I should be clearer, and point to the main point. Maximus mentions SEVERAL ways in which Christ reunited what sin had separated; the exception (I think) would be gender which he does span, but not in as direct way as the other categories.

I can't remember any of the categories at this hour of the evening--sorry. But Thunberg covers them well. Maybe I'll remember them (I'm just not going to look through the boxes upstairs right now.)

I very MUCH MORE like what Maximus says than the origins story of the "Cosmic Man!"

Read this page:  

http://books.google.com/books?id=nDaZQFVvrSwC&pg=PA73&lpg=PA73&dq=maximus+the+confessor+male+and+female&source=web&ots=sU8wtnh5ak&sig=V_Q1_J6f8JlOftqok4u0b6qoLAQ

Post Edited (PotOnWheel) : 1/11/2008 5:31:49 PM (GMT-6)

Post Edited (PotOnWheel) : 1/11/2008 5:33:28 PM (GMT-6)

It is not very difficult, though, to understand that the οpinion of Maximos οn the dignity of man is suitably set in the whole system of his doctrine, and eνen constitutes its height. Indeed a title like "the cause of creation towards God" might be the mοst convenient inscription at the top of his entire literary production. True to the eastern orthodox tradition, he presents relations between tlιe two categories of existence, the divine and the worldly, in a two-fold manner, i.e. at the same time strange to each other and in close contact. Ιn this way he could escape the danger of dualism, either philosophical or gnostic. He especially thinks of man as one who combines and mediates between the two extremes and who by beginning with the removal of his οwn division into male and female might unite all the other divisions in the universe and reach God as the cause of all(8). Τhe relation between the uncreated and created nature, is expressed in terms of transcendence as well as goodness. Ιn the first case, we might point οut that the uncreated nature remains inaccessible as infinitely surpassing the created nature; in the second, we might point out that the uncreated natιιre essentiated and produced the knowledge preexisting eternally in itself(9).

 

http://www.myriobiblos.gr/texts/english/christou_maxim.html

and...

Under conditions prevailing after Christ's incarnation, three factors move and influence the human will. God, nature, and tlιe world. Μan remains stagnant if his will is subjected to nature; he becomes mere flesh, if it is conquered by the world; he becomes God by adoption, if it is attracted by God. Therefore, his pursuit is to surpass first the world and then his οwn nature, in order to reach God. For, these factors do not act by force, but rather propound their motives before man's will. What is of the greatest importance in the process of regulating his life is the αυτεξούσιον, i.e. the self-determining power, the faculty to transpose appetite from the allowed to the forbidden, from the good to the bad, and conversly; the right to choose between "being attached to the Lord and become one spirit and of being attached to the prostitute and become one body"

PS: Bruce, could you minimize your linke from your 10:34pm post on this page.  It's throwing off the page alignment a bit.  Thanks! 

Post Edited (Imago Dei) : 1/11/2008 8:55:28 AM (GMT-6)

I’m gonna make two long posts. This first is a VERY long post. I apologize ya’ll. But I wanted this to be my final contribution (so to speak). This is where I am. Some points might overlap. I typed it up on the fly.

1) God alone is hypostatic being within himself. Only God generates his own fully realized personal identity through the contemplation of God’s own self as F, S, and Sp.

2) The created universe is impersonal material substance. It exists as divine energies in the person of the Logos who holds it in existence and sustains it being. There is no sense in which anything exists without existing in the Logos. All is in Christ ‘creationally’, even Satan. Whatever fulfillment of identity the universe or sentient beings achieve, it is a movement from ignorance to discovery within this subsisting in Christ.

3) But the universe is not capable (Nesteruk) of knowing that it has a creator “for whom” it exists. Its purpose is to be “for” God. But it has no ability to contemplate its own existence and relate itself to its Creator. God wanted US to be the ones who hypostacize (indirectly) the created order by contemplating it and articulating its presence and purpose (Nesteruk).

4) Human beings, unlike God, do not generate their own personal identity. They do self-contemplate (unlike the rest of the material cosmos), which is itself a hypostatic exercise or disposition and expresses the personal design and orientation of human being per se. Nesteruk might squirm at this, but (a) I’m not saying human being is inherently personal (as God only is), and (b) it’s entailed in the role he attributes to human natural capacities (self-perception and meaningful articulation) in contrast to the “impersonal” universe.

5) This (No. 4 above) sets human being off from the rest of creation. We’re not impersonal material substance like the rest of creation which finds its identity passively and entirely asymmetrically by being contemplated by an ‘other’. Nor are we inherently personal as is God who generates his own (inter)personal identity through self-contemplation. We are a mixture, a glorious mixture. We are created substance “breathed into” by God and endowed with hypostatic capacities to contemplate ourselves (like God and unlike the rest of creation) and others in evaluative ways that determine meaning. But (like the rest of creation and unlike God) we are not self-sufficient determiners of our own identities. We must be brought to our identities (like creation) “in another.” But (unlike creation) we are not passively brought to personal fulfillment merely in being apprehended by another (Christ), for we know that we are as a matter of fact contemplated at all times by Christ without this fulfilling us personally. We must also contemplate Christ. So unlike the created non-human order which is entirely given its identity through humanity’s contemplation of it (Nesteruk), humanity is endowed with hypostatic capacities to participate in the fulfillment of its identity. Just as we are active in bringing creation to its fulfillment in Christ (through our endowed capacity to apprehend creation’s purpose and so grant it identity in ourselves [Nesteruk]), so we are active (synergistically) in bringing ourselves to our own fulfillment in Christ. We are at once impersonal creation (sharing the same fundamental elementary particles as the rest of the universe) and hypostatic entities who in the end share in mutual, interpersonal, “face to face” relationships with God.

6) This ability (in No. 5 above) is a spiritual endowment and grace-gift from God. It is the divine spark or locus of divine intentionality, that constitutes a kind of matrix, or womb, from which human being emerges with hypostatic capacities (though not fully realized) as opposed to emerging as rocks tree, or even dolphins or chimps. But the capacities for relationship and self-perception grow toward fulfillment as humans interrelate with others, perceiving themselves and the universe relationally and purposefully. This is a measure of hypostatic being. However, it is not enough to bring human identity to fulfillment (I’m nodding to D). Fulfillment is only achieved as created entities are related to their ultimate source, to God, in Christ.

7) The universe as well achieves its purposeful identity “for God” as humans contemplate it and relate it to God as they themselves achieve their full identity though the relating themselves to God. “Being itself a hypostatic event,” (Nesteruk) “a human being…” has the ability to contemplate its own and the universe’s existence and relate them to God. Thus the universe realizes its identity (we might even say its ‘hypostatic existence’) in human beings who articulate the universe’s existence and being “for” God finally only when human beings are in full “face to face” (“person to person”) relationship with God.

8) I like a lot of what Nesteruk says, but he (and the entire GO tradition) hold to a position on divine temporality and imperviousness to change in relationship with creation that I think hampers their whole system and complicates much of their insight, especially where it pertains to the interhypostatic nature of the divine-human relationship.

9) Eschatological fulfillment, fully realized human being, is expressed in 1Cor 13 as an “interpersonal relational posture” (my term) of “face to face” engagement, a “knowing and being known.” See the symmetry? See the synergy? It’s not ALL ‘asymmetrical’. It’s ‘creationally’ asymmetrical, yes. But it’s ‘existentially’ symmetrical (which just means ‘interpersonal’). ‘Identity’ by definition emerges ‘existentially’. The human person perceives its meaning, its identity, in this “person to person” posture wherein she “knows as she is known.” The interpenetrating light of God that informs and brings knowledge also elevates human hypostatic capacities to their full and the human person perceives its destiny and purpose as a unique identity grounded in the relation to God as source, creator, father, redeemer, and lover. We are hypostases within the hypostasis of the Logos, that is, we achieve our identity and experience personal fulfillment by giving ourselves to Christ, by relating hypostatically to God.

10) Deriving our personal identities as non-divine persons from relating ourselves to the ultimate source of all existence and personal identity (God), we also offer the non-human creation to God by perceiving it as God’s and relating it to God as his own. This is why creation groans “awaiting the redemption of the children of God.” When WE are fully realized, our perceptions of the universe and our articulation of its purpose are also fully realized and offered to God. The universe gets redeemed, or hypostacized, “in us.”

11) I have no firm opinion on vocabulary per se (especially on ‘spirit’). D’s gone on a bit about this. But just take what I said back there, D, as ‘aiming’ at something. I’m not gonna get hung up on the vocab. Whatever works within a “face to face” encounter is fine with me. I’m only concerned about metaphysics as far as it helps me explain the interpersonal nature of our relationship with God as it is actually perceived and experienced by us and God. I’m totally nuts about the 1Cor 13 passage. I don’t think it’s an accident that Paul chose “prosopon” (which is both “face” and “person”) to express the glorified human state, consummated in the interpersonal exchange of love. The “know as I am known” presumes mutuality and interpersonal relationality. I’m gonna work on this passage for some time. I think it’s a hands down rebuttal to D.

12) Putting together ‘person’ and ‘nature’, then, here’s where I am. This will seem closer to D because I’m putting more emphasis upon our ‘becoming’ persons, but it’s still fundamentally different because I believe the we become ‘persons’ who are not one and the same ‘person’ as that of the Logos. So, what’s the relationship? I look at it like this: human nature considered as creation is no more personal or meaningful than any other created thing—elementary particles. But as ‘icon’ or ‘image’, human being is “enbreathed” (breathed into) by God. This image is both ‘ontological’ (maybe “functional” is better) and ‘eschatological’. I don’t see how it could not be both (functional NOW to govern its journey toward full realization THEN). That is, human nature, divinely-endowed as it is, is divinely empowered embodied capacities for hypostatic becoming. But these capacities for ‘personhood’ behave from the beginning of an individual’s self-conscious life in exactly the manner they were designed to behave. From the first moments we ‘self-perceive’, we take our first step into ‘personhood’ and begin our journey. As we develop our sense of identity with other people, we’re becoming persons.

An analogy: the seed and the tree. Is the seed a tree? Well, yes and no. It’s not yet the fully realized thing it was designed to be, but it is ‘tree’ in seed-form. What do we say? We say, “I planted a tree.” Its identity is there, in the seed. And it can only grow and become tree because tree is what it already is in seed form. It is ‘tree’ from the moment it breaks above ground. It’s just not fully what it was designed to be until it stands tall as a redwood staring into the Sun. I’d say that in creating ‘enbreathed’ human beings God “planted persons.” And the hypostatic tendencies, longings, capacities to ‘identify’ one’s ‘self’ are at work from the moment we break above the ground, though they are not fully realized until we stand tall, “face to face,” staring into the Son.

So a ‘person’ is an individual ‘identity’, the ‘interpretation’ of one’s individual existence, the ‘meaning’ of our being here, and we derive that from relating to others but ultimate by relating to God. We construct our identities over time from the relationships we engage in. But no relationship can elevate human nature and identity to its full status and function as an ‘image’ of the divine but the relationship to God.

13) A note on evil. We’re broken and fallen. We “misrelate.” We try to get our identities from non-God sources. That leads to non-being and an erosion of personal being. But the thing to notice is that evil behavior can only be performed BY a hypostatic being. Evil is, in truth, attempted hypostatic suicide. So this means not (with D) that we’re not functioning ‘personally’ at all when we are relationally disconnected from God. We’re obviously ‘functioning’ hypostatically, but we’re not yet fully realized persons. We’re lost persons. We misrelating persons.

14) Here’s the deal. Our true “identity” is equivalent to our “logos,” to God’s subjective aim for us. Our ‘logoi’ are just the ‘persons’, the ‘identities’, the ‘Whos’ which God intends us to become. And those ‘logoi’ are divine in source and origin. They are God. But they’re abstract. They’re not embodied, concrete, instantiations of the realities they imagine. They are ‘possibilities’ in the mind of the Logos. But as such, they are God himself. They have to be. They are God’s ‘thoughts’. And God’s thoughts are God. They only become the ‘actual’ things God imagines through divine energies, through a purposeful “act” of God present in us, SAYING (logos, speech), “This is who I want you to be” and US in turn choosing. So the ‘logoi’ require divine-human synergy if they are to become actual. [BTW, this is the heart of an evangelical UR; an essentially loving God whose “love never fails” would never fail to “speak” to any created entity, “This is what I want you to become.” And so long as God is present speaking identity into the field of possibilities confronting some entity, that entity has a future with God.] I know D loves me now! This #14 paragraph is what he’s all about. Right D? Who understands you baby? You know I do. Whoze yo Daddy? I’m pimping yo philosophy straight up, Yo!

15) But D and I understand each person’s ‘logos’ (identity) differently. So we come out far apart in the eschaton when this is all wrapped up and fulfilled. What’s it LOOK like then? It depends on what we think the divine ‘logoi’ (those possibilities for personal identity that God imagines and constantly speaks into each person’s mind, drawing us, wooing us upward) are. D interprets those ‘logoi’ in essentially deterministic fashion. It’s booklickin to the nth power, yo! Yep. In the end, God determines absolutely everything about that ‘logos’ when it’s fully instantiated in me (or rather, as me [and HERE I don’t dispute the “as me”; I don’t need to]). Only when our self-perception and behavior perfectly match our ‘logos’ are we fully functioning ‘icons’ or ‘images’ of God. That’s D’s understanding of the ‘logoi’ and so his vision of the future.

I agree that we only become fully functioning icons or images of God in the eschaton when our self-perception and behavior perfectly match our ‘logos’, BUT (and this is the WHOLE difference between D and me) for me (and for Greg) that ‘logos’ is ONLY a created reflection of God IF it possesses a creative freedom like God. So part of God’s design, part of the ‘enbreathing’ gift of our ‘logos’, is the capacity to “become a creative self” other than the Logos, so that my identity is both perfectly fulfilled and determined by my relationship to God AND creatively free to determine the shape my loving expression takes. In fact, the latter (the creative freedom) IS part of what determines the identity and what it means to reflect God’s image. Essentially, what God does is ‘imagine’ creative centers who reflect his image by doing what he does—freely create in love. But the imagined ‘logos’ does not itself exhaustively specify the shape our loving expression takes in the eschaton. This REQUIRES that we be non-divine ‘persons’ (contra D) whose identities are determined by interpersonal “face to face” relationships with God but which uniquely stamp each person’s capacities to give to the collage of Creation as diverse an identity as possible.

That’s what we do when we have children. We create creators. Assuming I was infinitely creative, wise, and loving, it would also follow that the creative capacities of my children could only be fulfilled where my child, ‘existentially’ (T. Ware), makes her relationship to me as father the defining relationship of all her relationships, the one relationship she derives her identity from. But that doesn’t mean she takes my identity and comes to perceive herself AS me. This is where I think you are essentially wrong, D. You take ‘deriving one’s identity from God” to mean our identity is just ‘an extension of God’s’ identity.”

16) How’s the INCARNATION fit in methodologically? This is a big difference between D and me. D wants the Christ-event to parallel divine-human relationality in the sense that just as the divine PERSON of the Logos personifies human NATURE in Christ so that the ‘who’ in whom the exercise of human natural capacities takes on personal identity is one and the same as the Logos. With this I disagree. I want to model divine-human relationality after the TRINITY (as I read Ware doing), that is, interpersonally. I think this can be worked out in the incarnation in a way that satisfies both Chalcedon AND interpersonal divine-human relationality experienced by us. But I’m a long way from proving it. It’ll be a big part of my thesis I should think. My hunch is that part of what’s unique and unrepeatable about the incarnation is simply that God comes to do as a human what no human who is not also God has in fact done. But this doesn’t mean no human beings are to possess identities other than God’s identity.

17) Timothy Ware (I posted the URL to this article; it’s great):

“Christ does not acquire an identity from a created being, despite the fact that the created element is embodied within His identity. He subsumes all of His other relationships in His predominant relationship with the Father, and, being thus engulfed in this relationship with the Father, all of those other relationships are liberated from the restrictions that they were subject to; they are set free and are engulfed in His Body, as a part of His identity.”

This is what I was trying to get at, D, regarding the interpersonal nature of our relationship with others after glorification and their share in our identity. Christ “subsumes all his other relationships” in his relationship with the Father. They don’t determine Christ’s identity, but they are, as Ware says, “part of his identity,” that is, part of the sum total of his ongoing life-experience, but experiences which themselves are interpreted from the perspective of his relationship with the Father. Likewise with us in our glorified “face to face” state. The point is that when we’re correctly centered on God and get our fundamental identity from God, there’s MORE room, not less, to accommodate others. When we attempt to derive our identity from others, however, there’s LESS room, not more.

And in discussion human personhood, Ware says:

“It is certainly true that the Greek terms in question are less psychological, less inwardlooking, than the modern notions of the person. Prosopon in Greek is formed from pros, ‘towards’, and opsis, ‘face’ or ‘aspect’, and so it means literally ‘facing towards’. The Latin equivalent persona has the literal sense of ‘sounding through’ (per + sonare). A prosopon or persona, then, means a discrete entity with which one enters into contact by looking at him or her, or be hearing him or her speak…

“We are not to assume that the Fathers meant by prosopon or hypostasis precisely what we today mean by ‘person’ or ‘personality’. Our sense of personalness has altered over the centuries in subtle but significant ways. New insights at the Renaissance, and more recently through the work of Freud, Jung and other psychological investigators, have greatly enlarged our sensitivity to the inner processes of self-awareness. Yet we should be careful not to overstate the extent of the change. The person is not just a modern discovery. In the Greek classical world there was definitely an understanding of the person as a conscious subject, and this sense of the personhood is also evident in the New Testament and in patristic texts.

“If humans are so made in the image of the Trinitarian God, then all that was said earlier about God as Trinity is also to be affirmed of the human person. We are to see the Trinity, in the words of Raimundo Panikkar, as ‘the ultimate paradigm of personal relationships’. The doctrine of the Trinity, he insists, ‘is not mere speculation about the depths of God; it is equally an analysis of the heights of Man’. Taking up St. John’s statement, ‘God is love’, William Blake rightly adds, ‘Man is love’. God is not self-love but mutual or shared love, and so the same is true of the human person. God…is exchange, self-giving, solidarity; so likewise is the human person in God’s image."

Tom

Some last thoughts:

D: The reason that you keep falling into Apolinarianism (and you do, bro) is because you associated a human being's "individual human being’s purpose in the world in personal terms" DIRECTLY and EXHAUSTIVELY with the human spirit (nous, heart) of a person.

Tom: Actually I’m beyond the status of Jesus as a ‘human spirit’. Somewhat like POW, I don’t know that ‘spirit’ always means exactly the same thing. I’m open to the notion that ‘spirit’ is the ‘how’ of human being. Now, however, I see more clearly that ‘how’ and ‘who’ a being is are inseparable (though distinguishable). If ‘spirit’ is the ‘how’ of human existence, then it’s the ‘how’ of ‘personal’ human existence, though I agree of course that this spiritual mode of existence is not fulfilled until the self is “face to face” with God. The ‘Who’ is the identity, the existential meaning, of an actual disposing ‘How’.

D: In your mind, to possess a human spirit is SYNONOMOUS to possessing a "merely human calling."

Tom: To be a ‘spirit’ is to ‘possess a calling’? Dang. That ain’t me, Bro.

D: Because you do this, the only way that you can say that Jesus didn't have a "merely human calling" is to say that Jesus didn't have a human spirit (and human "logos") like everyone else. You CANNOT claim that Jesus had "a human 'heart', like his mother (the Theotokos), from whence the human being Jesus cried 'Not my will, but Your will be done'" because of this belief you have. I know you see this very clearly by now. You'd be much better off saying this: part of a "human hypostasis" (GENERAL TERM) is the "how" of how it's hypostatic features are displayed.

Tom: I’m comfortable with that. That is, I’m comfortable saying ‘spirit’ is the unique ‘how’ of human being. But you and I still disagree over the hypostatic nature of such spiritual being. I say it’s irreducibly hypostatic, that is, the operation of ‘human’ nature subsists in a ‘unique’ identity. It is undeniably hypostatic.

--------------------------------

D: As a thought process, if A is the "target disposition" of B at all times…

Tom: Well, that’s just the problem isn’t it? You begin by presupposing the point of debate, that all A is is a “target disposition” of B (God). With “target” you’ve just dismissed all views but your own. You see this, right?

But even so, I’m willing to concede a use for “target” that’s consistent with my view, provided B’s (the Creator’s) designs on A include A’s being a ‘creator’ (small ‘c’)! Can you deny God is capable of willing this? No. Can you deny the aesthetic satisfaction is provides God? No (not without denying EVERY intuition there is about human love and family). Can you deny its philosophical coherence? No. Can you deny that it’s consistent with many EO authors and their understanding of Chalcedon? No.

You gotta give me SOMETHING, D, some reason to move to your side. Motivate me. I want, I need, to be motivated.

Biblically speaking, we haven’t even scratched the surface. But if you can take the passage where Christ quotes the OT saying “ye are gods” and Paul’s statement that “I, not I, but Christ” and use them to support your theology/psychology of divine-human relationality in which we do not perceive ourselves as selves, or ‘Whos’, in relationship with God (but as God relating personally to God in contingent RWE containers; sorry, that’s how I’m viewing it), then I think I can call upon 1Cor to do the same for me. And your explaining 1Cor’s “face to face” as equivalent to 1Jo’s (“we shall be like him for we shall see him as he is”) ain’t flying. Both are describing fulfilled divine-human relationality, yes, but both don’t have to be saying the same thing about that relationship. 1Jo describes the ‘purity’ of human nature and intentionality in such a relationship. 1Cor describes the mutually personal nature of the relationship.

So here we are.

I’m cool with saying God is at the center of the individual human ‘identity’ (or ‘person’). But like I say, ‘deriving our identity from having God at the center’ doesn’t equate to our identity simply being ‘an extension of God’s identity’. I take bi-polar to describe mutually defined but distinct realities (that’s what ‘poles’ are) not a mutually defined reality. There are ‘two’ poles, not one, to the Earth. But one pole cannot constitute its own hypostatic existence. The north pole needs a south pole to BE a north pole, else it cannot hypostacize ‘north poleness’ at its location. The north pole defines the south pole (and visa versa). We ‘need’ others to be ‘persons’. God has that necessarily as triune. We obtain it by relating interpersonally with others, and ultimately with God. But once ‘persons’ in relationship, we remain ‘persons’ not equivalent to the others who define our identity and whose identities we contribute to defining.

I’m cool with saying we derive our true identity from having God at the center with us revolving on the periphery. It’s a visual aid. Fine. But again, I don’t mean what you (or Loder) seem to mean by it, namely, the human identity perceives itself AS the divine identity, as an extension of the divine identity. For you, what’s at the center and what’s at the periphery are not both ‘hypostasis’ or ‘persons’. For you it’s not the case that one ‘identity’ is centered on another ‘identity’. It’s the case that one ‘identity’ (God’s) is expressed contingently through…sorry but it’s the best way I can describe it…human RWE containers. I account for God-centeredness RELATIONALLY.

Take my daughter, Jamila. She’s nuts about Tuck. She can no longer conceive of her own identity apart from her relationship to Tuck. His choices and movements all express this. She knows what Tuck wants and disposes her own mind and will accordingly. There’s a real melding of heart and mind. No problem. I can imagine a supreme sense in which God defines our identity—by empowering us IN OUR OTHERNESS to be freely creative and loving selves. Where our ‘otherness’ (our unique identities, our sense of being personally distinct) is depleted of power and creativity when we view other relations as the source of personal meaning and fulfillment, that same sense of otherness/identity is empowered and freed to be a true self-in-relation when we view God as the source of personal meaning and fulfillment, the ultimate value, the supreme good, etc. That’s what I having God at the center to mean. God at the center means ‘at the center of the relationship’.

Like the analogy of the Daddy and his daughter painting a picture, Tuck WANTS Jamila to express herself creatively. Christmas comes along. Jamila knows Tuck well. They’re so tightly related and in love, she knows the kinds of things Tuck likes and dislikes. What’s Tuck do? Well, he COULD tell her, “I want product X,” and include the brand, model, makes, color and serial number leaving her no room to exercise a creative freedom that contributes to defining her gift as a gift ‘of her’ TO ‘Tuck’. See? But what if Tuck himself says, “Ah, Hun, you know me well enough. Surprise me! I want something ‘from you’. I want a present that expresses your love for me.” Essentially, what Tuck wants is Jamila ‘in’ the gift she gives. Likewise, I believe Creation as a ‘gift’ to God from God is the gift of other persons love God and each other the way F, S, and Sp love each other.

D, you KNOW what I’m saying. You KNOW where I’m coming from. The intuition I’m expressing and the relational beauty of it IS, it just IS, my metaphysic. That’s what I mean by a ‘relational ontology’. The beauty of creative love mutually shared and experienced, the expression of which is uniquely shaped by each of the persons in the relationship (not by any one member in the relationship) is what I believe God creates us for.

If you don’t have any concrete philosophical or metaphysical argument for dismissing the beauty of the interpersonal relationality as necessarily less beautiful than what YOU’RE describing, then are we done here? We each have different starting points, different convictions (fueled by different intuitions) about what God is after with this whole creation thing. So long as we don’t share the same starting points, we’re gonna come out differently on the other end.

Do you REALLY think we can find real agreement on the psychology of our experience with God without agreeing on the essential question of what the PURPOSE of creation is? I don’t think so.

What do you think we should do?

I’d rather you try to CONVINCE me that it’s MORE like a personally satisfied God of infinite love and creative capacities to create non-persons (human ‘beings’) that GOD indwells and through whom God loves Godself THAN it is for such a God to create other persons who reflect God’s creative capacities by BEING creators of loving expression by virtue of loving God supremely. I view the former roughly as God creating a mirror and staring into it (except the mirror gets to feel the pleasure of God loving God, though it determines nothing of PERSONAL give and take that constitutes God’s vision of Godself in creation). The latter roughly equals God staring into the face of non-divine persons who are transformed by the vision of God into unfailingly loving and freely creating persons who constitute the pleasure God gets from creation as they do the same KIND of thing God does, creatively expressing their love. As Paul says, “Be imitators of God my beloved children.” The picture is of little children ‘mimicking’ what they see their father do.

Freedom is crucial to me, as you already know D. I’ll paraphrase a comment on Whitehead from a great book I’m reading: Hegel argued for a single all-encompassing reality at the cost of the interrelatedness of all things. Whitehead saw this same danger implicated in the classical notion of God as ‘the Absolute’ and so insisted on the irreducible substantial freedom of ‘creaturely’ existence as necessary to reconciling the inclusive eternality of the divine mind as the ‘ground’ of the created world and the preservation of the ontological independence of the individual, actual constituents of that world, thus rejecting traditional ‘pantheism’ in favor of ‘panentheism’. God is immanent in all, but not identical with all.

For me (as for Whitehead), freedom IS that which preserves the ontological independence of creation. As far as I’m concerned, being a different ‘who’ than God is the only real difference worth making. It’s the one distinction which, for me, explains why a God who is unsurpassably satisfied and infinitely creative already would create rational, relating beings such as ourselves. So far as I can see, the whole project stands or falls on the “irreducible freedom of creaturely existence.”

--------------------------------------

One very last note: Nesteruk (from his chapter in In Whom We Live And Move [comments NOT made in his book, D]):

“Our response would be that the presence of intellect and consciousness, even if treated as epiphenomena of physical and biological functioning, does not explain the personhood of human existence. [I’m cool with that.] The personhood of human beings implies not only that they have self-consciousness, i.e., the perception of one’s own ego, but also that there is a fundamental distinction from and relation to other existences. Despite the fact that the human hypostasis cannot be communicated, the formation of the personhood goes on only through its relation to other hypostases…and to the common source of their origination in the Logos. This means that when we speak of human being as hypostatic, it stands for the whole of humankind (in contrast to natural man) as the community of beings with a common logos of human nature related to God and realized in different persons.”

I rest my case.

T

_________________________

Let's not forget Nesteruk...

Christ himself was treated as “the New Man” and the last Adam. The divine plan of salvation was consummated, the kingdom of God inaugurated through Christ, but the ultimate things were yet to come in fullness and glory. The king had come, but the kingdom was still to come. The promise of the kingdom was granted to the church by the Holy Spirit. The church has lived since then in two dimensions: in sight of ongoing secular history and world events in the time of decay and oblivion, but also in the time of the heavenly kingdom inaugurated by the risen savior (in which the church has lived epicletically in the expectation of the kingdom.)

The coming of Christ and the resurrection changed completely the human situation, for in fallen existence, the time form of the world is characterized by law (nomos); this implies that humans were involved in an irreversible chain of decay and corruption, which led them to mortality with no hope of undoing the things they had done. Everything that had been done became ontologically necessary, so that there was no way to overcome this necessity, which is indicated by the word “law”. The coming of Christ and the resurrection relieved us from this law; we are still living in the world or “fallen” temporal order, but we are relieved from the necessity of the law; that is, we have a chance of renewal and of entering the kingdom [of God], cleansing ourselves through constant participation in the resurrection of the Lord.

---------------------------

In short, does your “end goal” for Creation involve human hypostases having CONTINUAL EPICLETIC EXPERIENCE IN ONE’S HUMAN BODY, SOUL, AND SPIRIT, VIA THE TRANSFORMATIVE POWER OF FATHER'S SPIRIT OF CHRIST where "I, not I, but Christ" is the central self-understanding of all human hypostases.

Mine does.

Post Edited (Imago Dei) : 1/11/2008 11:13:36 AM (GMT-6)

Post Edited (Imago Dei) : 1/11/2008 2:43:07 PM (GMT-6)

-------------------

To Greg, our "true freedom" is always living in alignment with the divine "ought" over our lives.   This is why the Theotokos was TRULY FREE whenever she COULD NOT FAIL to hear and obey God's Word.

Post Edited (Imago Dei) : 1/11/2008 10:36:41 PM (GMT-6)

Post Edited (HumanHypostasis) : 1/12/2008 3:30:40 AM (GMT-6)

You guys are killing me here! I can’t stop if you guys keep writing. We have to agree to stop together!

Dang.

I understand ‘gnomic’ choice to be choice that’s determined discursively though an evaluation of the pro’s and con’s of the options. I think we’ll agree that such choice is part of human becoming, right? We evaluate options, consider the pro’s and con’s and then render a decision. Now, D, how do you relate ‘gnomic’ will to ‘indeterministic’ choice per se?

See, here’s the thing. We do attribute some free (LFW) choice to God, like the choice to create. How do you understand the ‘gnomic’ status of this choice? I’m not saying it’s gnomic. In fact, I don’t think it is. That is, I don’t think God ‘discursively evaluates’ options, “Hmmm, let’s see, what would be best in this situation? Now if I go with….” Where the choice is between loving and unloving courses of action, no problem. There’s no real choice there for God.

But what about a choice of equally consistent, equally compatible, loving options? Like creating or not? Creating this world or that world? Do we want to say God NEVER faces such choices? I wouldn’t say it. And I take the choice to create to represent just such a situation. Creating and not creating represent states of affairs that are equally compatible with God’s loving nature. Nothing about God (his nature or character) make one choice more preferable than the other. So there’s no gnomic will involved in God’s determination here. But there IS LFW. See?

So how do we understand God’s landing on ‘create’? Do we just conclude that God chose arbitrarily? about a year ago I think you opted for this. God just said, “Hey, whatever. Either is good with me. Heck, let’s go with creation” or he “tossed a coin” (so to speak). It seems that if we WERE to posit a “reason” for creating, that would necessarily make the actual choice the “preferred” choice, and the “reason” would ground the preferrability of creating and so register a ‘pro’ for the choice to create and a ‘con’ for the choice not to create. But that would destroy the ‘freedom’ of the choice and attribute necessity to creation (so it is thought).

Now, it may be that the choice to create over not creating WAS arbitrary. I don’t know. If it was, that would not render the choice to create a meaningless or unmotivated choice. If I know that either ‘flowers’ or ‘chocolate’ will give equal pleasure to Anita and I make an arbitrary choice, say, ‘flowers’ (because each is as good as the other), I do not thereby empty the choice of ‘flowers’ of loving intention and purpose. So it may be that the choice to create was arbitrary but still meaningful and purposeful. We just don’t like think of God as acting arbitrarily. Maybe we’ll have to get over that. I don’t mind.

Anyhow, my point was to say that since God does not think ‘discursively’ (that is, he doesn’t take time to reason his way through the options in evaluating them to arrive at a conclusion, viz., gnomically), this does NOT render the choice to create other than libertarianly free and meaningfully purposeful. But if the choice to create is free and God does not think/reason discursively (and so has no gnomic will) in making it, and the choice is still meaningfully loving and purposeful (whether arbitrary or not, I don’t care), then we have a way to imagine human being, fully united with God and compatibilistically love, but still ‘final determiners’ between equally loving options. It’s possible to have fully realized human beings who have no ‘gnomic’ will (do not reason discursively on the choice between ‘valuable’ and ‘not valuable’) but who nevertheless can at least partly determine the shape the manner of loving expression they offer God.

See, D, I think you just assume that a perfectly loving world full of persons who love unfailingly and who are one with God would have to be a deterministic world, a world that faces one possible future trajectory, especially if those persons are all possessed of God’s Spirit and directed by God. But we already know that God is perfectly loving AND capable of making free choices about the future. So this removes ‘gnomic’ will from the equation. Sure, fully realized human beings won’t possess ‘gnomic’ wills in the sense of having to discursively reason their way through the choice over good and evil. But there’s no reason to think that they can’t still remain free (as God is) to determine something of the shape of their loving expression.

Now, you may grant this in God’s case. You may grant that the future of humanity with God throughout eternity will enjoy a good measure of free and open paths to follow, but you’ll want to say ONLY God makes the choice about which path the God-human relationship takes. But there’s no reason to do that, D. If the choice can be freely made by God (without being gnomic), then such choice, such freedom, defines God, then what reason can you give us, D, for concluding that human beings would reflect God LESS if God were to endow them with the same capacity, if the ‘logoi’ that defines our identities were express communications of this free and creative love? Indeed, how can it NOT be so? How can the ‘logoi’, those creative imaginations of the Logos, the expressed images of creation which embody the self-same creative power of love that God is, produce a world void of self-determining icons? That is, how’s this NOT encourage us to conclude that it is part of our ‘logos’ to create, to bring into being (in relation with God and others) loving states of affairs whose composition is partly defined by the unique and freely determining self that is us?

It SILL gets you a creation that is a REFLECTION of God to God—because the ‘logoi’ are God’s thoughts. They HAVE to reflect God to God when embodied in us. So it’s self-communication, yes, but in and through other persons who reflect God’s creative ability by being creators. If God determines everything about their manner of expression, they cease to reflect God in perhaps the most important way of all. It is the nature of us as the embodied fulfillment of ‘logoi’ to create and that capacity is God’s gift to us, in us, as us. How this will be processed psychologically by us is anyone’s guess, but I cannot at this point conceive of us NOT perceiving ourselves as ‘personally distinct’ (not ‘personally independent’) from the F, S, and Sp in some meaningful way that reflects the ‘indentity-in-relation’ that each of us now is in part and which we shall be.

Tom

Post Edited (Imago Dei) : 1/12/2008 7:02:31 AM (GMT-6)