Wednesday, June 17, 2020

God shows us connection

In the poor writer, I wrote about God showing us who he is.

One of the challenges a god has is to show how the infinite, eternal, ineffable one can have any fellowship, any connection at all with the finite, temporal, limited and contingent one: us.

I haven't read myths for some time, but my recollections give me the impression that the gods of the ancient world, particularly the Greek and Roman pantheon is full of limited gods. God's not big enough. They are in some vague way dependent on a prior cosmos or other dwelling place.

But God comes to man for fellowship.

He doesn't tell us this: just telling would be easy and unconvincing, and as challenging is the problem of particulars and universals in some branches of philosophy.

No, he demonstrates that he fellowship is realistic.

He shows that he is active and effective in our time-space-material domain while not bound by its constraints: he created by his word in six days.

He fellowships with us becuase he made us like him: he breathed life into us. His life, and made us in his image. That is, for commutative fellowship. We can only fellowship with those who are in the same ontological category. We have 'God-image'. Our person-ness is akin to God's person-ness. Both are integrated wholes, both self-conscious, both can consider motivations and make choices that might not be consequential  upon our motivations. Both are without parts. Our person-hood has many modalities, but they are all mixed in some degree and all of the same person. Our awareness of their being 'ours' doesn't vary: affection, emotion, intellect, sensation, motivation...all modes are of the one integral person.

God further shows his personhood and its congruence with ours in Genesis 1:27 and inversely in Genesis 3:8, when it was broken, but A&E choosing 'not-God' as their ontological focus, denying the image they were.

Preeminently, he shows ability to bring the eternal into the sphere of the temporal in the Messiah. God incarnate, and in John 1:1-3, 14.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.