Archive for the 'holy spirit' Category

Calories Schmalories

Published
by
Ken
on December 5, 2008
in holy spirit
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My wife has started to help me count calories. She has a nifty computer program that she has used for a while. Today was the first day following “the plan” and all I can say is, “I’m Starving!”

I did not eat poorly before but I never thought about calories. What I thought was a reasonable day’s food turned out to be 2700 calories! Not an ideal situation for losing the 13 pounds I’m shooting for.

Basically, to lose weight, you need to be hungry All The Time!

This got me thinking about being “filled with the Spirit.” Should we really be filled or is that a final goal to be realized in the future? If we get filled with food, we get lazy and fat and go to sleep. Is it the same with the Spirit?

What do you think?

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The downside of anthropomorphism?

Published
by
Ken
on May 11, 2008
in christianity, god, holy spirit and jesus
. 5 Comments

Reading this post, from Inspirations and Creative Thoughts, about Islamic reaction to the doctrine of the Trinity got me thinking. What are the downsides of thinking about God in anthropomorphic ways?

Along the lines of this post from Exploring Our Matrix, I was also thinking about how the OT God is most often conceptualized as having a location. He was with the Israelites either as the pillar of fire or in the Ark or he was located on Mount Sinai. In all these cases, you could point to one spot be say, “God is there.” At times, God is seen as locating himself, temporarily, in one spot — as with Moses and the burning bush — which de-emphasises his human characterization. The implicit idea is that God was there to communicate with Moses whereas in the previous examples he was more firmly implanted for a longer time frame.

From the NT, we think of Jesus mostly in his incarnated form and as the son of god. We think of him as an historical person (indeed, some Christians fight tooth and nail for an historical Jesus and claim that Christianity is nothing without it) located in a particular place at a particular time. Even now, after his ascension, he is sitting sitting at the right hand of God — an image which restricts both God and Jesus to a particular space.

There is very little in Christianity that focuses our attention away from the human characteristics attributed to God. Sure we talk about his omnipresence but right behind the words is the image of a father. Even in the end, our souls - the numinous part of ourselves - end up located in space, in heaven, where we will be with God and Jesus. You know, I’ve never thought about seeing the Holy Spirit in heaven. Nor have I heard a sermon preached on what role the Holy Spirit will play in heaven. The one part of the Godhead which retains some non-human characteristic is blatantly missing!

The Trinity could be a medium for concentrating on the non-human characteristics of God yet even here we’ve named them God the father and God the son. We force the divine into a human-shaped mold.

Perhaps it’s not all that surprising given the strong anthropomorphic nature of the OT which is Christianity’s heritage. But I think that it is also one reason we react so negatively to other religions. We call the atheistic because they do not have a God that is a father figure. We call them nihilistic because they do not end up in a specific place when they die.

God is more than our anthropomorphic conceptions of him. We can’t even refer to god without assigning a human gender to … him. I think most Christians would be offended if we called God “It.” God is more than our human conceptions otherwise he would not be God; he’d be understood by us. So why do we insist that everyone hold the same limited conceptions as we? Can’t the ineffable be reduced to more than one subset of ideas and still be the same?

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Can’t get there from here …

Published
by
Ken
on October 7, 2007
in born again, carl jung, god, holy spirit and quotes
. 0 Comments

… unless we’re already there and just don’t know it.

It seems to me that there is a disconnect in salvation. If we are totally depraved and can do nothing good without God then how can we receive the gift of God’s son? How can we, as sinners, bring ourselves to realize that we even need God let alone bring ourselves to find God? Through the urging of the Holy Spirit? I think not because the Holy Spirit needs to appeal to something in us which can know God and we in our sinful state cannot.

By way of (obviously imperfect, as all examples are) example, let’s say that I am trying to get Joe, who has been blind from birth, to understand the color red. He has been separated from color all his life (born color-depraved, so to speak) and so has nothing within himself with which he can begin to understand color. No matter how hard I press and explain and urge him to understand the color red, it isn’t going to happen. Any understanding of the color red at which Joe does arrive will, obviously and necessarily, be extremely different from the understanding that I have.

Isn’t that the predicament we are in? If we are 100% separated from God and always have been (and I’m talking about each person and not “man” and “woman” as created by God) then there is no way we are going to understand anything about God no matter how hard the Holy Spirit urges. Unless there us a bit of God in us — a seed or a kernel — then there is no way we can understand our need of God’s salvation and no way we can receive it. This reminds me of something C.G. Jung said:

For it is not that ‘God’ is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man.

We all have a “divine life” in us. We all have the image of God within. Sometimes that image is buried quite deeply and we have absolutely no recollection of it but it’s there. It has to be there in order for the Holy Spirit to work. So we are not given the image of God when we are “saved” but that (perhaps tiny) part of us that already is the image of God is brought to our attention.

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The work of the Holy Spirit

Published
by
Ken
on September 25, 2007
in buddhism, christianity, d.t. suzuki, god, holy spirit, meister eckhart, mysticism and quotes
. 3 Comments

Found a quote from The Orthodox Faith by John of Damascus on The Fire and the Rose:

The Son is image of the Father, and image of the Son is the Spirit, through whom the Christ dwelling in man gives it to him to be to the image of God.

So, we can’t become the image of God without the Holy Spirit? But I thought we were created in the image of God. There’s no becoming involved.

Genesis 1:27: So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

Genesis 9:6: Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made man.

In Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist, D.T. Suzuki writes:

Indeed, we are all apt to forget that every one of us is Buddha himself. In the Christian way of saying, this means that we are all made in the likeness of God, or in Eckhart’s words, that “God’s is-ness is my is-ness and neither more nor less.”

We already are the image of God so what does the Holy Spirit have to do? The Holy Spirit is the reminder of things we’ve forgotten because (again from Mysticism)

… the sense of opposites is dominating your consciousness. The idea of participation or empathy is an intellectual interpretation of the primary experience, while as far as the experience itself is concerned, there is no room for any sort of dichotomy. The intellect, however, obtrudes itself and breaks up the experience in order to make it amenable to intellectual treatment, which means a discrimination or bifurcation. The original feeling of identity is then lost and intellect is allowed to have its characteristic way of creaking up reality into pieces. Participation or empathy is the result of inellectualization.

. . .

It is our eating the forbidden fruit of knowledge which has resulted in our constant habit of intellectualizing. But we have never forgotten, mythologically speaking, the original abode of innocence: that is to say, even when we are given over to intellection and to the abstract way of thinking, we are always conscious, however dimly, of something left behind and not appearing on the chart of well-schematized analysis. This “something” is no other than the primary experience of reality in its suchness or is-ness …

The Holy Spirit does not enable us to become the image of God but, rather, is the constant reminder that we already are the image of God. If we allow the Holy Spirit to work in our lives, then we can realize this a-rational identity. A-rational because it does not come from our intellect. We cannot think our way into the image of God. We must experience it in a raw, unprocessed manner.

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More on Christianity’s Evolution

Published
by
Ken
on March 9, 2007
in christianity, evolution, god, holy spirit, i am that, jesus, ravi zacharias and trinity
. 1 Comment

I’ve been reading I Am That by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj and while reading page 15 where he says:

All there is is me, all there is is mine. Before all beginnings, after all endings — I am. All has its being in me, in the ‘I am’, that shines in every living being. Even not-being is unthinkable without me. Whatever happens, I must be there to witness it.

the following thoughts started flowing. They carry on where what I posted here leaves off. These are rough thoughts and were written while drinking coffee and feeding my daughter her lunch. As such they may not be very eloquent or complete but that’s ok. Anyway, here goes …

Don’t you see that Jesus had to portray God as being “out there”? He had enough troubles claiming that he was God’s Son and, therefore, God himself. Imagine if he started saying “Oh, and so are you!” His ministry wouldn’t have lasted three days let alone three years. He was talking to Jews, afterall, who had some real issues with “blasphemy”.

Ravi Zacharias, in the Introduction to Jesus Among Other Gods: The Absolute Claims of the Christian Message, talks about Deepak Chopra “who teaches a doctrine … woven into Vedic teachings, karma, and self-deification.” And the inference is that self-deification is bad because only God can claim to be God. But Zacharias’ version of self-deification is saying “I am the God of the Old Testament. I am the God whose name cannot be pronounced. I am the God who cannot be looked upon or else you will die.” But that’s not what the eastern religions are saying. There is no notion of the God of the OT — there’s no valid comparison between “I am God” said by a westerner and an easterner.

So, Jesus portrayed God as out there but he didn’t stop there. Now, I don’t know where the Jesus and Holy Spirit pieces of the Trinity were in the Old Testament but they were not a big part of it. But they are in the New Testament and this is the evolution I talked about the other post. Let’s see what they are in the NT.

Jesus is the way to God. And we are to be like Jesus. We are called children of God — just as Jesus was the son of God. The Holy Spirit is God in us. God is in us. God is part of us. The character of Jesus is the character in us that points us to God. The Holy Spirit is that part of us that is God.

So, Jesus starts with the bordering-on-blasphemous idea of his being God. He showed us God in human form. This is exactly what we needed. We needed a way to God. This is through Jesus Christ. But if Jesus was the son of God and we are children of God, then isn’t Jesus that part of us that points to God?

That’s all I’ve got … for now.

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God is not …

Published
by
Ken
on February 22, 2007
in christianity, god, holy spirit, jesus and trinity
. 0 Comments

I’ve touched on this idea in several other posts but while browsing my usual blogs I ran across several talking about the Trinity. The other day, I started outlining my own Trinity post but what I saw today led me in a slightly different direction.

On Faith and Theology, Kim Fabricius has a post called Ten propositions on the Trinity. Propositions 2-4 read as follows:

2. The Trinity is not an academic doctrine thought up by clever scholars, rather it grew out of the Christian experience of worship, i.e. it expressed the early church’s pattern of prayer to the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit.

3. The driving force of the development of the doctrine of the Trinity was Christological and soteriological, i.e. it served to articulate the Christian experience of salvation in Christ. The first Christians already knew God; through Jesus they came to know God as Jesus’ Father and Jesus as God’s Son; while in the Spirit Jesus continued to be present to them, forming a family of prayer to the Father and building a community of witness to Christ.

4. The church’s thinking was this: As God discloses himself in worship and salvation, so God must be in Godself. In the technical language of (Karl) Rahner’s Rule: the “economic” Trinity is the “immanent” Trinity, and the “immanent” Trinity is the “economic” Trinity. What you see is what you get, and what you get is what there is.

So, according to props 2 and 3, the Trinity “grew out of” and “served to articulate” an experience. But “experience” is very subjective. We can — and do in everyday life — experience things as “other than” what they are.

You experience the chair you are sitting on as a solid surface but at the atomic level there is far more empty space than occupied space.

You experience a firetruck as “red” but it appears red because that is the wavelength of light (i.e. color) that the paint on the firetruck rejects — it absorbs the other colors. So, is it really red or is it really not red or “other than” red.

We all experience time as other than the passing of regular intervals. “I spent the longest winter of my life in Chicago one weekend.” “Time flies when you’re having fun.”

I am fortunate enough to have seen Michelangelo’s The David in Florence. This is, in it’s physical essence, a chunk of stone. It’s been handled by a true genius but in it’s being it is a chunk of stone. But I experienced awe when I saw it. I did not perceive this piece of stone as just stone but as a presence.

So, is the chair “really” solid as I experience it? Is the firetruck “really” red as I experience it? Is The David “really” more than a chunk of stone as I experience it? Can we say that God “really” is a Trinity because that’s how we experience God?

Proposition 4 then claims that how God is disclosed to us through our experience must be God. This is the same God who could only flash his backside to Moses without killing him. We can know this God with certainty?

I find it simply fascinating that in one breath (some) Christians will talk about their perfect, all powerful, all knowing, all present God who is powerful enough to create the world by merely speaking and who works in such mysterious ways that we cannot know them and who is outside time and yada yada yada and yet in the very next breath say with utter conviction, “but that notion of God is 100% wrong”. In other words, “we can’t know everything that God is but we do know everything that God is not“.

Since (some) Christians experience God as the Trinity then God must be the Trinity and even though they don’t really know God they do know that if you don’t experience God as the Trinity then you are not really experiencing God and are a heretic. Bruce makes some excellent points along this line in his post Is Belief in the Doctrine of the Trinity Essential?:

The question I have is “can someone believe a heretical doctrine and still be a Christian?” How much heresy until they fall away from the faith? Where is that line where a person goes from child of God to child of the devil? Is salvation by “correct doctrine” or is it by personal faith in Jesus Christ? What about the Christians of the first 4 centuries before this issue was settled? Are they to be considered Christians if they did not believe in the Trinity they had not been taught yet? Did the Apostles teach Trinitarianism during the first 100 years of the Church? If not, how can they be considered Christians if Trinitarianism is essential to the Christian faith?

I also question our selective appeal to Church history. The Church, almost universally, throughout history baptized people for the remission of sins. History clearly bears this out. Yet, Baptists reject this. Are they not heretics for refusing the witness of the historic Church? Why is one group heretical but not the other? Who decides? The Pope? The National Council of Churches? The National Association of Evangelicals? Every little pope that pastors a local, evangelical Church? Who decides and by what authority?

I think that any and all notions of God that are disclosed to us (regular people — true mystics aside, perhaps) must be “dumbed-down” approximations of God’s true being. The concept of the Trinity (among others) is, very purposefully, just beyond our comprehension. It is a mystery that we can embrace without being completely overwhelmed. It is God showing us his backside as he did with Moses. But it is also less than God’s true being. It is the veil hiding God’s true face.

God may very well have seven veils — the Trinity being one. God may choose to disclose his being in different forms at different times to different people. If we have seen but the one veil, who are we to say that another, different veil does not hide the same face?

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