With as much self-understanding as my "created 'I' " has right now, "I" just want God. Pretty much, that's it.  I just want God.  Giver of the gifts of live, health, friends, family, etc.  The Trinity is my consuming desire.  I want to be "one" with our Creator as God's Spouse/Adopted Child/Embodied Presence ...all referring to the Body of Christ...with as much "oneness" with the Uncreated as will be allowed in the Creator/Created relationship of being "Spouse/Adopted Child/Embodied Presence" of God. God can do what he chooses with me from there.

All the rest is commentary, as far as I'm concerned.

So...

The Triune God is of/from God's love.

The Anointed One and Only Begotten, Jesus of Nazareth, is of/from God's love.

In Christ, "I" am of/from God's love.

In Christ, "you" are of/from God's love.

In Christ, "we" are all of/from God's love.

And God's love is ONE and ETERNAL.

Post Edited (Shekinah) : 6/29/2008 3:52:58 PM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (Shekinah) : 6/29/2008 4:30:46 PM (GMT-5)

D-

Bro, I completely hear your heart. But both of us know that neither of us will settled for just expressing the goal of our salvation in minimalistic terms, whether it’s you preferring to express it in terms of wanting to be as “one” with God as possible or me expressing it in terms of wanting to be as “beautifully related to” God as possible. We each want to understand as far as possible what that means, what the end result will be like. I don’t think we can help it. We want hearts AND heads satisfied and on fire for God. We want to ‘fill out’ our hope’s content. The more it’s filled out, the more we can begin to experience it now as foretaste. That’s what eschatology is meant to do. It’s the future defining the present.

I’m uncomfortable expressing the believer’s eschatological hope in terms of just being “one” with God because too much that’s crucial gets left out. If we’re building on the Trinity, then it’s never enough to say “one.” We have also to say “three.” To say “one” is to say “three.” To posit “unity” is to posit “diversity.” If someone said, “God is one. God is one. That’s it!” we’d say he wasn’t saying all there is to say about God. Something equally as important as “one”—something definitive OF the “one”—isn’t getting said. And a similar one-sidedness might be the case about how you’re expressing your hope. I know that when pressed you admit ‘diversity’ is there. But you have to be pressed to do so. It doesn’t seem to factor significantly into your ‘hope’ per se, as you express it. So instead of “unity” and “diversity” together (without either assuming the other) constituting what really is the more important reality, viz. “relational beauty,” it looks like you’re beholden to “oneness” as such and leave the rest up to God. So in that sense I think you’re one-sided.

This is why I said I prefer “as beautifully related to God” as possible because the experienced beauty of divine-human relationality itself overarches both “oneness” and “differentiation,” neither of which has value in and of itself. Together they define a more fundamental reality—beauty. I really believe that aesthetics is more fundamental than either the ‘one’ or the ‘many’ (or rather, beauty is what the one/many issue is about), so it makes more sense to express our hope in the most fundamental terms. I can mistakenly aim at a ‘oneness’ that's deficient in 'diversity' or a ‘differentiation’ that's void of 'unity'. But I can’t say ‘beauty’ without at the same time saying both ‘one’ and ‘many’.

I’ve just finished Edward Moore’s (EO Prof) book on Origen and Maximus. Very good. I wish I could loan you my copy. It expresses what I’ve been trying to say about freedom’s role in defining the beauty of interpersonal relatedness, and from an EO perspective too.

That’s all I wanted to close with.

Tom

PS For those interested, the best review I've found of David Hart's The Beaty of the Infinite is here:

http://inhabitatiodei.wordpress.com/2006/08/24/the-beauty-of-the-infinite-a-review/

Post Edited (Tom) : 6/30/2008 3:28:22 AM (GMT-5)

4) I've tried to be as honest, transparent, and forthcoming about the "mystical" journey that I've been on since going on 2 years ago. (All the pages are still on this board). Jesus Prayer. Hesychasm. Nepsis. All that. As far as really describing the experience/concept of what Christian mysticism is, I've not seen anything better than what Harvey Egan wrote. An excerpt...but please read it all...

--------------------------------------------------
Christian mysticism is a way of life that involves the perfect fulfillment of loving God, neighbor, all God’s creation, and oneself. It is the fundamental human process through which one becomes fully authentic by responding throughout life to a God who gives himself unconditionally as love and as the ultimate destiny of every person. It is an ordered movement toward ever higher levels of reality by which the self awakens to, is purified and illuminated by, and is eventually fully united with the God of love.

Under God’s palpable initiative and direction, mystics fall in love with God—at times abruptly, at times gradually. Through God’s special activity, they realize that God is in love with them, and therefore we are all, at least secretly, in love with God and each other. The explicit awareness of God’s burning love at the very roots of their being causes mystics an immense longing that allows them no peace until they are irrevocably united to God and transformed into God’s very own life.

...

The unitive life is the last stage of mystical ascent. The mystic becomes as closely united to God through God’s love as God is unified to his own being by nature. Mystically married to God, the mystic becomes “God by participation.” Nonetheless, this union remains differentiated, that is, God and the mystic become one while remaining distinctly two. The mystic’s person does not dissolve into God. In fact, the more deeply united to God the mystic becomes, the more the mystic’s individuality is confirmed and enhanced.
-----------------------------------

We see things from where we are. If you look at the track record of even our boardnames, you can see our tendencies...One/Many; ImagoDei/HumanHypostasis, etc. It seems pretty simple to me: We have different temperments and in different places where we give MORE EMPHASIS on different things...though, I don't feel, either of us deny the reality of either. I have been more than willing to admit that 1)I sort by sameness, which means I lean towards seeing commonality in things 2) I am an ENFJ, which means I lean towards wholism and focusing on "unity" and "oneness" naturally. You are QUITE different from me in these ways as you seem to 1) sort by difference and 2) are an INTP. We can look at the SAME REALITY and say different things about it because of just where we are. Now, put all this on top of my possibly having an "immense longing" to be in "union with God." Look at the past mystics (Eckhart, Julian of Norwich, etc) who had the SAME STRUGGLE because people didn't think they were expressing enough differentiation/distinction between Creator and Created...not enough "unity/diversity" distinction to suit them. As I see things, this struggle that you and I have been having with this is nothing new at all in the church scene. Actually, pretty par for the course. (Egan's anthology has been SO helpful!) So, if I seem "one-sided", I hope that I've given more than enough context to explain why that seems so.

5) As I've said time and again, I really believe that we AGREE more than we DISAGREE. If you don't see that, then I guess you just don't.  I really don't know what else I can say to try to bridge our divide.  I keep trying. Oh well, that's my TENDENCY anyways.

Alrighty...

Post Edited (Shekinah) : 6/30/2008 6:43:43 AM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (Shekinah) : 6/30/2008 6:40:25 AM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (Tom) : 6/30/2008 10:17:07 AM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (Shekinah) : 6/30/2008 11:11:47 AM (GMT-5)