The fullness of the Godhead and salvation

Great Debates
1

I suppose I should start with this:

Well I think this falls under the witnessing category. In Christianity there is a belief by many religions that is biblically inaccurate, yet it is continued to be taught and accepted as the truth. That is the belief that there is a triune God in the separate form of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. What I know to be true is that Jesus is God as well as the having the Holy Spirit living within us.

First of all we know there to be one true God, as found in Deuteronomy 6:4 “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD.” This is the basis of faith on a one true God. Another verse is Isaiah 44:24 “I am the Lord that maketh all things; that stretcheth forth the heavens alone, that spreadeth abroad the earth by myself” We also know that God is a spirit, John 4:24 God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. In the Old Testament God showed himself in many forms, the burning bush, a cloud pillar, angels, etc. But Jesus himself said that you cannot see a spirit, Luke 24:39 “A spirit hath not flesh and bones as ye see me have.” God had shown himself in many forms but no one had ever seen the embodiment of God. To be able for God to finally show Himself to His people He took upon flesh. God finally became visible, glorious day. Isaiah had prophesied this day long before, Isaiah 42:13 “The Lord shall go forth as a mighty man.” Jesus is God manifested in the flesh. Philip asked Jesus to “show us the Father”. Jesus replied, John 14:8, 9 "Have I been so long time with you and hast thou not known me, Philip? he that hath seen me hath seen the Father.” Paul saw this and communicated the mystery to Timothy: I Timothy 3:16, “God was manifest in the flesh” and to the Colossians, Colossians 2:9 “In Him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead (Greek: Deity) bodily.” Even the name Emanuel means God with us as prophesied by Isaiah (Isaiah 7:14; Matthew 1:23). In Colossians 1:19 one can see that, “It pleased the Father that in him (the Son) should all (the Father’s) fullness dwell.” That is why John said “the Word was made flesh”. Jesus cannot be a co-equal to God, nor can He be a double or duplicate deity. Jesus is God, the spirit, manifested in the flesh as a man. God never invented or created a God the Son. The Son of God was “made of a woman”, as seen in Galatians 4:4, and was “conceived…of the Holy Spirit” in Matthew 1:20. That shows the Holy Spirit is actually God, since John said the Son of Man is the “only begotten of the Father” (John 1:14).
Jesus=God.

As to salvation one can see in Acts 2:38 “Then Peter said unto them, Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.” Repenting is asking God for remission over your sins and a pact of sorts not to do the sin again, this is the first step to salvation. Baptism is another stumbling block for some, as seen here (and in every other case of baptism in the bible, Acts 2:38, 8:16, 10:48, 19:5) they can be seen using the name of our Saviour, Jesus, along with Lord or Christ. No where in the New Testament does one baptism use the formula of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, these are titles for Jesus which is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Yet a major portion of the Christian churches today baptize in this fashion. This tripartite formula was an invention that was post-apostolic and well to be blunt, inaccurate. one can also note that in every case of baptism in the bible the person baptized was immersed in water not just sprinkled upon, which is also done by many Christian churches today, baptism is the second part of salvation. The Holy Spirit is the most beautiful, wonderful, euphoria that I have ever experienced, accompanied with such a peace and filling me with a fervor to just love Him in every way possible. The Holy Spirit is recognized by the speaking in other tongues, the beauty of this experience can’t be fully described in words, but it is something that one can obtain when they totally forget about ones self and only concentrate on how they can love Jesus to the fullest and simply asking for it, after the repentance of sins. repentance + baptism in Jesus name + The Holy Spirit = salvation
Together this is what makes me so happy in life, oh the feeling of Gods undying love and the knowledge of knowing the truth. I will confess that I am human and born into sin and I stumble, and stumble quite a bit, but when I do so I always get back on my knees and ask God for forgiveness. If you have any questions about the salvation plan or the fullness of the Godhead, please ask. I remember the words of someone really wise I know, well it was something to the effect of, through all the battle between words if nothing is accomplished, just try to show love through it. I love you all, and I pray that God richly blesses you.

2

Nomadic_One, I’m happy to hear that your experience with Christianity has been a positive, fulfilling one. While your experience was a good one, please consider that not everyone’s experience is like that.

Mine was not. I tried the ‘born again experience’ and had three days of intense soul-wrestling that convinced me that Christianity was not for me. Therefore, I left. Years later, in a Wiccan ceremony, I had another an experience that convinced me I was on the right path and this was the right choice for me.

It’s wonderful that Christianity works so well for you. Please remember that it doesn’t work well for everyone. When someone chooses a faith to practice (or chooses to practice none at all) they do so because it’s right for them. Please be respectful of their choice and their right to choose.

3

Freyr, if you saw someone that was trapped on a rail-road track and you could save their life by helping them free, would you? Well this is how I feel about witnessing, there are people out there on the rail-road tracks of life and I would like to be there to help them get off of it and help save them and their soul. Thank you for your input.

4

Ironically enough, this is exactly how a number of people (myself included) feel about you.

No, we do not know that. It is stated as truth by one particular religion. That doesn’t make it true. For comparison, consider all the other religions that have existed throughout human history. Every one has proposed a certain “truth” that its followers believed in. Yet I would assume that you are not inclined to believe that they were actually true. Likewise, I am not inclined to believe that your religious claims are truth without some good, solid evidence.

5

-Joe Random, Well friend, there have been many attempts to dis-prove the bible and what contains therein and cant find any facts or historical faults anywhere within it. http://www.shenessex.heartland.net/kyfr/bibletru.htm is a good site that shows some good evidance proving some truths within the bible. :slight_smile: thank you for your thoughts.

6

You must be reading a different bible than the rest of the world, because the bible that I’m familiar with has plenty of contradictions and factual errors. Case in point:

So, who is Joseph’s father, Jacob or Heli? It can’t be both, so one of those two quotes must be wrong. Or how about:

Surprise! Bats aren’t birds; they’re not even close. So now we have a factual error. Maybe that was just a grouping of all the flying animals for simplicity’s sake, you say? How about:

Hares don’t chew cud. Here’s one more:

But locusts amd beetles don’t have four feet! Yet another error.

Yeah, the bible has some truths. That’s to be expected from something that can be considered a work of historical fiction. However, the bible also has flaws, and, as such, it cannot be the inerrant, divinely inspired word of God.

7

The claim by theists that they are witnessing out of concern for our souls is, for the most part, a lie.They despair over other human beings rationally rejecting their claims for the same reason a father despairs when his teenaged son starts leaning in a different political direction from his own.It is the same “concern” that a boy band fanatic feels when she discovers that the guy she has been dating who she is really attracted to hates commercial/top 40 music adn listens to bands like the Dead Kennedys or The Misfits.

It is pure and simple egotism which the theist attempts to justify via the authority of God.“Hey…don’t look at me!God tells me to do this!” or “Hey…normally I would not care if you had a different belief or if you lacked a conviction I had unless you were putting yourself in danger and I KNOW you are in danger of suffering eternally!”

For one thing we do not “know” there is a such thing as a soul.We have never observed or measured such a thing and there is nothing to warrant the inference.Also, we have never observed anything to warrant the inference that a god or God exists.
The best theists have to offer is anecdotal evidence which is worthless as evidence because it cannot be scrutinised or falsified.

Your bit about “people have tried many times to dis-prove the Bible” is also off.Empirically one cannot prove a negative(such as “Santa Claus does NOT exist” or “God does not exist”) and I know of no one who has ever tried to disprove the Bible in such a way.It is obvious that Bibles exist.What CAN be “disproven” however is the Bible’s credibility and when we show the Bible is not a credible source, the empirical claims made within that tome can be effectively dismissed until such time as empirical evidence substantiates the claims.

8

Oh yes, anyone who believes in God must, by definition, not be concerned about the goodness of a person.

9

Joe Random,

I don’t know if it was your intent, but you won’t convince anyone that the Bible is untrue by listing what seem to be Biblical contradictions. I have read that, as far as anyone knows, there is no “silver bullet” contradiction. Every objection (including yours) raised that I have seen has been answered by Christian apologists. If you really care about this, a simple Google search will provide you with the answers to your objections. They can be explained.

10

Christian apologists already have their conclusion firmly set and their minds closed, so no amount of reason or evidence will ever convince them that the Bible is merely a compendium of histories and religious poetry and not the Magic Key to Enlightenment.

It’s nice that the OP has found a new toy and wants to share.

11

I wouldn’t say that about every Christian apologist. And even if that were partly so, it wouldn’t make their answers to objections posed by skeptics untrue.

12

Im sorry if this is blunt but that sounds really cold. God is love, and we have to strive to have the best lives we can, one of the things we can do do so is to witness and yes save their soul.

13

There doesn’t have to be any “silver bullet” contradiction, since there are more than enough “regular bullet” contradictions to make up for it.

Every aswer that I have been given by the Christian apologists seems to involve me not having enough faith to interpret the bible correctly, because only people who have large amounts of faith can see the “truth”.

I don’t consider that much of an answer.

Yes, they can be explained, but the contortions of logic needed to do so boggle the mind. Case in point: The first rainbow was made to appear after the Flood. I have had people seriously suggest that it never rained before the flood, which is why there were no rainbows before. Others have, just as seriously, I might add, suggested that light didn’t refact the same way before the flood.

Both of these answers are cop-outs that appeal to divine power to resolve what would otherwise be a damning (pun intended) contradiction. It’s flawed logic:

“We know that God exists because the bible says so. We know the bible is correct because everything in the bible is the word of God, and God is imperfect and infallible. We know that the bible is the word of a perfect and infallible God because it has no contradictions or errors. Oh, and all those errors you pointed out aren’t really errors, because God can do anything, including altering the laws of physics for the sole purpose of making the bible internally consistant”

That’s circular reasoning. Apologists cannot (reasonably, at least) appeal to divine power to resolve contradictions and errors in their holy texts.

14

…hmm dont you think that if God was powerful enough to make the universe in 6 days that he could make a rainbow appear? God used it as a promise to never flood the earth again.

15

God would probably have to change the way light refracts in this universe in order to do that. That would mean that light would have had different properties pre-flood. That would mean that light behaved far differently than it does today. Why would God tinker with the refracting properties of the entire universe (including the trillions of stars and galaxies) in order to prove a point? Seems like a rather wasteful and capricious deity, rather than an intelligent deity who doesn’t mess with the nature of the universe willy-nilly.

Wouldn’t the easier explantion (and more respectful of God) be that the flood story was really a human mythos created as an attempt to relate to an unknowable deity?

16

If, as you say, “God is love” then isn’t it just as likely that “God” would accept all people regardless of what they believe or don’t?

Your belief in the necessity of “saving a soul” is based on the notion that only the viewpoint you subscribe to is correct and anybody who believes otherwise will be doomed. Many other people disagree with you, myself included. I’ve always felt-even before coming to the conclusion that there is no god-that any god that would be so capricious as to rule out anybody who didn’t follow a particular doctrine, even if they were basically good people, wasn’t a god worth my time.

17

Strawman.I never said anything like that.I was refering specifically to “witnessing” which is, by and large, NOT done out of genuine concern, but out of egotism.

18

The problem is that these same bizarre rationalizations and impossible twists of logic can be used to “explain away” errancies in ANY scripture/holy book.In fact if I were to seriously believe that the events described in H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds actually happened just as described in that book, you could not convince me otherwise no matter how rational adn sound your argument.It is even easier to do this with the Bible because any violation of logic or nature can be attributted to a supernatural deity.
“Well, if God could create a universe in just six days then surely he could halt the earth’s orbit around the sun(making it appear that the sun “stops” in the sky) for a day!”.
The problem with this reasoning is that you have to presuppose that a God did these other extraordinary things to justify the claim that he did still more extraordinary things.It is like saying “What do you mean Santa could not fly around in a sleigh?If he can magically divine the moral standing of every child in the world and shimmy his fat arse down billions of chimneys in juts a few hours then surely he could ride in a sleigh pulled by flying rheindeer!”.

19

You’re missing the point. There is no non-biblical evidence that there was ever a point in human history where it either never rained anywhere, or where light refracted differently in water. And you’d think that someone would have commented on the fact that sticking a spear into a lake straight at a fish suddenly stopped working the way it was supposed to.

For those of us who do not believe that the bible is completely accurate and unflawed, “goddidit” is not a valid argument for explaining away errors and incosistancies. If it were, then I could easilly write The Gospel of the Invisible Pink Unicorn, and have all kinds of outlandish stuff in the book. When anyone points out that the stuff in the book is ridiculous and could never have happened, I can just say “Since the Invisible Pink Unicorn created the entire Universe in sqrt(pi) nanoseconds, don’t you think She’s powerful enough to make rain fall up toward the sky? She only made the rain start falling down as a promise to never drain the earth of all its water ever again.”

Do you see where I’m going with this? The bible is only internally consistant by means of the Almighty Loophole, who’s existance can only be proven via circular logic. If you start with the base asumption that the bible must be shown to be correct before you believe the stuff in it, then this becomes clear.

20

As someone else already pointed out a loving god would not demand worship or even aknowledgement.Any being worthy of being worshipped would not want to be and in being who would demand such does not deserve it.Worship insults a being who deserves it and demeans us whether the being deserves it or not.

The excuse you present for your bigotry towards other humans does not fly.“God made me” is being used to justify what is nothing more than an ego driven political agenda.The really sick thing about “God told me to” or “God made me” is that there are a few lunatics who actually do the things that the Bible says that God commands with this same rational and it is costing children their lives.A woman in Texas recently stoned her three children to death saying that God told her to.Of course christians come out in force to dismiss this as the act of a mad woman who was not inspired by God, even though all Bibles I am familiar with clearly state that children should be put to death for a variety of petty offenses.
The excuses posited by christiasn who “witness” are no more insane than the ones put forth by mothers who kill their children.It is only the behavior/action that is somewhat less horrific.
Bottom line is that if you worship a god(whether it exists or not) who would create a place like Hell and then sentence people for not believing in or knowing of his existence to the same fate as he would reserve for genocidal maniacs and child molestors, then you nare worshipping an evil god.You have no more reason to think he would treat YOU fairly in the afterlife than you do to think he will treat ME fairly.