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| Open Theism Discussion Board > Public Forums > General Chat > The Incarnation -- What does it MEAN? | Forum Quick Jump
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One Love
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| Posted 12/30/2010 9:33 AM (GMT -6) |   | Tom:
We may still disagree a bit on the mechanics, D. Not sure. I mean, you seem to think that something occurs in the incarnation (in addition to our having been created in the image of the archtype, and in addition to our being spirit-being, and in addition to the dynamics of relationality, etc.) that we need in order to fulfill our destiny. I'm not sure I see it that way precisely. In other words, there's nothing beyond function as we're designed that's needed. God did enough by designing us. True, we have to then CHOOSE to engage (the whole freedom piece), but that's not what you mean. You seem to mean that the incarnation does something to the created order that further equips it constitutionally (beyond all God already did by design) to fulfill its destiny. See? I'm not sure I'd wanna say that. I'd say the incarnation isn't about us. It's about God expressing Godself to Godself in a new and loving way. God gets that in the incarnation. Done deal. He also gets a whole family along with it in us. But we're already created to fullfill that. We don't require a personal incarnation of the archtype in order for us to fullfill our natures. Had God JUST wanted us filled with the Spirit and one with him, he could have constructed us the same way he did (designed us for personal relations as spirit beings) and gotten what he wanted. I'm not seeing what the incarnation effects FURTHER than than our own design does that's we require for fulfillment.
I could be wrong. I just don't SEE the necessity of the incarnation for our deification per se (irrespective of sin of course). I see the two "fitting" together in terms of overall plan. But I don't see the causal link between them.
I'm agreeing with you. The actualized Incarnation is not required for our human perfection and glorification per se. It's for God expressing Godself to Godself in a novel way. If it was true that the actual Incarnation was required for human glorification, then Enoch's and Elijah's translation into Divine Presence without death would have been totally impossible. The necessity of the Incarnation, I agree, is basically the complete outworking of God's "personalized gift-giving" nature being demonstrated in Creation. I said...
Without the genuine intention for God to incarnate himself into humanity, human perfection and glorification (via the bi-polar assymetrical relational unity between the Holy Spirit and human spirit in a particular human hypostatic relational unity) would never be a capability. Without the actualization of the Incarnation itself, the fullness of Divine Nature (and the "personalized gift-giving" of that) would not have been displayed in and to Creation and reflected back to God.
The thing I'm emphasizing is that designed human ontology is "based" upon the requirements for God's incarnation. That's all. I think we are straight. 
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Post Edited (One Love) : 12/30/2010 8:37:22 AM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 12/30/2010 9:37 AM (GMT -6) | | | | |
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Tom
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| Posted 12/30/2010 9:56 AM (GMT -6) | | D: I’m agreeing with you. The actualized Incarnation is not required for our human perfection and glorification per se.
Tom: Are you serious? OMG! Dude, the idea that this was what you’ve always been arguing has been driving me nuts!
But seriously. I think it IS what the EO argues. The whole “God became man so that man could become God.” It seems more accurate to say, “God created human beings the way he did so that God could become man.” I understand that God’s intention to express Godself to Godself ad extra was first and that it required an adequately hypostatic context in which to incarnate. But the EO means something more. They mean (I think) that the incarnation effects some metaphysical change in creation (apart from sin and redemption) that’s required in order for our natures to be deified. At least that’s how I’ve always read them. But I could never get anybody to tell me what that change is.
D: It's for God expressing Godself to Godself in a novel way. If it was true that the actual Incarnation was required for human glorification, then Enoch's and Elijah's translation into Divine Presence without death would have been totally impossible. The necessity of the Incarnation, I agree, is basically the complete outworking of God's "personalized gift-giving" nature being demonstrated in Creation.
Tom: Dude, why didn’t you say this two years ago? Dang.
We’re good.
Tom
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One Love
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| Posted 12/31/2010 7:50 AM (GMT -6) | | D: I’m agreeing with you. The actualized Incarnation is not required for our human perfection and glorification per se.
Tom: Are you serious? OMG! Dude, the idea that this was what you’ve always been arguing has been driving me nuts!
What I remember articulating from the past was this, following Ware, Nesteruk, and the like...
1) The Incarnation is fundamentally motivated by the loving, self-giving, sharing nature of God, not just freedom from sin.
2) Human nature is created with the Incarnation "at heart" such that human deification is a possibility open to humanity. In other words, human ontology is GROUNDED FROM God's pre-Creation intention to incarnate.
3) In the Incarnation, the archetype of the Imago Dei in human nature is completely fulfilled.
what I feel is novel about what you've (Tom) said is this:
1) Creation itself is an "side-effect" (as it were) of God's desire to incarnate into createdness.
2) The Incarnation is primarily a "gift" from the Eternal Son to God the Father, providing God a new way to percieve and enjoy Godself, and secondarily a gift from God to Creation itself.
I AGREE with your ideas here. Do you remember the whole "I Am (That I Am)" becoming "I Am...Immanuel" thing that I'd been talking about a loooong time ago? What I was saying with that whole thing was that God being "God with us" was a contingent expression of who God is, a new way of God experiencing Godself. AND that without Creation's existence, God could never experienced Godself as "I Am...Immanuel." Remember all that? What I hear you saying--that I didn't say before--was that this new divine self-experience occurs primarily from the rationale of "gift" from Eternal Son to God the Father via incarnation into created being. I didn't say (or think) that before. But it makes sense to me, now that you've articulated it. AND it already made sense to say that God's self-experience as "I Am...Immanuel" is the more fundamental aim for Creation and Incarnation than simply having non-divine beings with the capacity for deification and intimacy with Divine Presence.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Post Edited (One Love) : 12/31/2010 7:30:17 AM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 12/31/2010 7:55 AM (GMT -6) | | I feel like this will be helpful...Greg's "Trinity and Process". page 399-400 "The Two Natures of Christ"
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Our modified understanding of Edwards’ understanding of disposition can, we believe, also lay the groundwork for a fruitful understanding of the person of Jesus Christ in line with the Chalcedonian Confession as well as with modern non-substantival categories. On this too, nothing more than a summarizing word can be said.
As has been frequently pointed out in recent times, the most fundamental difficulty which the traditional understanding of Christ poses for the modern mind concerns its substantialist categories: Christ is said to be “two natures” in “one person.” If the concept of an “enduring substance” as the ground of an entity’s actual attributes has become problematic to the categories of modernity, how much more problematic is the concept of two such realities “crammed” into one person…”without division,” and “without confusion”?
A dispositional understanding of “essence”, however, while it by no means abrogates the paradox of the God-man, does render this paradox more intelligible within the dynamic categories of our contemporary milieu. Within the framework of this ontology, Christ may be said to be distinct from all other humans in that in this one person the disposition which defines God as God, and the disposition which defines humanity as human, converged. In Christ, and through Christ, the unsurpassably intense sociality of God is replicated ad extra.
Thus, we might say that the dynamic essence of the man Jesus was wholly taken up into the dynamic essence of God so that God now “aims” at Godself—as God eternally does—but now God does so through this one man. In this one man, God achieves God anew. The necessary triune disposition for primordial satisfaction now encompasses this spontaneous feature: it now encompasses the person and work of this one man. The event of God, one might say, now includes the event of the man Jesus, and through him, the event of the entire creation. The Incarnation is thus must fundamentally the dynamic convergence of these two events.
Christ does not here cease to be a man, for his non-divine relationality, his non-divine perspective on, or role within being, is retained. The concrescence of his human disposition is yet what it is. But just as this human, God is disposed to be God. “The Word became flesh” (Jn. 1:14). Precisely through the subjective aim which constitutes the man Jesus, the subjective aim which constitutes God as God is creatively (viz. unnecessarily) achieved anew. The dynamic nature of dispositions allow this to be affirmed without the problematic connotations which the traditional substantival categories have for the modern mind. And it arrives at this dynamic conception without the radically unorthodox implications which, we have seen, the Process scheme necessitates.
The ultimate effect of this dynamic Incarnation is the redemption of the world. In the expansion of the divine sociality to essentially include the man Jesus, the process of the Trinity expands to include the process of the world (Jn. 17:24ff). The ceaseless achievement of the expression of God’s deity in the Trinity will now eternally include the expression of beauty of the non-divine order, and all of this through Christ. This is the Good News of the New Testament.
We, of course, yet live primarily as through we were “in Adam.” Our history is the history of “putting off the old” and “putting on the new.” We live in the “time of transition” from our old orientation towards self-destruction to our new grace-given orientation to become who we really are—in Christ. But the promise of the gospel is that this will certainly be accomplished, and the mission of the Church is to proclaim this promise and strive for the accomplishment and exemplification of this Shalom throughout the whole of God’s creation.
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This is what I hear with this: The human hypostatic unity of Jesus is a "singularity" in that he is the only human who has achieved the "unsurpassable intense sociality of God" within his own particular person via the TWO other indwelling divine Persons. Remember that, per Greg, God is characterized by unsurpassably intense loving sociality. I think the idea is that Jesus of Nazareth's Spirit-born loving relationship with God the Father (where he KNEW that he was God's Only Son and loved the Father with purity of heart, ground his "Abba, Father" experience) is what engendered this "unsurpassable intensity of sociality". Before the actualization of the Incarnation, this level of intensity of filial love relationship with God (believing oneself to be "son" of God the Father by the Spirit) had yet to be experienced by humanity. But following the actualization of the Incarnation, this loving "sonship" was revealed clearly in Jesus...and adoption to sonship was offered to the rest of humanity through the Holy Spirit of Jesus. As the Holy Spirit "testifies with our spirit" that we are indeed "sons of God"...and as the Holy Spirit reproduces the "unsurpassably intense sociality of God" within us (via the Spirit-borne presence of all THREE Divine Persons), we experience the divine life in human existence.
Divine Filiation
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Post Edited (One Love) : 12/31/2010 8:05:23 AM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 12/31/2010 9:13 AM (GMT -6) | | The intimacy of Jesus' experience of Spirit is pointed to by one of the distinct features of his prayer life: his use of the word Abba to address God. An Aramaic word used by very young children to address their father, Abba is like the English "Papa." Within Judaism, it was common to refer to God with the more formal "Father," but rare to call God Abba. The most plausible explanation of Jesus' departure from conventional usage is the intensity of his spiritual experience, a supposition supported by the parallel within Judaism. Namely, Abba is used as a term for God in traditions reported about Jewish charismatics contemporary with Jesus. Thus as the heart of Jesus' prayer life was the experience of communion with God.
Marcus Borg
Jesus: A New Vision--Spirit, Culture, and the Life of Discipleship
"The Spirit-Filled Experience of Jesus"
Page 45
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What we're saying is that the Jesus was a "singularity" among creaturely (human) beings in that his loving filial intimacy with God was UNSURPASSABLE in it's intensity.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Post Edited (One Love) : 12/31/2010 8:16:41 AM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 12/31/2010 9:19 AM (GMT -6) | | | “I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me. Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world. O righteous Father, even though the world does not know you, I know you, and these know that you have sent me. I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.”
The "unsurpassbly intense" trinitarian sociality of God is the immanent grounding of the believer, via the indwelling Holy Spirit-ual Presence of Jesus!
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Post Edited (One Love) : 12/31/2010 8:23:34 AM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 12/31/2010 9:58 AM (GMT -6) | | And this "unsurpassably intense loving sociality of God" empowered Jesus' human exercise of faith to say the following things in the midst of his very human experience of "Void" in Gethsemane and Calvary:
"Not my will, but Your Will be done."
and...
"Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!"
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Post Edited (One Love) : 12/31/2010 9:05:18 AM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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PotOnWheel
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| Posted 12/31/2010 10:07 AM (GMT -6) | | | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 12/31/2010 10:11 AM (GMT -6) | | For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.
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I mean that the heir, as long as he is a child, is no different from a slave, though he is the owner of everything, but he is under guardians and managers until the date set by his father. In the same way we also, when we were children, were enslaved to the elementary principles of the world. But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 12/31/2010 10:28 AM (GMT -6) | | Sorry. Wow. Weird thought.
Paul demonstrating the Loderian 4 dimensions of human existence ( "lived world", "self", "Void", and "Holy" )...
"I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. "
Lived world: Paul's social, interpersonal environment where his evangelistic work took place
Self: Paul's sense of "I", the center of Paul's personal sense of choice and belief
Void: Paul's experience of "death to self" in Christ-like humility, crucifixion with Christ
Holy: Indwelling presence of Christ in Paul
Hmm...I think it works...
Whatcha'll think?
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. | | Back to Top | | |
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Tom
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| Posted 12/31/2010 2:53 PM (GMT -6) | | | | |
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