t think so. I mean, they ARE risks.

Daniel: One of the things I love about the Open View (I suppose this comes mainly from Boyd's Satan and the Problem of Evil) is the ontological risk God took in creation. I have no problem with the aesthetic prospect of the entire content of creation being redeemed, but it seems to come at the cost of genuine freedom.

Tom: I don’t see where I’m denying creaturely freedom. Quite the contrary, I’m insisting upon it. I think you think that unless we’re free to irrevocably self-dispose away from God that we’re not free at all. But it’s not at all obvious that being free to choose God at all (or reject God at all) entails the freedom to make a single irrevocable determination to reject God.

Daniel: Further, what over-all purpose does this world serve? If human souls are capable of repending at any point in eternity then why not establish the New Jerusalem now and let the sinners repent in eternity?

Tom: Because you have to choose your way into becoming a sinner. God can’t start with the eschaton because the eschaton is the culmination of creaturely choice.

Daniel: UR seems to suggest that God didn't risk. He knows it's just a matter of time. If the beloved doesn't have a genuine choice to reject the lover, which UR appears to argue, then what value does the choice to love (or the temporary choice to reject) retain?

Tom: But we DO have a genuine choice to reject the lover. We just don’t have the ability to make a single irrevocable determination/choice to reject God.

Back to risk, it all depends (as you and Mark suggest) on what’s LOST. All risk is risk of some ‘loss’, true. So let’s say what’s lost. I hear you saying that the ONLY possible risks God can take with respect to creatures is the risk of losing them completely and irrevocably. Nothing else even counts as a loss. Why think that?

Tom

Post Edited (One Love) : 4/30/2010 1:13:22 PM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (Daniel M) : 4/30/2010 1:34:49 PM (GMT-5)

Well?

Post Edited (One Love) : 4/30/2010 1:46:10 PM (GMT-5)

Who is the "father of lies" again?