Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven
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| Sunny Days in Heaven Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven |
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Wednesday, May 15, 2002 Batter my heart, three personed God I have been revisiting the Arian heresy on the web and am able to conclude I am not heretical on his account. I also came across a definition of unitarianism which I am doubtful of as to its efficacy. Catholic Encyclopedia says this about Arius, "The drift of all he advanced was this: to deny that in any true sense God could have a Son; as Mohammed tersely said afterwards, "God neither begets, nor is He begotten" (Koran, 112). We have learned to call that denial Unitarianism." A great many of these heresies or differences of opinion in the early centuries of doctrinal formation had to do with Greek rationality running into newly minted Scripture in the New Testament. It created tensions and strains; and challenged either conformity or proposed new unities. Absolute reliance on Scripture meant that just about anything could be argued since the NT presents many different kinds of Jesus' and different absolutisms, too. The people in the pews (actually people stood then, I believe) were not much engaged except to reject most new thoughts. It was mostly all battles of the bishops and priests. Anyway, back to the above, it must be painfully obvious to us today that in no true sense could God have a son, that God did not create the person of Jesus since that would be saying that God created himself. But just as obvious to a Christian is that fact that God created a human being named Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus didn't appear one day incognito of a man. But we have the Church hoping to assert that Jesus managed to be two distinct people at the same time while in the flesh. God and a man. This assertion, which the church deems important, is essentially meaningless. It is irreconcilable in terms of logic, and thus meaningless. All we can actually know is that while Jesus was a man of mortal flesh and blood, he was only a man and limited in every way a man is. What we don't exactly know is how limited is Man? We also know that after death, Jesus was no longer a mortal man, but God who appeared to other humans in the form of a man while bearing all the presence and power of God in him. So much of what we face in theology is a result of Man's desire to know; except the desire is corrupted from one of simply wanting to know into one of dominating a problem and making it resolve under our force of will and power; as if with enough brute intellectual power we can crack the code which is God, and make him yield to us his secrets. Which then forces other men to come along and say, what a bunch of BS; that the way is not the mind, but the heart - in trust, risk, vulnerability, and a certain artistic boldness and audacity. Not even God tries to explain himself discursively in the manner of theologians. but depends on poetry, analogies, similes, parables, pericopes, and metaphors. Most of what I ever do as a thinker is to tear down others' arguments and reduce them to absurdity; make them reveal their falsehood. The human tendency to decorate, ornament, elaborate, and intellectualize is endless. It encrusts faith with layers of pious untruth or half-truth which accomplishes an essential purpose, to get people distracted and not thinking or praying. Distraction means that people will not experience their feelings, their wounds, their sins, their despair, their fears, their losses, and their desperate need for joy, peace, healing, and heaven. Of course, life and the way so many seek distraction is the way things are and so I'm not going to complain (too much) about that. I'm just looking for someone to shoot the examined life's breeze with. posted by Mark Butterworth | 1:20 AM | |
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