Hi, Everybody!
If it's Sunday, it's Meet The Pres...um, I mean, Dave Sim and "The Genesis Question":
1 April 18
Hi Matt!
You must be running out of my Biblical commentaries along about now. So…
2 March 14
Hi Troy and Mia!
Mr. Ross' further citations for Chapter
Three:
Touching the Almighty, we cannot find Him
out: he excellent in power, and in judgement, and in plenty of justice: he will
not afflict. Job 37:23
This is a very difficult theology to
actually believe and have faith in and yet I think it is as close to
irrefutable as theology gets. "We
cannot find Him out". Period. He's
God. Our brains are not large enough or
intricate enough to come close to comprehension of him.
Beyond "excellent", considering
the scope of His nature, the only real hope any of us have is that he is
perfect in power and in judgement and that, beyond "plenty" of
justice, God is Justice itself. "He
will not afflict" is, likewise, difficult to believe as theology,
particularly when we are certain that we are looking at affliction and looking
at the afflicted or when we feel ourselves to be afflicted in some way.
Affliction is an illusion for the God-fearing. We are not afflicted. We afflict ourselves
both individually and collectively and we follow in sequence generation upon
generation upon generation that have likewise afflicted themselves -- and us --
individually and collectively. That's
the price of free will. We get to choose
but we also have to suffer the consequences of those choices.
The consequences don't go away. They can
only be channeled into our own future and the future of others, inherited,
ameliorated mostly through God's undeserved kindness of which none of us are
worthy, repented of, atoned for and, ultimately, lifted off of us by God if He
determines us to be worthy of His undeserved kindness (an inherent
contradiction demonstrating God's mercy:
His kindness is always undeserved so none of us are worthy of it).
Since God is Justice in and of Himself
there is no Court of Appeal. We inhabit
His perfect clockwork mechanism intended for us. If the clock isn't working, that's because
we've chosen to be sand in its gears instead of keeping the mechanism smoothly
oiled.
Even violent, to us inexplicable and
painful death is just another form of atonement, I think: endure this now and it's like getting
thousands of years of time off for good behaviour. We see death as an end however much our
theology tells us that it is actually just the beginning. If we were able to see death and pain
accurately, I think, we would have a much better understanding of both and be
less inclined to inaccurately accuse God of afflicting us. God always means the best possible for us,
but often that means backing Him into a corner where only an inexplicable, violent
and painful death can offer us hope for the next world. Which we can't come near to understanding
until we actually get there and see what the genuine structure of Reality -- as
opposed to our "reality" -- is.
This was in beginning toward the God (2)
All through him came to be, and apart from
him came to be not-however one. Which
has come to be (3)
in him life was, and the life was the light
of the men (4) John 1:2-4
I've included John 1:2 and 1:4 because it's
hard to see 1:3 as a stand-alone instruction.
The original Koine Greek, it seems to me,
conveys a different sense than do the later translations. I find this a troubling aspect of most
Christian theology: the preference for the incomplete thought as long as it has
a couple of "happy words" in it instead of the overall sense of what
is being expressed. It does tend to
complicate things but amputating the overall gist of something in order to make
it less complicated -- well, I don't think it does Christianity any great
favours.
So let's start back at John 1:1: "In beginning was the word, and the word
was toward the God and God was the word."
You could write a book on what it does to the meaning to capitalize the
different nouns in the sentence.
"Word" is often capitalized, but I think that's
inaccurate. If you capitalize it, you
Deify it and you run into the problem of "joining gods with God" --
the primary indictment of men by God's revelation in the Koran -- at the
outset. The Word isn't God, the word is
God's -- "toward the God", aligned with God, serving God's
purpose. God did not begin life as The
Word, that would make The Word pre-existent to God, the parent to God. The word, god, expresses God when it is
capitalized. That's why the word was in
the beginning: a means of giving a name,
imperfectly, to what God was and is.
It's the beginning of God's creation, not God Himself. God, by definition, doesn't have a
beginning. He either has always existed
or He isn't God.
"All through him came to be"
personalizes the act of creation. God's
word, a "him" sets creation in motion. This is "the father" (as opposed to
The Father) that the Jesus of John's Gospel continually refers to. The word isn't God and the father isn't God. The word and the father are the means by
which God sets creation in motion. Thus
everything that is comes into being subsequent to, first, God, then God's word
which is the "father" the progenitor of everything that we see and
know as having been physically incarnated.
"and apart from him came to be
not-however one."
There's a double meaning there, I think, in
the hyphenated Koine Greek term:
"And apart from him came to be not one" AND "And apart
from him came to be however one."
This, it seems to me, expresses the concept of the meschiach, the
messiah, which I believe the Jesus of John's Gospel to have been. He is, simultaneously, the "not
one" and the "however one".
"in him life was and the life was the
light of the men"
It wasn't the word and it wasn't the
"father" it was the ideal creation.
Entirely subordinate to God and doing God's will and the work God gave
him to do -- but not yet. The
"not-however one" is held in abeyance from the beginning of creation
until his presence in the world is required as a template and a comparison: basically God saying, "Okay, if you were
all subordinate to me and obedient to me from the moment when I created with
world or -- fallback position for your own epoch -- when I created Adam, this
is what you would have been like."
Seminally, this is what is always going to happen. Every sun, every planet, every asteroid,
every comet, every galaxy, I infer, is issued a "not one" who is also
a "however one" when they come into being. Eventually the "not one" and the
"however one" incarnates, like a living report card. Here, here is how you are doing. We killed ours. Which certainly suggests to me a
"D-minus" at best. Considering
where we have collectively gone from there?
Probably a collective "F".
Every man was -- and is -- created with
that "light" inside of him.
There is nothing exceptional about the meschiach in terms of content,
just in what he chose to do with that content.
He fully developed the light he was given and so was able to instruct,
to understand, to explain, to heal, to give life to the dead. The Jesus of John's Gospel doesn't do
anything that Elisha didn't do in 2 Kings, but Elisha isn't the meschiach, we
all pretty much agree.
according as he chose us in him before
throwing down of world, to be us holy and unblemished down in sight of him in
love Ephesians 1:4
Well, yes.
Incoherent as I find Paul to be most of the time, this strikes me as
someone trying to express the above while drowning in a sea of
"D-minus" and "F" folks.
The "not one" and "however one" comes with a lot of
equipment. John the Baptist being a good
example. He isn't the "not
one" and "however one" and says that explicitly. But he is sent to bear witness about the
"not one" and "however one". He is the voice of one crying in the
wilderness -- ONE crying in the wilderness, that's how bad the situation has
gotten when it comes to true obedience to God.
And Paul follows in that tradition:
the only one enunciating the eternal verities.
I'd take issue with the idea that Christ
Jesus, the meschiach, "chose us in him" but I certainly can't refute
it. That's way out of the scale of human
speculation. The Jesus of John's Gospel was created by God for a specific
purpose -- to be "not one" and "however one"
simultaneously. The apostles, I assume,
were the apostles before they became the apostles. Anyone who became part of the narrative were
fated to become part of the narrative.
That is, I don't think there was a "Plan B" Simon Peter. They enacted what they were going to enact,
in the same way that from the time that the sun made the choices that would
make it a single star instead of a binary star, the earth existed
implicitly. The earth just further
enacted the choices the sun already made.
"to be holy and unblemished",
well, yes, that's what I think is the implicit promise of the meschiach. Here's a demonstration of what "the holy
and the unblemished" looks like, acts like and does. You're not supposed to worship him, you're
supposed to be like him, to be as much like him as you are capable of
being. Everything goes a lot better for
you as an individual and for you as a society if you choose to do that. But it's your choice.
who is image of the God the invisible,
firstborn of all creation, because in him it was created the all in the heavens
and upon the earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or lordships
or governments or authorities; the all through him and into him it has been
created Colossians 1:15-16
This is counterintuitive, to say the
least. How can something be an image of
something that's invisible? And yet that
seems to be the obvious point of the successive incarnation. God pre-exists and then comes the word which
is "toward the God". It
expresses God's nature imperfectly but it's "toward" the God: it's over in that direction as far as we can
get with our simplified physically incarnated brains and "limited
perception" brains.
I don't think this is accurate because it
suggests that Christ Jesus is the firstborn of all creation and that appears to
violate the sequence of God, the word -- which is the light of the men -- and
the "father". I think all of
those needed to exist before you could create the seminal obedient subject --
the "not one" and "however one". "Thrones or lordships or governments or
authorities" I think is a dog's breakfast of tangentially-related subjects
which illustrate the need for John 1: to
get the sequence of creation straight.
"Thrones", "lordships", "governments" and
"authorities" are corruptions, plain and simple -- the attempt to
usurp God's place as Sole Authority.
"YHWH God" is translated as "Lord God" for that same
reason: to attempt to establish that the
Lord is God. God is Our Lord but the
YHWH isn't God.
It's the reason that the meschiach -- the
"not one" and "however one" -- is called King of Kings and
Lord of Lords. It's an attempt -- to me
an imperfect and needlessly confusing attempt -- to try to merge human vanity
(thrones, lordships, governments and authorities) with the Actual Order of
Things. In short: be as much like the
Jesus of John's Gospel as you can and be as little like the "YHWH
God" as you can. As simple a
distinction as between "obedience to God" and "disobedience to
God" as you can get.
2 Timothy 1:9 Titus 1:2
I just noticed that Mr. Ross cited these
last week, so I won't address them again.
To faith we are minding to have been
adjusted down the ages to saying of God into the not out of ____s appearing the
____s being looked at to have occurred
Hebrews 11:3
Paul, it seems to me, is always TRYING to
express the simpler view…and, as always, I give create credit to Christians,
historically, for taking passages like this and making them into a guiding
credo.
I would respectfully suggest that it would
be worthwhile to examine Hebrews 11:3 at length in this form and draw your own
conclusions as to what, specifically, it is saying, rather than checking to see
what the popular translation has it as saying. Personally, I found it
completely incoherent and couldn't begin to suggest what it might be saying
because it doesn't seem to be saying anything:
it's just a batch of "happy words" that appear to have great
meaning to Paul.
One of the problems, I'm sure, is the
"compound terms" of Koine Greek.
In this passage, "we are minding", "to have adjusted
down", "being looked at" and "to have occurred" are
all single Greek terms.
The Interlinear translates it as "By
faith we perceive that the systems of things were put in order by God's word,
so that what is beheld has come to be out of things that do not
appear." The KJV has it as
"Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of
God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear." Which, it seems to me, express two very
different ideas (at LEAST two!) and
which, it seems to me, both mistranslate "to saying" as "the
word" when there are very different Greek terms for each. VERY theologically suspect considering how
specific John's Gospel is in using the term "the word" in a very
specific theological context and sequence.
Okay, back to Chapter Three, per se, having
made it through Mr. Ross' biblical citations.
Best,
Dave
Next Time: This, continued...
