/christian/ - Christian Discussion and Fellowship

He oversees but is not in the world as we are; thus we can only try to stretch our tired arms and reach for His, whose have been stretched wide open on the cross for us.

>>757784

He is too great to be within creation, and so great that His being is restricted by nothing. See how rather than being contradictory, one flows from the other.

>>757793

So he includes the world within his eternal being?

>>757787

That sounds like as if he was entirely separate.

>>757784

He made the world from nothing, He simply spoke it into existence. It's not made of Him, therefore it's separate. However, God is infinite, so He encompasses and fills all things.

>>757795

Sounds like, maybe:; but He’s with us in a variety of ways, without having to explicitly show Himself.

Wish I was better at explaining all this, sorry.

>>757784

>How can he be separate from the world if he is everywhere?

The whole transcends the part.

>>757797

That would imply that you can separate nothing from everything, which is a well known paradox. Either everything includes nothing, or nothing equals everything.

Also God definitely didn't create man out of nothing, and he even breathed his own breath into man. Now one could argue that man is a special case, because he was made in the image of God, but what creation doesn't reflect it's maker?

Even if we could clearly separate nothing and eternity, the idea that God is completely separate from his creation just doesn't seem to be a correct assumption, given that he is omnipresent and he continually creates the universe.

I find the idea of an immanent God quite compelling, but I also think that he is also transcendent.

>>757815

God creates things into being where there was nothing before. Creating out of nothing is a exactly what he does, compared to what we do which is transforming things that pre-exist into other things. This wasn't the case for God, nothing like the world or man exists, not their material parts neither their souls, so he created everything literally out of nothing, out of the void, which is incomprehensible to us and might seem "paradoxical". But I don't see the paradox.

>>757815

>That would imply that you can separate nothing from everything, which is a well known paradox.

Not what I said. God created the universe from nothing. He is separate from all created things, but since God is infinite, all things may said to be "within" Him. None of that has to do with separating everything from nothing.

>Also God definitely didn't create man out of nothing, and he even breathed his own breath into man.

God created man from dust, but the dust is from the Earth. The universe in its entirety was spoken into being. Therefore, everything was made ex nihilo.

>>757821

>>757822

This is so wonderful.

I hope God is real, because this is so nice.

>>757829

It is wonderful :)

Read some of Genesis. The story of creation is beautiful. Even there one finds prophecies of Christ.

Redpill: open theism

The insistence that God is so detached and outside of time is an extrabiblical impulse stemming from platonism

>>757854

Redpill: open theism

Wut

Why hasn't anyone spoken of God's immanence by mentioning, oh, I don't know, maybe the incarnation?

>>757784

The way I understand it is you can use words like transcendent and immanent to describe God, but if you carry it too far then you've joined Islam, but if you reject it too much then you've joined Freemasonry.

There's a happy medium to recognizing God's importance and recognizing that He ordained a natural order which, though fallen in man, behaves in a regular fashion, and is overall relatively sane. A fully transcendent God would also be an evil god since it implies that he is the author of evil as well as good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xki03G_TO4

Good video on the subject, although several people here have argued to me that panentheism and the essence-energy distinction are heretical so of course this is specifically an Eastern Orthodox perspective (well, the maker of the video is Protestant but his summary of the Orthodox view is correct).

>>757854

Open theists aren't Christians

>>757910

Prove it

>>757910

Still waiting

>>757874

Essence-Energy distinctions have nothing to do with pantheism and is precisely what destroys all such notions. And in practice, you'll see that to be the case. You won't find one pantheist Orthodox. Anyone trying to push it so is an outsider. A LARP. The Orthodox church to this day only upholds the God revealed through revelation, not in various expressions in matter or via universal knowledge (sadly you even see this creeping in in old/sacramental churches like the Roman Catholic church, which views the Eucharist literally in the species of bread and wine as Christ himself. They've disembodied Christ from the only form he chose in revelation: the form of a Man. Outside of that, the Eucharist should be a mystery). It's these kind of associations that lead to pantheism or a God in "everything". Nowadays, the post Vatican II church has gone beyond just odd philosophical notions of the Eucharist and fully embraced the notion that all of those pagan religions outside of Christ still hold some "truth". Look at Assisi, where Pope John Paul II is celebrating with Native Americans and Muslims and Hindus alike. Why did they fall this hard? Because they stopped believing in a God of revelation long ago, and this is only it's natural end. It's a generic "god" revealed in all of these mundane expressions, even pagan ones.

>>757784

God exists outside of our time and spacial dimensions, and as such can move freely through or ignore them, or "transcend" them.

Like how you transcend two dimensional space.

>>757865

>A fully transcendent God would also be an evil god since it implies that he is the author of evil as well as good.

How so?

>>757784

>So if I understand correctly, God created the world and he is separate from it, however God is also omnipresent, all knowing and all powerful.

>

>How can he be separate from the world if he is everywhere?

God the Father remains seperate, but enters the creation of time/space/matter through the Word and Spirit. Specifically the Word/Son first for our sake.

And anyone who is talking about God in some transcendent sense doesn't know him.. or ever has any hope of knowing him. They are either liars or deluded. Especially the ones who've claimed to reach some sort of transcendent state themselves (i.e. Buddhas). "No one comes to the Father except through me," as Jesus said. As Christians, our focus first starts with Jesus, not in philosophy or seeking a trancendent, unknowing-ness of God or the universe.. but in the down to earth nature of the God-Man Jesus Christ, who very much can be known and loved. And through him, we can know the Father.

In light of that, be always on the lookout for anything that erodes notions about Christ's validity (such as a lot of modern biblical teaching), but still claims to teach about God. You can't teach about God, and then destroy scripture and Christ's testimony at the same time. It's like burning a bridge.

And every expression outside the Son is imperfect or a falsehood. Or worse, like I indicated earlier, will lead to some kind of pantheism (my IP changed, but I'm the same poster a few posts up who touched on this). Unredeemed man only has a vague notion of God, but ascribes all kinds of creaturely/created aspects to him or tries to make "analogies" (like the stupidity of the "analogia entis"…i.e. a God "comprehended" in created things.. be it sunsets, animals, taking sacramental symbols too far away from the full incarnation of Christ, etc., etc.. It's all the same nonsense, and eventually conditions the mind to accept a "universalism" that believes God is revealed everywhere in different cultures, be it Hindu or Buddha or aboriginal or anything outside the explicit revelation of Christ). One indicator that God isn't known these various ways (as the Catholic church is somehow teaching now) is in that story of St. Paul when he encountered the Greeks and their temples and idols. He didn't say "Hey, look at this statue of Aphrodite. Or look at Zeus. These are all expressions of the transcendent God." No, he never did anything so grotesque. He chose the lone monument "To the Unknown God", and started preaching from there, saying the Unknown God they acknowledged is actually the Creator, and can be known through Jesus Christ.

>>758211

OK. Why are you talking about pantheism?

>>758260

Sorry, panentheism. It still applies as I'm dismissing these philosophical notions of theism as having any kind of fellowship with orthodox teaching. Christianity is not theism. It's revelation. The actual first starting point in Orthodoxy is Jesus Christ. Not an understanding of God's nature in an abstract sense. Talking about God in any other sense than revelation is the trap the West has fallen into (and shows in practice fully now). Be it's the church apologists or science or secular philosophers. None of it engages God through the incarnation as the actual starting point.

It actually could all lead to pantheism though.. since it becomes such a load of nonsense from all sides that people just embrace each other's notions as having some form of the truth.. since they all apparently believe in a generic god who can be discussed in these stupid, transcendent ways.

>>757946

“I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

Not very open, is it bruv?

>>758295

>“I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

>Not very open, is it bruv?

That's not what open theism means retard