I don't think I can talk about the nature of scriptures without talking about revelation.
And I can't talk about Christology without talking about what it means to be "a human being."
Getting down to the nitty-gritty of it, how does Creation happen? Much as poems are "written," or plants grow. We live in our dream.
What is there to dream us?
Given the miracle that anything exists at all--that there is spirit to live this story--I'm inclined to believe the notion that God intrinsically exists. If it were possible for God not to exist, there would not be any existence, any being to experience the nothingness that wouldn't be anywhere--but my experience contradicts that alternative (and so does yours!)
God "became" us because that was the only way we could have any reality whatsoever.
The Whole Thing is within us, within each of us, and so is whatever we call "the outside world." But is not limited to that.
We experience our moment-to-moment existence. This could be, as in a dream, a succession of (seemingly) unrelated images, but instead we have continuity, the past morphing into the future--So something holds it all together, and whatever that is--is beyond our conscious self. Whatever that is, it is not some brute unreasoning "subconscious," not a mental working that's less conscious than we are but obviously something conscious of much more. I can imagine no limit to it.
And yet it has "peopled" itself into this universe. It is not possible to exist without being, intrinsically, It itself. And thus it loves us "as we love ourselves." If we are hungry to know the truth, it feeds us. But it's such a bewildering truth, and we're so little.
Scripture is our baby food.
Is it "the Truth"? How can words or letters be true or false, except as we translate them into our minds? Scriptures nourish the truth growing in us, if we chew them and digest them properly. Like what we might tell a child who wants to know, "Why is the sky blue?"
"Inspiration is not dictation." We can read scripture (like anything in this world, but particularly scriptures) as containing messages addressed to us. The passage we need (like anything else in this world) is likely to come to our attention at the appropriate moment, when it will be most helpful. At best, scripture is written by people in a state of communion with God, but it is not written by infallible people, nor can it make us infallible. It is merely one form that our mental/spiritual "daily bread" can take.
Is Jesus "just another human being," then? Yes. But what is a human being?
Is Jesus sent by God to let us know what God is like? Yes.
Is God like Jesus in character and personality, then? That appears to be the message.
2 comments:
Wow.
Colorful. Very Hindu conception of both creation and incarnation I think. Not that I'm a Hinduism expert by any means. Your christology seems very much like Richard Bach's in Illusions: Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah.
I think you might also enjoy John Carse Finite and Infinite Games.
I'll post mine later. But my short answer is that my metaphysics is pragmatist; nothing is intrinsic and there really is stuff that is NOT an extension mine or anyone else's ego (including God's).
It isn't one's ego that's God.
I suppose God must form a "self" somehow. But it wouldn't be separate from anything that truly exists. I'm pragmatist enough not to try too hard to imagine what that would be like.
There's no reason in principle that Richard Bach couldn't say something true, but I don't care for what I've read of his. So it goes.
The notion of mathematical truth bewilders me utterly (how that relates to the existence of God or anything whatsoever.)
Raymond Smullyan quotes God as saying ~ It's not a matter of how I fit into the scheme of things; I am the scheme of things.
'No God' would imply no consciousness to feel the truth of mathematics. Does it make sense, then, to talk of mathematics existing separately? Or to consider it a created thing, either?
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