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- June 16, 2016 at 3:22 am#814936Ed JParticipant
Scripture was written by men, i.e., males, and therefore reflects their prejudices.
Hi Hoghead1,
Have you considered the possibility that creation is God’s own self-evolution from unconsciousness and mere potentiality into self-consciousness, personality, and self-actualization? Those are intriguing possibilities I am interested in.
The culture you describe is here:
Have you read the book of Urantia?June 16, 2016 at 8:50 am#814942942767ParticipantHi hoghead1:
Doesn’t saying the “Word was God” make it clear the Word is God? Why would it have to say the Was in the form of God? I don’t follow you here.
t8 uses Phillipians 2:6 to justify his belief that Jesus pre-existed, and he believes that Jesus is “the Logos” in John 1.June 16, 2016 at 9:15 am#814944NickHassanParticipantHi ,
phil 2 speaks of the Spirit that anointed and made a human vessel into the living Word.
John testified about this in his first letter
June 16, 2016 at 1:28 pm#814950hoghead1ParticipantI’m not sure what John you are referring to here. If this is I Jn., you are probably referring to the Johannie Comma, which is a much later tampering with Scripture by Trinitarians. It is not in the early Bibles.
June 16, 2016 at 1:29 pm#814951hoghead1ParticipantI side with t8 on that.
June 16, 2016 at 1:32 pm#814952hoghead1ParticipantHello, Ed,
My sources largely come from contemporary process theology and also the Christian mystical tradition, specifically Jacob Boehme and Meister Eckhart.
June 16, 2016 at 1:36 pm#814953hoghead1ParticipantHi, Kerwin,
The early Trinitarians identified Christ with God simply because there is no way you could have all the qualities of God and not be God. That doesn’t even begin to make sense. Sorry, but it doesn’t.
June 16, 2016 at 1:37 pm#814954NickHassanParticipantHi hoghead1,
1Jn 1
John wrote of touching the Word.
The Word that was with God in the beginning.
He spoke of Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh at the Jordan.
June 16, 2016 at 1:41 pm#814955hoghead1ParticipantHello, Nick,
I never said that man is our only hope. Also, I don’t view all human speculations as merely carnal. If we can’t trust our speculations in any way, then all is lost, simply because all we have is human knowledge. As I said before, we can’t step outside of our humanity. Also, I don’t view carnality as inferior or ungodly. That whole idea came from Hellenic standards of perfection whereby the whole temporal-material order is something grossly inferior, evil, a big illusion.
June 16, 2016 at 2:29 pm#814961NickHassanParticipantHi hogshead,
You must be born again of the eternal Spirit.
That Spirit wrote the scriptures through men as Peter told us.
Only then will you rise above mere human speculative reasoning and know life.
June 16, 2016 at 5:19 pm#814964hoghead1ParticipantHello, again, Nick,
As I already said, we are all human beings and have to think in human terms. Even the Bible was written by human beings and is therefore a work of human thought. So I don’t see the need to arise out of our humanness. If anything, I think we should work to become more human. Also, about rising out of or transcending human nature, what that amounted to is the old Hellenic notion that we should completely detach ourselves from the temporal-material order, the world of time and change and physicality and feeling, etc. Forget it. The Hellenes, like Plato, can have it. To me, living without a body, parts, passions, compassion, wholly immutable would be a totally deadbeat, boring existence. I’d be living on a par with an amoeba. No, not even that well, as after all, amoebas have feelings and mobility, though very little. The fact that God transcends us does not mean God is the negation of our humanity. Put another way, I have a human nature. Now, it’s wrong to go against nature, so there is not point in trying to cease and desist in being human, not for me, anyway.
June 16, 2016 at 5:46 pm#814967Ed JParticipantHave you read the book of Urantia?
Hi Hoghead1,
Is you answer “No”?
June 16, 2016 at 6:00 pm#814969hoghead1ParticipantHello, EdJ,
Yes, I read it, but years ago. My dissertation covered mysticism, but I was so loaded down with traditional mystics that I did little with anything modern, which is where I would put the book. There are certain themes that I recall strongly parallel ideas in both process and traditional Christian mysticism.
June 17, 2016 at 1:18 am#814972kerwinParticipantHogshead1,
The early Trinitarians identified Christ with God simply because there is no way you could have all the qualities of God and not be God. That doesn’t even begin to make sense. Sorry, but it doesn’t.
It may not make sense to you but it made sense to at least one of John’s contemporaries by the name of Philo.
The best I can say is that it is not all the qualities.
June 17, 2016 at 1:41 pm#814996hoghead1ParticipantHello, Kirwin,
Philo was largely a Platonic thinker. He said absolutely nothing abut Christ. His goal seems to be to present Moses as the original source of Platonic metaphysics, relegating the temporal-material world to being an anti-God principle. In his thought, God per se did not create the world, has no contact with the inferior world of matter. However, the Logos, a lesser being, does. That stands in tension with the Bible, because the Bible affirms the innate goodness of the material order and presents a highly anthropomorphic image of God.
June 17, 2016 at 4:47 pm#815000kerwinParticipantHogshead1,
You might want to look into him a little as he gives a numeric argument that is definitely Hebraic in nature and not Platonic. He does have some ideas in common with the later though its unclear about how much as he used the way of speech that is hard to understand. He also differs from them.
From John’s way of speech it is clear their audiences are similar even when the words differ. Both have more mysticism in their writings than the other gospels. It is possible John wrote to those that had come to know of God through Philo’s evangelism.
Philo saw the cosmos as a great chain of being presided over by the Logos, a term going back to pre-Socratic philosophy, which is the mediator between God and the world, though at one point he identifies the Logos as a second God. Philo departed from Plato principally in using the term Logos for the Idea of Ideas and for the Ideas as a whole and in his statement that the Logos is the place of the intelligible world. In anticipation of Christian doctrine he called the Logos the first-begotten Son of God, the man of God, the image of God, and second to God.
John 1:1 is just calling the logos a second God just like Philo did. It was not new at that time and it certainly did not mean the word was God in all ways.
In fact Philo actually John’s words even though he was speaking of the OT.
Logos
b.) When the scripture uses the Greek term for God ho theos, it refers to the true God, but when it uses the term theos, without the article ho, it refers not to the God, but to his most ancient Logos (Somn. 1.229-230).From what I have come to understand saying calling the logos God is equivalent to saying the word that comes out of God’s mouth is Divine.
June 17, 2016 at 4:59 pm#815003hoghead1ParticipantHell again, Kirwin,
Philo does depict the Logos as a lesser god, however. He also emphasizes the inherent evil of teh spacio-temporal world, a per Plato. Really then, he is far more of a gnostic. Of course, Gnosticism was a strong movement within the early church, though eventually declared a heresy.
June 17, 2016 at 5:29 pm#815006kerwinParticipantHogshead,
He might have had Gnostic leanings but he was definitely not a true Gnostic as his idea of a demiurge varied drastically from theirs. To Philo the demiurge is a tool of God so that the later does not act directly with his creation while the Gnostics teach the demiurge rebels against God and makes a flawed creation. In addition Pilo’s demiurge is not actually a being. It is the word that comes out of God’s Mouth.
On aside not some Gnostic teachings are still present in the church though they have evolved over time.
June 17, 2016 at 11:53 pm#815011hoghead1ParticipantYes, I would agree with that about Philo. I’m just stressing that he definitely has gnostic tendencies. Yes, definitely gnostic teachings were and are present in the church. Those are to be found in the static, world-negating God of classical theism.
June 19, 2016 at 7:50 am#815037942767ParticipantHi hoghead1:
I side with t8 on that. (meaning that you believe that the “Logos” in John 1 is Jesus, and that Philippians 2:6 is speaking about a pre-existent Jesus who was “in the form of God” prior to being born into this world in the likeness of human flesh.)
Well if that is what you believe, please explain what it means to be “in the form of God” and where do you see Jesus manifest as such in the OT prior to his birth into this world?
John 1 states that “the Word was God”. The definition of the word Logos is:
of speech
a word, uttered by a living voice, embodies a conception or idea
The Word (what God has spoken pertains to Jesus), but is not him as some pre-existent being. Jesus was foreordained (1 Peter 1:1:18-20, Ephesians 1:9-10, Gal 4:4)
Jesus was “in the form of God” in his ministry on earth as God’s Christ. The Apostle Paul was teaching the Philippians about humility, not about a pre-existent Christ.
Love in Christ,
Marty - AuthorPosts
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