Maybe its just me Svt4Him; It’s late and I’m tired, but what the hell did you just say?
Of course, if God is truly omnipotent, then he could just Poof! away ‘our sins’…
Zeus could take the form of a white bull and do the deed with humans, so surely the Islamic-Judeo-Christian God can ‘create’ a deific Jesus. That is the beauty of the sci-fi/fantasy genre; You can do anything that you can imagine!
Cool! I think I’ll write me up some new gods. After I’ve shovelled the actual existing snow off the actual existing walk, of course.
EXCELLENT!!
An Athiest,a Pagan & a Muslim all glad handing each other.
Typical.
ResIpsaloquitor,
RIGHT ON!!!
I agree. And this is just my personal theory, so I hope noone takes offense, but I’ve always suspected that the God-man duality of Jesus is a paradox that’s not necessarily supposed to be understood, and serves a similar purpose to the koan (paradoxical riddle) used in Zen Buddhism. IOW, it’s to be meditated on, not explained.
Not that I wish to argue, but I’m pretty sure that mainstream (whatever that means) Christianity holds that Jesus was more than just a representation of God; that the Jesus-part of God actually departed from heaven and fully inhabited a human form, as a resident, rather than a telepresence.
Good point, and more accurate than my comment. Maybe what Alde is really saying is that he doesn’t get the concept of the Trinity, in which case he would not be alone.
You’re probably right and (at least as far as I understand the concept) I think the doctrine of the trinity is that the trinity is impossible to properly describe (very Tao/Zen).
But it is possible to describe what the trinity isn’t;
It isn’t three Gods (because it is one God in three persons)
It isn’t one God split into equal thirds (because each person is ‘fully’ God)
It isn’t one person doing three different jobs, or just three different ways of looking at the same thing.
I think that another part of Aldebaran’s trouble is the idea of a holy God getting his hands dirty; the only real way to respond to this is that Christians believe that God chose to get his hands dirty and if he wanted to do something, but was unable to, then he wouldn’t be God. (immovable rocks notwithstanding).
**Do you hold that it’s impossible for anything to exist in a state or nature or construct outside of our own physical universe? And to clarify, I’m not asking if you believe such a thing has occurred, only if it is possible. A related question: Has this physical universe always existed?
You know this how? Is this just an issue of faith for you, or do you have something to support this contention?
It is not up to the atheists to disprove the existence of whatever the diety of the millienium is.
According to Christian theology, in Jesus Christ God became a man, totally human, and yet remained completely divine. (See article II of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Anglican churches: “The Son, which is the Word of the Father, begotten from everlasting of the Father, the very and eternal God, and of one substance with the Father, took Man’s nature in the womb of the blessed Virgin, of her substance: so that two whole and perfect Natures, that is to say, the Godhead and Manhood, were joined together in one Person, never to be divided, whereof is one Christ, very God, and very Man; who truly suffered, was crucified, dead, and buried, to reconcile his Father to us, and to be a sacrifice, not only for original guilt, but also for actual sins of men.”) The 2000 Baptist Faith and Message (Southern Baptist Convention) states that “God is all powerful and all knowing; and His perfect knowledge extends to all things, past, present, and future, including the future decisions of His free creatures”, a statement which I think would be accepted by most Christian theologians. I don’t think either of these statements would be disputed by Catholic theologians, other Protestants from within the mainstream of Protestant theology, or (probably) Orthodox theologians.
If Jesus Christ was God incarnated, then was Jesus Christ omniscient–did he have perfect knowledge of all things past, present, and future? Did he have such knowledge even while he was a baby in the manger?
On the one hand, if Jesus was omniscient, it seems hard to justify saying that God “became a man”. To a human being, with limited knowledge, events take place in sequence, we exist in a changing universe, and we experience the flow of time. To an omniscient God, with perfect knowledge of all things past, present, and future, all things would appear to have already happened, and the universe would be a static whole, with all parts of it already grasped, viewed from an eternal perspective outside time. Omniscience is such a radical departure from the human condition, and the mind of a being with perfect knowledge must be so different from the mind of a being like ourselves, that while God might create a man-shaped apparition which humans could talk to and which could appear to eat and sleep and so on, God could not really become a man.
On the other hand, it may be that Jesus was not omniscient when he was a human being. (See Mark 13:32.) Perhaps God voluntary gave up some of his divine attributes when he was incarnated as a man. However, while it’s possible to imagine Zeus voluntarily giving up his ability to hurl thunderbolts for a time, and yet still remaining as Zeus, omniscience is so central to the kind of being the Christian God is that I don’t see how God could give up such things and remain himself. A human might voluntarily surrender the power of sight or the ability to move for some period of time, and yet remain himself; but it would be meaningless for a human to “incarnate” himself as a statue. He might create a statue, he might act like a statue for some period of time (by simply holding still), but he couldn’t become a statue without ceasing to be a person. Of course Arians (and Jehovah’s Witnesses) have said that Jesus was not really the omniscient God, but was simply the highest of God’s creations–the “Son of God” in a different sense–but this view is and has been rejected by the great majority of Christians. It might be imagined that the omnscient God would have perfect knowledge of what it was like to be Jesus Christ incarnated as a human being, but an omniscient God should already have perfect knowledge of the thoughts and feelings of all human beings.
The response that God is omnipotent and can therefore do anything he wants, and can therefore meaningfully become a human being while retaining omniscience, or meaningfully surrender omniscience while remaining the Christian God, opens the door to all sorts of arguments of the “Can God make a rock so big he can’t lift it?” sort. (And note that the 1917 Catholic Encyclopedia has no problem with defining omnipotence as “the power of God to effect whatever is not intrinsically impossible”–empahsis added–so the traditional conception of omnipotence is not just some logical “Get Out of Jail Free” card.) There is of course the response that this is simply a “Mystery”, but that response obviously solves nothing.
In my opinion, the problems of the Incarnation are worse than the problems of the Trinity, and it’s no wonder so many Christian heresies have arisen from people trying to reconcile what it means for an omniscient God to become a human being.
No, indeed it is not. That’s why I find it curious when one seems to have done so, and I become interested in what supports their conclusion. Those atheists that would prefer not to discuss those positions probably shouldn’t offer them.
An interest linkety-link it is. Are you suggesting that this shows that there is no existence possible outside of our Universe’s context? Do you believe this counters an argument I am implying? I found this interesting and accurate from blowero:
**This rings true to me, and it allows that our Universe is simply the only existential construct we understand (but not necessarily the only one that is or was or will be). God’s existence can’t be proven or disproven (not based on what we know now). Those who state God does not exist do so, I can only assume, out of a sort of faith. It’s another thing entirely to say, I am not convinced there is a God, as there is no scientific evidence to support such a being.
Splitting semantical hairs perhaps (an atheist might counter, “I also don’t believe in pixies”), but apropos in this particular debate, it seems to me.
Simply because Jesus was good (loving) without equal, and God is love.
I’m afraid anything I say will merely be a subset of Buckner’s excellent post, but is it official doctrine that God actually became Jesus? From the accounts in the Gospels, it would seem to me that God did not leave heaven, but rather occupied both heaven and Earth simultaneously. When Jesus addresses God: “Why have you forsaken me?”, he isn’t talking to himself, is he?
I’ve always thought of it this way: if I write myself into a novel, then I’m existing in both the omniscient form of the author and the limited form of a character at the same time.
You seem to be very quick to put a limit on God’s powers. Why if God is all powerful cannot he chose to be Human?
You do God a disservice if you think he is so0 limited in power.
Why? Why couldn’t the defining attribute of God be the ability to love in an unqualified manner? Why couldn’t he retain this trait while voluntarily assuming a form that did not manifest all the traits of God (e.g., he could experience physical pain)?