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One Love
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| Posted 5/25/2011 10:05 AM (GMT -6) |   | | Ok. This is pretty simple of a question.
What are the implications of a human being having the "inheritance" of the Holy Spirit of God within them?
Brainstorm. Let's put as many as we can think of.
Let's go!
If the Holy Spirit is within us, then the love, joy, and peace of God Himself MUST be within each of us. We just don't live in it...and thus, don't express that reality.
Next?
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 5/25/2011 10:09 AM (GMT -6) | |
Acquisition of the Holy Spirit
January 07, 2010 Length: 48:41
St. Seraphim of Sarov taught that the aim of the Christian life is to live by the Spirit of God. Today Fr. Tom explores the acquisition of the Holy Spirit.
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Remember this thread?
When referring to Orthodox theology, we do not simply mean a history of theology. The latter is, of course, a part of this but not absolutely or exclusively. In Patristic tradition, theologians are the God-seers. Saint Gregory Palamas calls Barlaam [who attempted to bring Western scholastic theology into the Orthodox Church] a "theologian," but he clearly emphasises that intellectual theology differs greatly from the experience of the vision of God. According to Saint Gregory Palamas theologians are the God-seers; those who have followed the "method" of the Church and have attained to perfect faith, to the illumination of the nous and to divinisation (theosis). Theology is the fruit of man's cure and the path which leads to cure and the acquisition of the knowledge of God.
Western theology, however, has differentiated itself from Eastern Orthodox theology. Instead of being therapeutic, it is more intellectual and emotional in character. In the West [after the Carolingian "Renaissance"], scholastic theology evolved, which is antithetical to the Orthodox Tradition. Western theology is based on rational thought whereas Orthodoxy is hesychastic. Scholastic theology tried to understand logically the Revelation of God and conform to philosophical methodology. Characteristic of such an approach is the saying of Anselm [Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093-1109, one of the first after the Norman Conquest and destruction of the Old English Orthodox Church]: "I believe so as to understand." The Scholastics acknowledged God at the outset and then endeavoured to prove His existence by logical arguments and rational categories. In the Orthodox Church, as expressed by the Holy Fathers, faith is God revealing Himself to man. We accept faith by hearing it not so that we can understand it rationally, but so that we can cleanse our hearts, attain to faith by theoria* and experience the Revelation of God.
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One Love
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| Posted 5/25/2011 10:12 AM (GMT -6) | | Just talkin' about God without actually EXPERIENCING God for oneself...is fruitless and without "exousia".
Right, Tom?
"And when Jesus finished these sayings, the crowds were astonished at his teaching, for he was teaching them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes."
--Matthew 7:28
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Post Edited (One Love) : 5/25/2011 10:24:28 AM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 5/27/2011 8:54 AM (GMT -6) | | More thoughts:
1) The idea that we cannot "know" God interpersonally is foolish. If we have the very SELF-KNOWLEDGE of God Himself via the Spirit, how can we not know God?
2) We are never, ever, ever, ever, ever separate from God. We are IMMUTABLY and DIRECTLY connected with the Personal Presence that is creating all things all the time. To think we are separate from God is an ILLUSION.
3) Connected to #2, we are never, ever, ever, ever, ever, separate from CREATION or EACH OTHER! If the Holy Spirit grounds all things (including all persons), then ALL THINGS are "one" in the Creator Spirit. It is a profound misunderstanding to think that people are "unrelated" to each other, when everything is grounded in ONE Presence like it is. Basically, genuine Christian theology DOES NOT ALLOW FOR any two-storey universe.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Post Edited (One Love) : 5/27/2011 9:33:05 AM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 5/27/2011 8:55 AM (GMT -6) | | God With/In
May 22, 2011
Speaker – Greg Boyd
When Jesus ascended to Heaven, he sent another advocate to us, namely the Holy Spirit. In this sermon, Greg describes why Jesus went “up” to heaven, and also why another advocate had to be indwelt within the body of believers.
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One Love
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| Posted 5/27/2011 9:48 AM (GMT -6) | | | From "The Holy Spirit in the Theology of T. F. Torrance" by Rev. Gary W. Deddo, Ph.D...
To receive the Spirit is to receive God himself, because in the Spirit the Gift and the Giver are one. Through this communion with the Spirit we don’t become divine but we are nevertheless united to God while remaining a (radically transfigured) creature. This, Torrance contends is the proper understanding of the Eastern Orthodox doctrine of theosis.
Torrance also likes to explain the indwelling of the Spirit as “interiorizing” because we are redeemed from our “inturned and ingrown existence” through his possession of our subjectivities by actualizing God’s own knowledge of himself in us and so turning our spirits “outward and upward to God.”
and...
Torrance often characterizes the real presence of the Spirit in us by saying that it constitutes a profound “objective inwardness” which can never be reduced to a psychological or even a sacramental inwardness. The Holy Spirit always belongs to God and not to us. We may be possessed by the Spirit but the Spirit is never in our possession.
In my mind, this constitutes what I would call a "narcissistic inversion" in a egocentric human being. Even if all a person wants to think about is themselves, they come to realize that an aspect of their very constitution as a "self" is INSEPARABLY RELATED to Someone "OUTSIDE" of themselves who is also simultaneously "INSIDE" of every thing else, including all other selves. Simply put, knowing oneself as grounded in God necessitates that a person CANNOT truly think about themselves WITHOUT thinking about everything (and everyone) else.
Conscious appropriation of the Holy Spirit is the healing for the human egocentric condition. Which is WHY God has done all he has to GIVE us his Spirit!
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"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God" (Matt. 5:8). Made in God's image, man is a mirror of the divine. He knows God by knowing himself; entering within himself, he sees God reflected in the purity of his own heart. The doctrine of man's creation according to the image means that within each person--within his or her truest and innermost self, often termed the "deep heart" or "ground of the soul"--there is a point of direct meeting and union with the Uncreated. "The Kingdom of God is within you." (Luke 17:21).
The quest for the inward kingdom is one of the master themes found throughout the writings of the Fathers. "The greatest of all lessons", says St. Clement of Alexandria, "is to know oneself; for if someone know himself, he will know God; and if he knows God, he will become like God." St. Basil the Great writes: "When the intellect is no longer dissipated among external things or dispersed across the world through the senses, it returns to itself; and by means of itself it ascends to the thought of God." "He who know himself knows everything," says St. Issac the Syrian; elsewhere he writes:
Be at peace with your own soul; then heaven and earth will be at peace with you. Enter eagerly into the treasure house that is within you, and so you will see the things that are in heaven; for there is but one single entry to them both. The ladder that leads to the kingdom is hidden within your soul. Flee from sin, dive into yourself, and in your soul you will discover the stairs by which to ascend.
And to these passages we may add the testimony of a Western witness in our own day, Thomas Merton:
At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It its so to speak his name written on us, as our poverty, as our indigence, and our dependence, as our sonship. It is like a pure diamond , blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions or points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely…The gate of heaven is everywhere.
Flee from sin. St. Issac insists; and these three words should be particularly noted. If we are to see God's face reflected within us, the mirror needs to be cleaned. Without repentance there can be no self-knowledge and no discovery of the inward kingdom. When I am told "Return into yourself: know yourself", it is necessary to inquire: Which "self" am I to discover? What is my true self? (Kallisto's emphasis on the "is" there) Psychoanalysis discloses to us one type of "self"; all too often, however, it guides us, not to the "ladder that leads to the kingdom,", but to the staircase that goes down to a dank and snake-infested cellar. "Know yourself" means "know yourself as God-sourced, God-rooted; know yourself in God". From the viewpoint of the Orthodox spiritual tradition it should be emphasized that we shall not discover this, our true self "according to the image", except through a death to our false and fallen self. "He who loses his life for my sake shall find it." (Matt. 16:25): only the one who sees his false self for what it is and rejects it, will be able to discern his true self, the self that God sees. Underlining this distinction between the false self and the true, St. Varsanuphius enjoins: "Forget yourself and know knowself."
Kallistos Ware
The Orthodox Way
"The Inner Kingdom"
pp.55-56
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Post Edited (One Love) : 5/27/2011 9:58:38 AM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 5/27/2011 11:22 AM (GMT -6) | | | I like this example from Kabbalah. From Baal HaSulam...
Imagine that there are two best friends and one invites the other over for dinner. Because of his love for his dear friend the host prepares a meal made up only of the dishes and delicacies that he knows will satisfy him. Everything is arranged to entertain and please his friend. The guest arrives and sees a perfect feast laid out before him and he suddenly realizes that his friend is the ultimate giver in this situation, and that he’s there only to receive. He admits to the host that he’s overwhelmed by shame and refuses to eat. The host says, you don’t understand, I prepared all this for you because I wanted to see you enjoy all these things, so you’d know how much I like you. If you don’t eat, it will spoil this whole evening for me. Then it dawns on the guest that the success of the dinner is really in his hands, and if he eats in order to please the host, then he’s actually the giver… He begins to eat and enjoy so that the host would receive delight from all that he’d intended and prepared for the guest. In fact by doing that he attained the mind of the host because he now has the identical intention and love toward the host as the host has towards him.
This goes with the Kabbalistic idea of "Receiving for the Sake of Giving" described thusly...
In this spiritual degree, a person calculates how much pleasure to receive, but only thinking of how it pleases the giver of the pleasure, the Creator. This is in fact the very thought behind creation, to receive everything that the creator wants to give which is endless delight, so the sensation of pleasure from reception is amplified by the pleasure created by not thinking about self, but only of how it fulfills the Creator’s desire to give. This endless, eternal state the Kabbalist call Ayn Sof.
Basically, there is truly nothing that we can give to God. Everything we have, we get from God. God is the "ultimate giver" in the Uncreated Creator/Creation relationship. But there is a way for humans to give to God: by our conscious, absolute openness and receptivity to God's "Gift" of the Holy Spirit. When we do this for God's sake (and not merely or primarily our own sake), we take on God's attitude of self-giving, even in our receiving. In other words, we KNOW that it's God's good will and pleasure to give us His Spirit, to fill us with the Spirit...and we make it our top priority to love God with all our being by doing what is necessary to stay filled with His Spirit continually.
Makes perfect sense when you think about it. Like Torrance believed, with God, the Gift and Gift-Giver are one. And to receive the Holy Spirit IS receiving "endless delight" ( So says St. Symeon the New Theologian!)
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Post Edited (One Love) : 5/27/2011 11:30:03 AM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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Tom
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| Posted 5/28/2011 10:11 AM (GMT -6) | | | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 6/13/2011 9:37 AM (GMT -6) | | Divinization is the state of man’s total transformation, effected by the Holy Spirit, when man observes the commandments of God, acquires the evangelical virtues and shares in the sufferings of Christ. The Holy Spirit then gives man a divine intelligence and incorruptibility. Man does not receive a new soul, but the Holy Spirit unites essentially with the whole man, body and soul. He makes of him a son of God, a god by adoption, though man does not cease being a man, a simple creature, even when he clearly sees the Father. He may be called man and god at the same time.
--St. Symeon the New Theologian
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A Common Faith
By fatherstephen
There are doubtless many differences to be found between groups of Christians – though there is probably more that all Christians share than not. Orthodox Christianity generally holds to those doctrines that were at one time universal and continues to be a watershed of classical Christian faith. It is interesting that some things that many think of as distinctives of Orthodox Christianity have a wider attestation than most people know. These common essentials are often blurred by an emphasis on distinctives or the fact that certain things which have remained central within Orthodoxy have become marginalized in other places.
Perhaps no single doctrine is more classically expressive of the Orthodox faith than the doctrine of the Divine exchange (divinization or theosis). First offered in its most classical form by St. Irenaeus in the 2nd century (though there is ample Scriptural support for the doctrine), it is generally stated: God became man so that man could become god. This same statement of faith, in varying forms can be found in fathers, both East and West.
Daniel Keating has produced a small book on the topic: Deification and Grace. He says:
Following Irenaeus – and probably dependent upon him – we find wide attestation to this formula throughout the patristic period. It is noteworthy that some form of this expression can be found in writers from Alexandria, Constantinople, Antioch, Syria, North Africa, and Rome….
St. Clement of Alexandria:
the Word of God became man, that you may learn from man how man may become God.
St. Athanasius of Alexandria:
For he was made man that we might be made God…and…he himself has made us sons of the Father, and deified men by becoming himself man.
St. Gregory the Theologian:
Let us become as Christ is, since Christ became as we are; let us become gods for his sake, since he became man for our sake.
St. Gregory of Nyssa:
...the Word became incarnate so that by becoming as we are, he might make us as he is.
St. John Chrysostom:
...he became Son of man, who was God’s own Son, in order that he might make the sons of men to be children of God.
St. Ephrem the Syrian:
He gave us divinity, we gave him humanity.
St. Hilary of Poitiers (in the West):
For when God was born to be man the purpose was not that the Godhead should be lost, but that, the Godhead remaining, man should be born to be god.
St. Ambrose of Milan:
For [the Son] took on him that which he was not that he might hide that which he was; he hid that which he was that he might be tempted in it, and that which he was not might be redeemed, in order that he might call us by means of that which he was not to that which he was.
St. Augustine of Hippo:
God wanted to be the Son of Man and he wanted men to be the Sons of God.
Pope St. Leo the Great (5th century):
[The Savior] was made the son of man, so that we could be the sons of God…and…He united humanity to himself in such a way that he remained God, unchangeable. He imparted divinity to human beings in such a way that he did not destroy, but enriched them, by glorification.
Even in Protestant writers…
Martin Luther in a Christmas sermon:
For the Word becomes flesh precisely so that the flesh may become word. In other words: God becomes man so that man may become God.
John Calvin, rather eloquently:
This is the wonderful exchange which, out of his measureless benevolence, he has made with us; that, by his descent to earth, he has prepared an ascent to heaven for us; that, by taking on our mortality, he has conferred his immortality upon us; that, accepting our weakness, he has strengthened us by his power; that, receiving our poverty unto himself, he has transferred his wealth to us; that, taking the weight of our iniquity upon himself (which oppressed us), he has clothed us with his righteousness.
This is a wonderful testimony, of almost universal appeal, to one of the central tenets of the Christian faith. Often obscured by other doctrinal formula, it remains central in the Christian East, where the principle of exchange – that God took upon Himself our human condition that we might share in His divinity – runs throughout the whole of doctrine.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Post Edited (One Love) : 6/13/2011 9:40:40 AM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 6/13/2011 9:41 AM (GMT -6) | | | Gotta teach this stuff, yo. The Western church is suffering for it NOT being taught...
Exhibit A...
Exhibit B...
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Post Edited (One Love) : 6/13/2011 9:50:06 AM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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PotOnWheel
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| Posted 6/14/2011 8:58 PM (GMT -6) | | | | |
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