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Date Joined Jun 2001
Total Posts : 516
| Posted 6/28/2001 11:03 AM (GMT -6) |   |
Tyll
02/19/01 9:01 AM
The Purpose of Christ
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Hi all! I've been reading much on the subject of the Open View, and lurking here for a short while. I have worked up the gumption to ask a question---actually it's more the vague beginnings of a new (to me) model of God that I can't seem to shake. I wanted to run it buy you all to see what you think. I'll try to be brief and then see where we go:
It appears to me that in the final analysis God must be Omni (Omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, impassible, simple, imutable, etc) in His eternal nature. This doesn't mean, however, that God can't, for a time, allow a dominion to exist in which He is able to limit His character and allow for things to run their own course. It appears to me that in our case we may be able to call this domain Christ. The model might be described thus: Take a piece of blank white paper and call it the Omni God. God in this case runs off the paper in all directions to infinity. The substance of the paper is consciousness. The characteristics God has are consciousness based like: Love, Wisdom, Peace, Joy, etc. At any place on this piece of paper (and Beyond) God is able to radiate experession. He has the ability to have multiple centers of self awareness which can emit; God is social within himself in this way. But God also feels this activity as a whole. So, God is triune by: Father-the overall awareness; Son-localized points of radiation; Holy Spirit-the meaning carrying movement (remember these expressions must be so increadably meaningfull that only a person can carry them---sort of a messanger).
Then draw a circle on the paper and call it Christ. A particular instantiation of personhood completely self-aware, who agrees as sevant to do a particular Will of the Father: the container of an Idea (Logos). Now assuming God has completely decoupled Himself from the region within the circle, the region within is now outside the Omni God. Assuming the Christ is willing to have us within him and respect our free will at the request of the Father and bear the burden of our darkness, that within doen not have to feel the power of the Father. However, at some point in the eternal future this situation must be resolved, and the Christ must put all things within Him in order; destroy all that is not harmonious with the body of God and then solve the boundry of the circle and rejoin fully the body of the Omni God. As a parenthetical note: I see the Father as we describe Him as what the Omni God looks like from within the circle.
Posted Originally From: Christus Victor Ministries
MrIndifference
02/20/01 12:53 PM
RE: The Purpose of Christ
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Here is my vision of the trinity.
When I think of the names Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, I tend to view them as titles of position. First the Father is the Creative member of the trinity. He comes up with all the cool ideas. The Son (Christ) is what I call the Great communicator. He is the one that communicates the will of the Father to His creation. Then we have the Holy Spirit. He is the force behind the word. I view them as three separate entities, that work togeather as one...the Godhead.
Let me give you a couple examples of this concept of the "trinity":
1. The US government consists of the Legislatual, the Judicial, and the Executive branches. They are all separate entities, but they work togeather as a single entity.
2. This is something that the bible alludes to. What does it take fore there to be a spoken word. First you have the tongue. It is the origionator of the word. Next you have the the word proceeding from the your mouth, and finally you have the breath carrying that word and giving it the force to be heard by the rest of the world.
One big thing you have to remember that though these are all separate entities, they work as a whole. In order for God to function, all three members have to be working togeather. If you take one out of the picture, then God has just been handicapped and cannot do his thing...What ever that thing may be.
That is all I have to say on this one. I will let the people with the 'Dr.' before their names deal with the rest.
Posted Originally From: Christus Victor Ministries
Proverbs23_23
02/24/01 7:16 AM
RE: The Purpose of Christ
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Just a quick question...
If Christ is the IMAGE of God the Father, wouldn't He have to be the whole paper?
"When you see Me you see the Father"
?
Posted Originally From: Christus Victor Ministries
ilgwamh
02/24/01 12:06 PM
RE: The Purpose of Christ
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Yall can comment on this if you like. They are two selected quotations from a paper I am trying to work on regarding the Trinity. It may seem like Mcdowell's 'NETDAV,' lots of quotes...
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I feel compelled to point out the paradoxical nature of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. God is one yet God is three persons (note Christianity does not support polytheism nor is it a tritheistic faith). The three-in-oneness of God is extremely hard to fathom at best and some, myself included, might say impossible. I called the trinity a paradox rather than a contradiction because our transcendent yet immanent Creator is beyond perfect perception to us. I do not mean to imply we can just wish away "contradictions" concerning God's nature at will. What I mean is synonomous to what numerous sciptural passages teach:
Isaiah 55:8-9, "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," declares the LORD. 9 "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts."
Psalm 145:3, "Great is the LORD and most worthy of praise; His greatness no one can fathom."
Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli, although it was pertaining to the problem of evil, pointed this out, "For if there is a God, His wisdom must be infinitely superior to ours, and we will not understand all of His ways . . . This is the only answer Job got, and Job was satisfied, for he was a good philosopher. This posture is not blind fideism but eminent reasonableness." 11
We may not be able to explain paradoxes like the Trinity but we can explain why we cannot explain them. If everything in the Bible about God was understandable it would be convincing evidence against the Bible's credibility. A book written by only men would contain such material, but not a book inspired by an infinitely greater, transcendent Creator whose ways and greatenss we cannot fathom!
Romans 9:18, "Therefore God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden."
Add those verses in with the notion of progressive revelation, Biblical anthropomorphisms and 1 Corinthians 13:11-12, and one is intellectually justified in adhering to paradoxical views recorded in the Bible.
1 Corinthians 13:11-12, "When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. 12 Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known."
In other words, if the primary source of my epistemology concerning who God is, what He does, what my life is about, why we are here et cetera, teaches a three-in-oneness of the God it reveals then I believe it.
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James Leo Garrett, "The dotrine of the trinity points to the mystery of the Divine being whom Christians worship and serve and who by their confession is at work in their lives. As a truth the Trinity has baffled the most astute Christian thinkers throughout the history of Christianity. It defies normal human logic and transcends our human, modal, natural, and psychological analogies." 12
Garrett, along with other scholars point out the idea that all of the analogies concerning the Trinity are riddled with defects. Here are a few of the more common analogies:
1. The Egg analogy. Yolk, shell and white all make up the one egg just as the Father, Son, and holy Spirit make up the one God.
2. The Water analogy. "Another illustration likens the Trinity to water at its "triple point" (32 degrees F or 0.001 degrees C), the temperature at which it can be ice or liquid or vapor." (Hugh Ross, beyond the Cosmos, pg 95)
3. C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, page 143 "In God's dimension, so to speak, you find a Being who is three Persons while remaining one being, just as a cube is six squares while remaining one cube."
4. A person can be a father, a son and a comforting friend while remaining one person. So to can God be the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spiirt while being one God.
5. The tree analogy. A tree has roots, leaves and a bark but it is one tree.
6. The sun is a light source, a heat source, and a star. God is a Father, a Son, and a Holy Spirit.
7. "Some Bible scholars have proposed the picture of a cake, which simultaneously can be thought of as ingredients, layers, and slices. The ingedients would represent the Father, the layers, the Son; and the slices, the Holy Spirit distributed to individual believers. To paraphrase a chilche, the problem here is that we cannot have a cake and eat its pieces, too. Once the slices are all distributed or eaten, neither the layers or cake would remain intact." (Ross, Beyond the Cosmos, pg 96)
8. Humans are body, soul and spirit.
Hugh Ross also shares the view that these analogies do not adequately explain the trinity. In Beyond the Cosmos which highlights the extradimensionality of God, Ross says after listing common trinity analogies and critiquing them says, "While each of these trinity analogies is helpful, one significant weakness hampers all of them (an many others). They attempt to explain a supernatural, extra-dimensional being in the frame of reference we four-dimensional beings occupy." Ross goes on to illustrate the trinity's extradimensionality utilizing a screen people analogy which appeals to lower dimensions. Likewise, Ross comments, "For that matter, all naturalistic, ten-dimensional representations of the trinity will to a lesser extent fail too. The Triune God, after all, has the ability to create space-time dimensions at will. The new physics tells us that He transcends the ten space-time dimensions of the cosmos. Thus, the extra dimensions exposed by the new physics will not define the Trinity. Nevertheless, they will enhance our understanding and comprehension of a meaningful doctrine." 13
The Trinity cannot be understood fully. Nevertheless, as James Leo Garrett point out, ". . . the Trinity has been regarded as basic to the Christian understanding of God's reality. In creeds and confessions of faith Christian theologians have siought to bear witness to and to demarcate, if not explain, the Trinity. Christian musicians, architects, and artists have attempted to celebrate and illustrate the Trinity. Amid all their limitations of knowledge and understanding, Christians have continued to teach about and to worship and praise the Triune God--Father, Son, and Holy Spirit." 14
Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli highlight six reasons the divinity of Christ is crucially important:
1. The divinity of Christ is the most distinctively Christian doctrine of all. A Christian is most essentially defined as one who believes this. An no other religion has a doctrine that is even similar. Buddhists do not believe that Buddha was God. Muslims do not believe Mouhammad was God: "There is no God but Allah, and muhammad is His phrophet."
2. The essential difference between orthodox, traditional, Biblical, apostolic, historic, creedal Christianity and revisionist, modernist, liberal Christianity is right here. The essential modernist revision is to see Christ simplyas the ideal man, or "the man for others"; as a phrophet, rabbi, philosopher, teacher, social worker, psychologist, psychiatrist, reformer, sage or magician--but not God in flesh.
3. The doctrine works like a skeleton key, unlocking all other doctrinal doors of Christianity. Christians believe each of their many doctrines not because they have reasoned their own way to them as conclusions from a theological inquiry or as results of some mystical experiences, but on the divine authority of the One of taught them, as recorded in the Bible and transmitted by the church.
If Christ was only human, He could have made mistakes. Thus, anyone who wants to dissent from any of Christ's unpopular teachings will want to deny His divinity. And there are bound to be things in His teachings that each of us finds offensive--if we look at the totality of those teachings rather than confining ourselves to comfortable and familiar ones.
4. If Christ is divine, then the incarnation, or "enfleshing" of God, is the most important event in history. It is the hinge of history. It changes everything If Christ is God, then when He died on the Cross, heaven's gate closed by sin, opened up for the first time since eden. No event in history could be more important to every person on earth than that.
5. There is an unparalled present existential bite to the doctrine. For if Christ is God, then, since He is omnipotent and present right now He can transform you and your life right now as nothing and no one else possibly can. He alone can fufill the psalmist's desperate plea to "create in me a clean heart, O God" (Ps 51:10). Only God can create; there is even a special word in Hebrew for it (bara').
6. And if Christ is divine, He has right to our entire lives, including our inner life and our thoughtd. If Christ is divine, our absolute obligation is to believe everything He says and obey everythingHe commands. If Christ is divine, the meaning of freedom becomes conformity to him. 15
If Christ is divine, the great truth becomes apparent; "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
11. Handbook of Christian Apologetics, Kreeft and Tacelli, pg 124.
12. Systematic Theology: Bibilical, Historical, and Evangelical, Chapter 23, page 288.
13. Beyond the Cosmos, Hugh Ross, pg 97
14. Systematic Theology: Bibilical, Historical, and Evangelical, Chapter 23, page 288.
15. Handbook of Christian Apologetics, Kreeft and Tacelli, pg 153-154
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The 6 reasons by Kreeft and Tacelli may have been slightly off topic but they leapt at my heart when I read them
Lots of love
Vinnie
www.ilgwamh.com
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