John 3:16 questions

I'm not trying to deflect. I'm just wondering how in thunder you expect a transcendental, all-powerful G-d who can create all that is in the Universe--all the laws of nature, the subatomic structures, the planets, stars, galaxies, the unimaginable things that we haven't yet discovered and can likely not even conceive--with a word, to be capable of being fitted into a neat little box entitled "apprehendable via human reason".

That's the most asinine proposition I've ever heard in my life--perfectly ridiculous.

And until you get the slightest sense of awe and realization that you, with your little slop of grey matter, can never apprehend G-d's "how" and "why" by throwing a few words around, you've missed the entire point of what you are, what G-d is, and the unimaginable magnitude of the difference. I would be glad to talk about it if only I could. But it cannot be comprehended. And the only reason I keep beating that drum is because it's the real drum that must be beaten!

You seem to want a very small G-d, a G-d that's not really G-d at all, or not deserving of worship. You want a G-d bounded by your paltry little reason box--no wonder so many of you want nothing to do with G-d; your G-d's too small.

My point is that we can try and understand things like vicarious atonement and the creation of the Universe and G-d becoming flesh and virgin birth and miracles with our reason for the next ten million years, and we shall not have gotten our arms around them. You cannot grasp it through human reason.

Oh that Aristotle had been born amongst primitive tribals rather than the greatest intellectual society of his era, perhaps this prattle about human reason being capable of doing that for which it is perfectly unsuited might never have taken hold.

Almost makes one wish that Darius had vanquished Alexander the Great.

Let me say one more thing; it's a baby step at understanding a little--very little--of this issue: vicarious atonement can work--and obviously from my perspective as a believer, it does--when it's being accomplished by a G-d against whom every sin has been a personal affront, just like universal forgiveness can be accomplished only through a G-d with the same properties.

For example, G-d can forgive sins because He was the One who created the entire Universe and humankind in His image. We are, in a sense, His property. A sin committed by one of us against another can be forgiven by Him precisely because He has a stake in the matter: the sin is being committed against one who He made and loves.

There was a great controversy about this in the first century when Jesus, on at least one occasion, said to an invalid: "Your sins are forgiven" rather than "Be healed". The religious experts of the day knew full well that no one could forgive sins but for the person against whom the sin was committed--or G-d Himself. This makes perfect sense. If I act like an ass and insult Osborne, Bill Grover can't chime in: "Oh, Little Fauss, your sin against Osborne is forgiven". Osborne could rightly say: "Nonsense, I'm the one affronted, if there's any forgiving, I'll be the one to do it; butt out, Bill." But G-d Himself can forgive such a sin. He has a real stake in the matter.

So when Jesus walked the Earth with us, He had a right to forgive sins. He was G-d in a human package. And it's but a small leap from the proposition that He could forgive sins vicariously to the notion that He could then atone for those sins. How it works, I haven't a clue. Again, I'll loop back to the animal analogy. Your dog cannot comprehend Quantum Mechanics, it really can't even comprehend words (though it might, by conditioning, respond to some without real thought), but your dog is none the less subject to these very real laws of physics.

And so it is with you. You want a G-d that you can understand, that stands to reason so to speak, but your reason is like that dog. And that G-d does not exist--can not exist.

Why you think that if G-d exists, that He must be such a G-d, is beyond me. In fact, dare I say it? It doesn't stand to reason. It's irrational.

 

I absolutely understand the Mormon faith, and Kenneth Copeland has said precisely that. I will produce quotes with references from Mormon leaders throughout history as well as word-faith preachers if you wish.

I have known for some decades what the Mormons believe, I have numerous connections--this is not uncommon or hidden knowledge. I only found out about the Copelands of the world recently, and I consider them an extremely dangerous phenomenon, even if they are true believers of a sort.

 

Re: Re: Some Reflections

The reference to Hume that you give above may convince a Sunday school audience for which it is intended, but not a rational and thinking person, even of the 18th century!

Not only was Hume right in saying that God is the creation of our own minds, but I would take it one step further and say that God is also the evolving creation of our own minds. This is where there are problems for the Christian who have to reconcile the creation of the OT God with the NT God : one is very fierce and revengeful; the other more reasonable, loving and merciful.

The postscript to my minister friend and his indiscretion was that his church - a conservative Reformed church-allowed him to continue in the ministry! Maybe the point I was trying to make was that if he took the S of S literally, as it is meant to be taken, then he would not have got himself into all this trouble. The church really have such a perverted view of sex, starting from the Garden of Eden ... And they accuse the 'world' of perverting sex!!

 

I would certainly appreciate any quotes from the Copelands stating we can become God. Thanks in advance!

 

Anyway, just what is John 3:16 all about.

It is saying that God 'so loved the world' that he sent his son to die for it.

But why send his son to die, when the sacrifices offered in the OT dispensation were doing such a good job, for the Jews anyway?

And if he so loved the world, why limit the possibility of salvation to only those who hear the gospel given to a limited part of the world? If he loved the world so much, why not think of a way of salvation that would encompass all races and continents immediately?

I don't expect a rational answer to such questions as there are none! It is all about 'faith'.

Oh, and I liked the one about how Hume should have believed in the resurrection because the apostles had witnessed it. They also must have witnessed in the raising of the dead, the stopping of the sun, numerous miricles - the loaves and the fishes- as well as believing in the historisity of the OT miracles. Just how much of a religious narrative can you regard as history and fact, and how much must you put down to faith and wishful thinking? Can Christians tell us just what parts of the Bible are fact and what parts are imaginative narrative? Is the Tower of Babel, for example, history, and can we account for the different languages from this 'historical' account?

Hume was dead right in discounting the fanciful parts of scripture as factual and historic.

 

Well put, Mike.

Matt

 

I'll repeat what I said in my first post:

"I agree that there may be some ultimate ground of being, some reason why something exists rather than nothing. But I certainly don't know what it is. I don't even know how to conceive of it without circularity or infinite regress. I can give it a name, 'God' perhaps, but it remains a blank, a cypher. It's probably least misleading to just speak of 'the unknown'."

I'm not making any assertions about whatever the word 'God' refers to.

I'm just observing that people who do want to say things about God seem to be making serious problems for themselves if they simultaneously insist that God can't be known.

If something exceeds human knowing, then what sense is there in having beliefs about it?

Dogs never claim to know anything about quantum mechanics, so the problem doesn't even arise with them. But Christians do make some very elaborate assertions about Jesus' transcendental significance and about God more generally.

Which would seem to land us squarely in agnosticism if not atheism, right?

Like my dog, I don't claim to know about unknowable transcendent realities. So I happily accept the label 'religious agnostic'.

But I'm not sure that path is really open to a Christian. Pseudo-Dionysius and some of the medieval mystics came awfully close to it, but they couldn't completely dismiss the cognitive truth of revelation without ceasing to be Christian. So the tension remained.

 

Your primary problem here is failing to separate "knowing" from "understanding".

I never said G-d cannot be known.

But I did say that G-d cannot be understood in any real, absolute sense. Again, why would you expect to be able to understand Him?

I dare say the fact that virtually every other major world religion can be understood quite well in some sense is evidence that it was the handiwork of man. In contrast, Christianity says, in essence: "This is tough stuff ("We see through a glass, darkly" is how the most brilliant messianic rabbi of his era put it, and these words are recorded in the Bible), not really to be understood by appeals to mere human reason." The Bible is honest and up front about it. If it makes you feel better, I think that many pig headed prideful little prigs that sit in church and spend all their time thinking about how evil that world is around them put G-d in a little religious box as well. Maybe sometimes I've been one of them.

But I still believe every word in that dusty old book is true, even if some of them make me scratch my head.

We can devise doctrines that give us some notion of what we should believe, but to pretend that we can really understand what's at the bottom of it all, given the difference that we know must exist between us and G-d (far greater than the difference between Einstein and your dog), is perfectly hilarious.

We can know G-d, even if we can't understand Him perfectly. He came and lived among us. He spoke to us and was forever blowing the minds of even His closest associates (would you expect G-d among us to be mundane or ordinary?). And then He died as a vicarious atonement for our sins. Every person in every land can accept this atonement. And isn't it interesting that G-d chose the veritable center of the ancient world, a culture from which highways radiated out to the farthest reaches of the known world, to land on Earth? And then He allowed that culture to persecute His followers to the point of death so that they would scatter to those farthest reaches and spread His words?

Just because I can't understand G-d doesn't mean I can't know Him. I know Him personally, and I can't put in words how good He is.

 

Glad to oblige. And sorry for my snappy little remark to you earlier. You've always been a gentleman to me and everyone else on this board. My apologies.

Copeland Quotes:

"You don't have a god in you, you are one."

The Force of Love, 1987

"When I read in the Bible where God tells Moses, 'I AM,' I say, 'Yeah, I AM too!'"

The Force of Love, 1987

Jimmy: We both know the significance of I AM.

Copeland,on how humans could have performed the same universal atonement work that Jesus performed:

"The Spirit of God spoke to me and He said,

'Son, realize this. Now follow me in this and don't let your tradition trip you up.' He said, 'Think this way - a twice-born man whipped Satan in his own domain.'

And I threw my Bible down...like that. I said, 'What?'

He said, 'A born-again man defeated Satan, the firstborn of many brethren defeated him.' He said, 'You are the very image, the very copy of that one.'

I said, 'Goodness, gracious sakes alive!' And I began to see what had gone on in there, and I said, 'Well now you don't mean, you couldn't dare mean, that I could have done the same thing?'

He said, 'Oh yeah, if you'd had the knowledge of the Word of God that He did, you could have done the same thing, 'cause you're a reborn man too.'"

Substitution and Identification, 1988?

Copeland also stated that any of the OT prophets could've performed the same atoning work if they'd only had the proper knowledge of the spiritual world.

I only recently learned this stuff about Copeland, just within the last month or so. It was shocking to me as well. Someone, somewhere, must have put our names on his mailing list. We buy Christian and Messianic literature, sometimes online; perhaps one of those companies sold our data. We started getting this Copeland stuff: his magazine, an audiotape. I knew who Copeland was, had even watched him on occasion many years ago to see what all the hoopla was about (lasted about 5 minutes before I changed channels). I could tell he was this bombastic Texan who I wouldn't be able to stand five minutes in the same room with, but I never really thought he was so deep in heresy. We listened to the tapes, read the articles in the magazine, and came away with a vague impression that all was not well. This guy seemed to be demoting Jesus and elevating man. So I did numerous searches on him, and found the foregoing (in addition to many other statements by him that puts him clearly outside established orthodoxy, and perhaps into blasphemy). Also, a local word-faith pastor, who is a Copelandophile, has made statements right in line with the above: "You are Gods" (to his congregation); "You need to stop praying to a G-d in Heaven out there and start praying to the Kingdom of G-d within you"; "The only difference between me and Jesus is that He was of virgin birth."

And so, I have come to the conclusion that they mean very much what they say, and what they say has more in common with Warren Beatty's sister than it has with the Bible.

As for Mormonism, surely you jest. We know what they believe, they don't deny it when pressed.

 

I learned most of what little I know about the Church of Latter-day Saints from the thread below.

http://forums.degreeinfo.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=6939

Thank you Drs. Piña and Grover.

Exactly what is it that Mormons don't deny when pressed?

 

That Mormons believe that the god (lowercase used intentionally) of our universe is but one of many, that he (lowercase used intentionally) was once a man, like us, and that we can one day become god (ditto above) if we are only:

1). Good, church-going Mormons;
2). Married within said church;
3). And follow all the various and sundry other rules required to attain righteousness in the eyes of Mormonism.

If we meet the criteria above (and other criteria that may have evolved, as the church is forever changing its doctrine), then we will be partakers of the Celestial Kingdom of Heaven, and will one day get to have cosmic sex with our cosmic partner and populate other universes ourselves. We will get to become gods (see above note on lowercase).

I'm sorry for my attitude, but as a impressionable young man, I almost got sucked in by this stuff that truly does deserve the sobriquet "snake oil".

 

I don't think that I have a problem here. But I think that those who emphasize the utter transcendence of God might encounter difficulties when they claim propositional knowledge about God.

I don't understand your distinction, but I guessing that you are talking about cognitive vs non-cognitive ways of knowing.

I agree that perhaps the transcendent dimension of life is best approached non-cognitively. But I'm not sure how easily one could remain a Christian while doing that.

I think that all religions, including Christianity, are the handiwork of man. I don't think that other religions are more easily understood than Christianity. And just personally, I think that Christianity is notable among world religions for how much it claims to know about transcendent things.

The Tao te Ching begins by establishing an explicitly non-cognitive theme:

Even the finest teaching is not the Tao itself.

Even the finest name is insufficient to define it.

Without words, the Tao can be experienced,
and without a name, it can be known.

The same kind of idea can be illustrated in the practice of Zen monks.

That's coloring the unknown in pretty densely.

God is a "him", a human being writ large. He comes, he incarnates, he lives, he speaks, he dies, he atones. He somehow inspires the Bible (but for Protestants at least, little else). All the vast Old Testament content is also included, but only sorta. So he also creates, he judges, he condemns, he smites, he blesses, he chooses, he reveals, he inspires. Add the Trinity to the mix, the hypostases and the ousia, the Christological complexities, the natures and their relationships, and all the other acta of the orthodox councils (but not the heretical ones).

I'm not arguing against that stuff. I'm just pointing out that it's there.

And my point is that a non-cognitive idea of religious knowing is going to be hard to square with the many elaborate beliefs found in Christian orthodoxy.

 

No. I'm talking about knowing someone who's far too great for me to understand.

I fear we're just talking past one another.

"ONLY SORTA"? Shudder! Do you know who you're talking to here? I'm just kinda sorta an Old Testament nut! Ask Dr. Osborne. Maybe them other guys meeting at that protestant church down the street are only kinda sorta OT, but not this boy. Not this leaning strongly towards full-blown Messianic boy. You kidding me? Them's fighting words, Bill!

I'm not talking about the orthodoxy. I believe for the most part that Christian orthodoxy is pretty sound: the Nicene Creed, the Apostles Creed, etc. We can understand that, or at least respond to the words of it with a mite of cognition and a mountain of faith, like your dog comes drooling when you bump the food dish. But to understand what goes on behind it all, to really grasp it? No way. That's where faith comes in. And humility.

And of this talk or attitude I hear here and elsewhere to the effect of: "Well, shucks, reason's all I got, might as well go with that. Nothin I can't fit in this here reason slot can possibly be true. Vicarious atonement? Makes no sense to me. So, it must not exist. All some Sunday School fantasy. Dum de dum dum."

I just have to laugh. Come on folks, you can do better than that.

One last thing. I think you're dead wrong about Christianity vis-a-vis other world religions. The whole notion of it has just that strange twist that doesn't sound anything like what man would devise. Not so anything else. I stand by that statement.

 

Well, shoot THAT explains it. I'm not even a bad Congregationalist! (;->

Matt

 

Hi Ted,

Just a quick corrective on this: The main difference between Arminians and Calvinists turns on the issue of God's Sovereignty vs. the Free Will of Humankind; the Arminians aknowledge God's sovereignty, but also believe that salvation involves not only God's predestining of the "elect", but that He does so in accordance with His foreknowledge of their choice to be joined to Christ, exercising their free will as enabled by His grace.

Matt

 

Perhaps we can understand it as Plato and Socrates evidently did, and begin with "Theos the only God" (;->

Consider the first 5 chapters of On the Incarnation; that's essentially the kernal of what Athanasius was saying. In case you missed the link above, the entire book is online at http://www.spurgeon.org/~phil/history/ath-inc.htm

(Incidentally, worth a read as well (maybe even for Uncle J! (;->) is the introduction to this edition written by CS Lewis, "On the Reading of Old Books", which has wider applicability than Athanasius or even the Christian context; it is in part an encouragement to go to original sources.)

More peace,

Matt

 

Do better than your cartoonish depiction of my position?

You have a tendency towards derision, little fauss (as have had so many christian apologists.)

Perhaps it impresses Jesus. It doesn't do much for me.

Brett

 

Or we could go with Pythagoras and Apollo.

5 chapters?

No offense, really, but I'll pass. For pretty much the same reason I wouldn't read 5 chapters describing to me how a race of lizard men really rule the earth, or some such.

I gave you a paragraph, with which you "strongly disagreed". (It's still a little unclear to me what you disagreed with.) You offer me 5 chapters?

Perhaps you could mine a nugget of wisdom for me from these 5 chapters?

More peace back at you

Brett

 

Brett:

Drawing horns and a tail upon me in your mind may assist you in dismissing my argument, but it doesn't make it less true. Tell me what about my cartoonish portrayal (I freely admit I was having fun with the absurdity of it all) is untrue. Tell me why. You're obviously a bright fellow, take a shot at it.

Peace to you as well,

Mike

 

A guffaw does not an argument make.

Horns and tails? I don't sense any evil intent on your part. It strikes me more as a defense mechanism - you deride my position due to insecurities about your own.

Just calling it like I see it...

I consider it more a matter of manners, really.