Amen, brother! I wrote this years ago, about the intrinsic humanity of God
Michelangelo and William Blake were right about God.
From a Biblical perspective the nature of God is seen as reflected in aspects of the created order. Yes, God to a certain degree does have the nature of space, wind, emptiness, mist, air, sky, force, energy, light, darkness so congenial to Buddhist/Hindu/New Age types. However humans as being made in the image of God, are the best representation of what God is like – especially a human at their highest development, a mature, wise, good, vital 50+ man or woman. I knew a dynamic, spiritual woman in her late sixties, another one in her eighties they both reminded me of a female God the Father carrying personal authority.
To me saying God is NOT like a man – Our Father in Heaven - is dumbing God down, making God less than what he is, flattening the divine out, a less than human gas. In a true sense since humans are made in the divine image, humaness is intrinsic to God, God is even MORE human than we are, as our humanity is but an image of that which is being imaged. though divine humanity is an infinite multidimensional cube compared to our simple flat squares. God is even more perfectly human than us who are echoes, a flatter image of him.
There is much wisdom and truth in Michelangelo’s and William Blake’s depictions of God as a dynamic, active, wise older man. Far from being simplifications of God they point to his personal depth, his danger, his joy and love and perfect humanness and the familiarity and commonality we encounter when we meet him for he is like us for we are patterned after him.
And the fire, wind and water of the Holy Spirit, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb, the Living God, the New Testament filled with the assumption of the felt tangibility of the Spirit in the ORDINARY believer as a gift, not something earned arduously through spiritual discipline over time by an elite few.
A noble effort, Yoshi. But the heuristic quality is missing, the explanatory power that can inform other spiritual phenomena that demand we grapple with them. In particular, I suggest that NDEs make the expression “more real than real” a clear indicator that God will never fit a category we can claim is declarative and final.
My own project is to resist the Greek concept of the Absolute being used in theology when the only rational claim we can make is that God is our Ultimate.
Reality has layers and we do not, can not, occupy all the levels at once. The use of ‘metaphor’ should be a conscious act of humility.
Well, this is quite an interesting read. And I do agree with most of the things you said but a few points you made were hard to swallow. I personally believe that the word of God is both literal and metaphorical. As much as it is literal, I believe the bible is like a scroll that requires the Holy Spirit to give you insight and understanding.
A quick example is an expression "The hand of the Lord is upon me". This is a metaphorical statement.
Now about your point about God being human since the beginning of time. The word human is from the word humus which means "Earth", as we would see with the creation of Adam whose name also means earth. So basically we can't have "Human" without "Earth".
Now earth is a creation of God, which means it came out of God as an expression of Himself, and from this earth came Adam who was fashioned with the earth to have an expression or a likeness of God. The earth was vital in this creation process. The point is the earth is a creation and God preceeds his creations, so it would not make any sense to say that before the existence of earth, God was human.
John 4:24 lets us know that God is spirit and Jesus affirms that for us to behold the face of the father, we only need to look at him.
The pre incarnate Christ appeared a lot of times in the old testament and if he was human then, he wouldn't have had to be born as one to die. If he was already human since the beginning of time, he only need appear like he did in the old testament to suffer and die, And also note that he returned to heaven only in his spiritual body.
Another note is "God does not sin", "God cannot sin". He is the thrice holy God. While I saw what you were trying to get at, I think it is misleading to tell people that when we sin, God sins. Jesus took on the sin of the world when in his perfection, he decided to take on our mortal bodies.
Apart from these notes, I think it was a really good article. Thank you for sharing this. I think the point was to make it clear that we are sons of God and truly we are. Even creation waits in eager anticipation of the children of God to take up their identity in him.
Something this post made me think about: I don't agree that it was *Jesus of Nazareth* walking in the garden and making every appearance in the OT, though I agree that God has physical form. I think the Father also has (or can have) a physical form. I think the Spirit can have a physical form. I don't think the Son only has physical form due to the Incarnation. I think any appearance of God in the OT could be any or all of the persons of the Trinity
[A Trinitarian Aside: Theologians get bent out of shape about what analogy you use to think about transcendent reality, but the fact is that three persons and one essence can only appear and act and interact in physical, three dimensional space as three or one. To be three-and-one physically (three dimensionally) is nonsense, like trying to draw a square circle. I just think that God exists beyond three dimensions... and I mean that concretely, not as some gaseous abstraction.
Six squares can be one cube in three dimensions, but they can only be six squares in two dimensions. A two dimensional being, looking at a cube, could only see a square. God can be three persons and one essence in a reality beyond three dimensions (fifth dimensional, if we take Time as the fourth? Sixth? I'm still thinking about this), but any manifestation in three dimensional space must be as either one or three... because that's the way physical reality works.]
I think something important happened at the Incarnation: One of the persons of God entered the world not just as God or as Son of God, but as son of Mary, as son of David, as son of Abraham, born under the Law of Moses. The one who formed Adam from dust became Adam's son. He took on real DNA from Mary, and real human limitation, and new connection.
God is physical... but he is also more than physical, and more than human. This is not because he's an abstract swirling cloud of light, but because his physicality and potency and self cuts across time and space in ways our minds can only faintly reach at by analogy and intuition. I think the Son truly gave that up at the Incarnation.... not in a way that ultimately drained something from him, but as the assumption of humanity - with its limitations and connections - into the godhead. As strange as it seems, the Son of Adam (Man) could do things that the Son of God could not do... including suffer and die. He entered in to Death, as he had entered in to every other hope and horror of human life in the Fallen world. And he drew Death itself into the very life of the Godhead. He could only do that because he was a mortal, time-bound human: born on a specific date, died on a specific date, rose again as the victor over Death.
So. I know it's tricky to talk about God and time and things happening to him "before" and "after", but I do not think Jesus of Nazareth was born yet at the time of Adam's creation, even though I wholeheartedly agree that physical God with physical hands formed Adam from physical dirt, and I believe in the full divinity of Jesus. I think God is physical apart from the Incarnation. But I think it's important to acknowledge the limits of humanity taken on by the Son.
Sorry this post is so long, please push back or ask questions if I'm not explaining myself adequately.
I think the Trinity is an incredible Quantum Physics style superimposition. If a gallon of water was like the Trinity all of it would be solid ice, all of it liquid and all of it a gaseous vapor simultaneously. And then the ice, liquid, and vapor could all separate and dance around separately like we see in Daniel’s vision in Daniel 7, John’s visions in Revelation, and at the baptism of Jesus and in our own experience of the Living God. Three for the price of one and so much fun. Also note the description of Jesus in Revelation 1 and the description of the Lord in Ezekiel 1. They seem like they could be the same being.
Yes and the apostles did actually say that our post-resurrection body will be like Jesus’s. His post-resurrection body was touched by His disciples, He could go through walls and doors yet could also eat and drink and sit and talk. (Philippians 3:21). God became man so that man could become god(like) and in the new Jerusalem described in Revelation, God will again dwell with His people.
I think you are onto something. One of the main ways I related to God as a creator is writing stories and creating characters. I love my characters, as I've poured hundreds of hours into developing them to where I can dream dreams of them where they are seemingly alive and acting in character but without any of my overt control. I think God is like that, but on an even higher plane of reality. Because He is so much greater than we even His "characters" are actually living beings who can act on their own. And I've often thought of Christ as being God's author inserted avatar.
But maybe Christ really IS all of God. And perhaps someday my created characters will really be alive. We all seem to love stories for a reason. Our collective creations like Sherlock Holmes and Dracula seem to have taken on their own life at this point.
On review maybe this is just some literary version of simulation theory I accidentally cooked up :P
In my dreams I have seen Christ and he was a very real person with a real body.
Sorry for the scatterbrained comment, but the article did stimulate contemplation.
Great article, it also explains then how is it that if we are made in the likeness and image of God he will resurrect us. We may go back to the ground but God knows how to fashion us out of the ground once again, as he did at the beginning of time.
Amen, brother! I wrote this years ago, about the intrinsic humanity of God
Michelangelo and William Blake were right about God.
From a Biblical perspective the nature of God is seen as reflected in aspects of the created order. Yes, God to a certain degree does have the nature of space, wind, emptiness, mist, air, sky, force, energy, light, darkness so congenial to Buddhist/Hindu/New Age types. However humans as being made in the image of God, are the best representation of what God is like – especially a human at their highest development, a mature, wise, good, vital 50+ man or woman. I knew a dynamic, spiritual woman in her late sixties, another one in her eighties they both reminded me of a female God the Father carrying personal authority.
To me saying God is NOT like a man – Our Father in Heaven - is dumbing God down, making God less than what he is, flattening the divine out, a less than human gas. In a true sense since humans are made in the divine image, humaness is intrinsic to God, God is even MORE human than we are, as our humanity is but an image of that which is being imaged. though divine humanity is an infinite multidimensional cube compared to our simple flat squares. God is even more perfectly human than us who are echoes, a flatter image of him.
There is much wisdom and truth in Michelangelo’s and William Blake’s depictions of God as a dynamic, active, wise older man. Far from being simplifications of God they point to his personal depth, his danger, his joy and love and perfect humanness and the familiarity and commonality we encounter when we meet him for he is like us for we are patterned after him.
And the fire, wind and water of the Holy Spirit, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb, the Living God, the New Testament filled with the assumption of the felt tangibility of the Spirit in the ORDINARY believer as a gift, not something earned arduously through spiritual discipline over time by an elite few.
A noble effort, Yoshi. But the heuristic quality is missing, the explanatory power that can inform other spiritual phenomena that demand we grapple with them. In particular, I suggest that NDEs make the expression “more real than real” a clear indicator that God will never fit a category we can claim is declarative and final.
My own project is to resist the Greek concept of the Absolute being used in theology when the only rational claim we can make is that God is our Ultimate.
Reality has layers and we do not, can not, occupy all the levels at once. The use of ‘metaphor’ should be a conscious act of humility.
Well, this is quite an interesting read. And I do agree with most of the things you said but a few points you made were hard to swallow. I personally believe that the word of God is both literal and metaphorical. As much as it is literal, I believe the bible is like a scroll that requires the Holy Spirit to give you insight and understanding.
A quick example is an expression "The hand of the Lord is upon me". This is a metaphorical statement.
Now about your point about God being human since the beginning of time. The word human is from the word humus which means "Earth", as we would see with the creation of Adam whose name also means earth. So basically we can't have "Human" without "Earth".
Now earth is a creation of God, which means it came out of God as an expression of Himself, and from this earth came Adam who was fashioned with the earth to have an expression or a likeness of God. The earth was vital in this creation process. The point is the earth is a creation and God preceeds his creations, so it would not make any sense to say that before the existence of earth, God was human.
John 4:24 lets us know that God is spirit and Jesus affirms that for us to behold the face of the father, we only need to look at him.
The pre incarnate Christ appeared a lot of times in the old testament and if he was human then, he wouldn't have had to be born as one to die. If he was already human since the beginning of time, he only need appear like he did in the old testament to suffer and die, And also note that he returned to heaven only in his spiritual body.
Another note is "God does not sin", "God cannot sin". He is the thrice holy God. While I saw what you were trying to get at, I think it is misleading to tell people that when we sin, God sins. Jesus took on the sin of the world when in his perfection, he decided to take on our mortal bodies.
Apart from these notes, I think it was a really good article. Thank you for sharing this. I think the point was to make it clear that we are sons of God and truly we are. Even creation waits in eager anticipation of the children of God to take up their identity in him.
God is outside of time. That's an accepted theological concept. We know He became man, so if He's outside of time...He definitely always was.
I don't know if you've seen the sci-fi film Arrival, but echoes a lot of what you're exploring here.
I love your worldview rehabilitation project.
Something this post made me think about: I don't agree that it was *Jesus of Nazareth* walking in the garden and making every appearance in the OT, though I agree that God has physical form. I think the Father also has (or can have) a physical form. I think the Spirit can have a physical form. I don't think the Son only has physical form due to the Incarnation. I think any appearance of God in the OT could be any or all of the persons of the Trinity
[A Trinitarian Aside: Theologians get bent out of shape about what analogy you use to think about transcendent reality, but the fact is that three persons and one essence can only appear and act and interact in physical, three dimensional space as three or one. To be three-and-one physically (three dimensionally) is nonsense, like trying to draw a square circle. I just think that God exists beyond three dimensions... and I mean that concretely, not as some gaseous abstraction.
Six squares can be one cube in three dimensions, but they can only be six squares in two dimensions. A two dimensional being, looking at a cube, could only see a square. God can be three persons and one essence in a reality beyond three dimensions (fifth dimensional, if we take Time as the fourth? Sixth? I'm still thinking about this), but any manifestation in three dimensional space must be as either one or three... because that's the way physical reality works.]
I think something important happened at the Incarnation: One of the persons of God entered the world not just as God or as Son of God, but as son of Mary, as son of David, as son of Abraham, born under the Law of Moses. The one who formed Adam from dust became Adam's son. He took on real DNA from Mary, and real human limitation, and new connection.
God is physical... but he is also more than physical, and more than human. This is not because he's an abstract swirling cloud of light, but because his physicality and potency and self cuts across time and space in ways our minds can only faintly reach at by analogy and intuition. I think the Son truly gave that up at the Incarnation.... not in a way that ultimately drained something from him, but as the assumption of humanity - with its limitations and connections - into the godhead. As strange as it seems, the Son of Adam (Man) could do things that the Son of God could not do... including suffer and die. He entered in to Death, as he had entered in to every other hope and horror of human life in the Fallen world. And he drew Death itself into the very life of the Godhead. He could only do that because he was a mortal, time-bound human: born on a specific date, died on a specific date, rose again as the victor over Death.
So. I know it's tricky to talk about God and time and things happening to him "before" and "after", but I do not think Jesus of Nazareth was born yet at the time of Adam's creation, even though I wholeheartedly agree that physical God with physical hands formed Adam from physical dirt, and I believe in the full divinity of Jesus. I think God is physical apart from the Incarnation. But I think it's important to acknowledge the limits of humanity taken on by the Son.
Sorry this post is so long, please push back or ask questions if I'm not explaining myself adequately.
I think the Trinity is an incredible Quantum Physics style superimposition. If a gallon of water was like the Trinity all of it would be solid ice, all of it liquid and all of it a gaseous vapor simultaneously. And then the ice, liquid, and vapor could all separate and dance around separately like we see in Daniel’s vision in Daniel 7, John’s visions in Revelation, and at the baptism of Jesus and in our own experience of the Living God. Three for the price of one and so much fun. Also note the description of Jesus in Revelation 1 and the description of the Lord in Ezekiel 1. They seem like they could be the same being.
Yes and the apostles did actually say that our post-resurrection body will be like Jesus’s. His post-resurrection body was touched by His disciples, He could go through walls and doors yet could also eat and drink and sit and talk. (Philippians 3:21). God became man so that man could become god(like) and in the new Jerusalem described in Revelation, God will again dwell with His people.
I think you are onto something. One of the main ways I related to God as a creator is writing stories and creating characters. I love my characters, as I've poured hundreds of hours into developing them to where I can dream dreams of them where they are seemingly alive and acting in character but without any of my overt control. I think God is like that, but on an even higher plane of reality. Because He is so much greater than we even His "characters" are actually living beings who can act on their own. And I've often thought of Christ as being God's author inserted avatar.
But maybe Christ really IS all of God. And perhaps someday my created characters will really be alive. We all seem to love stories for a reason. Our collective creations like Sherlock Holmes and Dracula seem to have taken on their own life at this point.
On review maybe this is just some literary version of simulation theory I accidentally cooked up :P
In my dreams I have seen Christ and he was a very real person with a real body.
Sorry for the scatterbrained comment, but the article did stimulate contemplation.
Great article, it also explains then how is it that if we are made in the likeness and image of God he will resurrect us. We may go back to the ground but God knows how to fashion us out of the ground once again, as he did at the beginning of time.