Eloquence is eloquence – but in the service of what overall concepts?
I didn’t say eloquent. I said profound.
Would you agree that any “conclusions†drawn from material not included in the gospels would need to be in agreement with the teachings and parables in the gospels, or at minimum be reconcilable to them?
Not at all, because no conclusions should be definitively drawn from the nature of “missing†material. For instance your view that the absence of Old Testament quotation is a significant absence, given the time frame of the writing of the gospels, would be distinct insertion into the teachings of Jesus, by my view. One simply can’t conclude. Nor does there seem to be any reason to do so.
Are you claiming that Paul did not in any way assert that Jesus Christ was god? It is a simple question. It requires only a simple yes or no answer.
It is not a simple question, but what it means to “be a god†is unclear. He calls those who are “lead by the Spirit†“sons of Godâ€, so would these then be “gods”, I don’t know. I will say that he seems to be against mimetic representations of God.
Is it your position that Jesus rejected the Laws of Moses as well and sought the “abolition of its power?â€
It is my position that Paul rejected the power of the Law of Moses to save. Jesus seemed rather to preach the fulfilling the Law in understanding and action – the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath, go and sin no more, etc. – rather than using it as a mechanism of social control.
Paul is not responsible for the degeneration of Christianity into Christendom. Christianity is a conscious teaching. When interpreted by the unconscious mind or as we describe it “educated”, it must lose its conscious life and become secular leading to precisely the same struggles within all secular institutions. There is no fault in this. It is the natural result of collective human “being” The public side of Christianity or christendom must endure this degeneration just as when you throw a rock into the air it must come down. The unconscious cannot comprehend the conscious.
I disagree with the notion that Paul thought Jesus to be the Absolute. Understanding the relationship of God to"son of God" to"Man" and how this can become confused requires the context of the relativity of being essential for appreciating the nature and possibilities for Man. You wish to avoid it so we’ll leave it alone.
What do you believe to be the essential message of Jesus? As I see it, the essential message of Jesus is re-birth and with Paul it is the accounts of the struggle for re-birth. That is why I don’t see the conflict. Perhaps you see the essential message of Jesus as something different.
Consider three stages of Christianity. the first is the wish or holy desire which Jesus introduced through the effects of his conscious presence and the nature of his death. At the concluding side is Christian re-birth.
The middle, which has been forgotten in modern times due to personal egotism and the influence of “experts”, is the “ability for”. The span between the holy desire and re-birth has become the domain of imagination so people no longer recognize its necessity. They believe they already have what in reality requires tremendous inner effort and personal inner struggle.
Paul refers to the “ability for” which is currently seen as unflattering and irrelevant so it is not surprising to me that people become indignant.
Sorry if this is slightly off the topic Nick but you seem to have this facination with this ‘corrupt’ ego. Surely ego is ego? Saying that the ego is corrupt is like saying that the ego has a life of its own, is its own being…what exactly do you mean?
I suggest that you look at the word that is translated as “Lord†and how it is used and to whom it refers in Romans 1:3 and then again Romans 4:8. If you go to the original Greek it is helpful. I think that will clarify the meaning of the word “God” in my question.
In the simplest terms, I think that the essential message of Jesus was a clarification of the message of Moses. This is not a complicated subject if one simply looks at the words of the two. It is a complicated subject because of all the misinformation (from mistranslation to misinterpretation) that has developed over centuries of misuse. It is like a two thousand year long game of telephone. Imagine what a simple monosyllabic word like “word†would be mutilated into after only one year of it being whispered from person to person – add to that the fact that certain people were purposely misrepresenting for their own personal reasons – forget about two thousand years, imagine that it were done for just one year!
I do not believe that the messages of Jesus and Moses (the two breathtakingly brilliant voices of Judeo-Christian philosophy) are really as complicated as we make them out to be. I think our struggle (particularly with Moses) is to separate the wheat from the chaff. That is, separate the metaphysical/spiritual laws from the governmental/secular laws. The metaphysical understandings of Moses are most clearly contained in Genesis 1 (The Creation); Genesis 2 (The Fall); and Exodus 3 (The name of God). I do not put Exodus 20 (The Ten Commandments) in that list because it is an amalgam of metaphysical and secular laws. In this melding of the metaphysical and secular, the message of Moses gets diluted. Many other Old Testament Books are much more confused and much less inspired, though there are some staggeringly brilliant insights at times. That is why the message of Jesus becomes so important.
The message of Jesus is exactly what he claimed it to be. “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill.†The Greek word “pleroo†that Jesus uses with regard to the Laws of Moses has been translated as “fulfillâ€. It can also be translated as “completeâ€, “bring to realizationâ€, “make complete in every particularâ€, or “make wholeâ€. So, in my opinion, Jesus came to clarify the laws of Moses. Jesus understood that the metaphysical laws of Moses had gotten confused with the secular. That is why you will see him have so much fun with the lawyers and rabbis when they try to trap him. It is because he knows that metaphysical law does not apply materially with the certainty of secular law. There are times when you will be breaking a secular law but following a metaphysical law.
Jesus accepted these metaphysical laws of Moses without question. “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill.†is a very weak translation. I prefer “I come not to destroy but to bring realization.†Jesus then gives example after example of how the secular laws of Moses are in conflict with the metaphysical laws of Moses.
Bottom line is that before one can understand the teachings and parables of Jesus, one must understand the metaphysical laws of Moses. That is why I keep attempting to refocus meandering discussions of Jesus’ teachings and Biblical meanings back onto the metaphysical teachings of Moses which are the underpinnings of Jesus and the others. When Jesus speaks of the birds in the sky that neither reap nor sow, or when he says that the Kingdom of heaven is at hand and it is the father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom, or I and the Father are one, or the Kingdom of God is within you, or so many other things, he is simply doing what he says he is here to do – clarify by word and deed the metaphysical Moses. In those cases he is clarifying the message of the burning bush to Moses: I AM THAT I AM. (I AM, WAS AND SHALL BE WHAT IS, WAS AND WILL BE) Tell them I AM has sent you. The seminal concept of Judeo-Christian monotheistic thought. It permeates the teachings and parables of Jesus like sun and air.
If one fully comprehends The Creation, The Fall or The Name of God, the teachings and parables of Jesus become clear and simple. Sentence by sentence, parable by parable, if one removes the coloration injected by others (including the gospel writers) and one holds the words of Jesus up against the background of the metaphysical teachings of Moses; the message of Jesus appears like faded ancient hieroglyphics when the papyrus is help up to the sun.
Man is dual natured. He has a physical body which makes him a part of organic life on the earth that has evolved from below. He also has a spiritual part that involved from above.
Earth becomes a special level for man since it is the place that these two levels can connect. The conscious should interact with the unconscious earth processes for their common good and for the purpose of the spiritualization of the earth itself. Organic life on earth is largely mechanical and an unconscious process. A certain amount of consciousness is necessary to fix the various things that must go wrong during the process. It is like a gardener making sure that the garden gets food and water and doesn’t create a tree that blocks all the light or doesn’t become overpopulated with life not beneficial for the purpose of the garden.
But the fall of man created conditions within the psych of man where the higher conscious awareness does not govern his lower nature but instead, man’s lower nature has become out of balance making it impossible to be open to consciousness. So where the higher should govern the lower in the psych of man, the result has been the chaotic lower denying the higher.
The place of connection between our higher (conscious) and lower (unconscious) natures is the ego or our "selves."It is the infancy in us that when developed allows for connection. It should be able to receive from the higher so as to govern the lower proper for what should be man’s objective purpose.
But the dominance of the lower has created a condition where self-knowledge and conscious attention that is necessary for the self to receive and to grow has been replaced by imagination giving the illusion of self. This illusion of self is the corrupt ego. It is a subjective illusion that we create in order to tolerate the chaos of our objectively out of balanced existence.
This seed within us that has the potential to enable God’s will to be done on earth begins to grow when we are more balanced. But through the day various learned and become habitual negative states enter that consume or throw off the higher or finer densities of matter that serve as the nutrition our selves need to grow. So in essence we abort ourselves every day. It is like a mother giving a bottle to a baby for two minutes and then smacks it away telling the baby how important the mother is. Naturally, after a time, the baby dies. This is what we unknowingly do to ourselves. This infancy growing as it should, and serving as "Jacob’s Staircase connecting heaven and earth is the process of re-birth in Christianity and is “life” from the conscious perspective. Its corrupted state or this artificial creation of imagination or our “corrupt ego” as imagination is not really anything organic. It isn’t alive but takes the place of conscious life
A person believes themselves to be normal. He may become aware of a teaching which invites him to look inward and he discovers that what he normally thinks is himself is not. He begins to separate his personality from his essential self or the qualities he was born with. He begins to see the difference between his inner life and the external reactions of his personailty. He begins to become aware of the nature of imagination that allows its continuance.
This invites a reconciliation that is not the normal illusion of self or ego, but a conscious attention allowing his essential self to begin growing into a soul or degree of inner unity consciously connecting his higher and lower natures. A person begins to participate in higher human purpose instead of being limited to the purpose that all organic life serves of the transformation of substances through life processes necessary for the earth. If this happens the unity of soul replaces the imaginary unity of the corrupt ego
I suggest that you look at the word that is translated as “Lord†and how it is used and to whom it refers in Romans 1:3 and then again Romans 4:8. If you go to the original Greek it is helpful.
The term is unremarkable in the Greek. “Kurosâ€, meaning anyone with invested with authority, very often attributed to human beings. It stems from the verb “kuroōâ€, “to confirm, ratifyâ€. I am unsure if this makes him “God†in the sense you seem to mean. Also I might ask, how would you read John’s prologue, where the co-eternal “logos†was made flesh, with reference to Christ, and at John 14:6 “I am the path, the revelation, and the Lifeâ€. Is this not a claim to authority? I think the question you are asking is very theologically complex, with no clear answer. Rather it seems you have memorized an easy position to take on Paul, which isn’t really easily born out the in texts of the gospels and of Paul.
“I asked what you believe. If you do not care to answer, that is fine, but I’d prefer not to be insulted [ ] for asking.”
Since you take my attempting to have you clarify your question as an insult, I won’t answer your question. The reason for this, as I made clear, is that I have no idea what you mean by “was God”. I think the question is very complex and can be interpreted any number of ways, as there are texts attributed to Jesus that establish some form of divinity and authority, and the same for Paul. By attempting to force me to answer “yes” or “no” to a vaguery, I’m really unsure what you wish to accomplish. Since I have no idea what you mean by your question, both the yes and the no would be meaningless.
Hi Nick,
I sometimes wonder if the metaphor of a dual nature has become overly concretized. I think that people read this far too literally. The essence of being must not be opposed to this existence here. Yet that is often implied in various spiritualistic descriptions of life.
There is a sense of hand and glove about the whole business. As if spirit were the hand and the physical was the glove and that the hand can very much do without the glove, but that the glove cannot do without the hand.
The high consciousness and the low consciousness, if these two are even separate, must somehow further each others aims through their participation together. A reciprocity must exist or else why would they continue their union.
"The essence of being must not be opposed to this existence here. Yet that is often implied in various spiritualistic descriptions of life.
There is a sense of hand and glove about the whole business"
I think this is really quite so, and in the history of Christianity you see this played out very plainly in the esotericism that arose with [apocalyptic]Gnosticism and Manichaeism on the one had, and Neo-Platonism through the conduit of Plotinus and Augustine. There seems to have been two fundamental attempts so deal with the disjunction between Being [Parmenides] and Becoming [Plato], or with God [synchrony] and Law-Sin [diachrony]. The dualistic one severs the Spirit from Matter, and grants an esoteric knowledge to the side of Spirit, a secret knowing which defeats the material forces of the flesh, and the Neo-Platonic one, which performs a much more subtle distinction, wherein Good has ultimate Being, and all gradations of the absence of Good are reflected in gradations of Non-Being, (and not an opposing and equal/evil power). These are two fundamentally distinct, but sometimes historically blurred ways of seeing the same thing. Once though man is seen as divided, he can only be aided by secret things. Rather, if man is continuous and part of a larger process, then each and every moment, each and every aspect is placed within the axis of Becoming. The “hand” and the “glove” fit because it is not a war of Good vs. Evil, pure and the stained, but process of transformation, a becoming more real, more vital.
Even if my position were easy and memorized, at least I take a position and make an honest attempt to answer questions. My “answers†may appear flawed, but that is part of the learning process, risking being shown where we miss the mark. Perhaps if you attempted to answer the question you would help me in my understanding.
In not risking an answer one is of no help to the questioner or to one’s self.
“In not risking an answer one is of no help to the questioner or to one’s self.”
It is not a question of risk. If I answered the question the way you would have wanted me to, I would have been foreclosing the very chasm of the notion of “was God” upon which your problem with Paul seems to rest. Only if one understands what it would mean to “be God” would your idea that Paul violated the core of Jesus’ teachings by turning him into a god/God, have force. If we don’t know what it means to “be God”, then we really can’t say that Jesus or the gospels didn’t assert such a thing, or that Paul did. I apologize if I offended you. It was not my intention. I only meant, and said it poorly, that you seem to have a strong bias against Paul that at the surface seems rather simple, perhaps even obvious, yet implies many things profound. Again I apologize.
Thanks for the apology and for the clarification of my understanding of Paul:
I will accept “simple†as a compliment.
To get past this bottleneck (caused I am sure by my simplicity and tendency toward the “easy positionâ€), why don’t you tell me what you believe Paul’s understanding of God is and what Paul expressed with regard to Jesus’ relationship to that God. Perhaps that would help me.
“why don’t you tell me what you believe Paul’s understanding of God is and what Paul expressed with regard to Jesus’ relationship to that God. Perhaps that would help me.”
You may have found me evasive, but really I don’t believe I know. I know very well the general positions Protestantism, Catholicism, and various “Heresies” have taken, all with the support of the texts, but I am unsure if Paul, or even the gospels have made a single position plain. There seems to be a heterogeneity of terms applied to Christ’s relationship to God and to man. Further it is not always clear in Paul (or even the Gospels) if this it Christ, an entity, or Christ the event, or if even that distinction is a makeable one. Largely I take Paul to treat Christ as an event, a piercing into the unfolding of history that marks a radical change in the possible relationship between man and God, yet this event is something that is also fundamentally within us, so while it happened in a moment in Time, it also is an eternal moment, accessible through any other moment. If given a metaphor I would say, the music was being played, note after note throughout history, and the theme seemed to have evolved to a certain point, and then this one note was played that changed the meaning of all notes that were played before that note, and all notes after. It simply recontextualized them. And similarly, this note can be played within our own lives, a note that radicalizes the melody past and present. It seems to me that this is Paul’s primary message, but he goes through uncountable metaphors and attributions, each according to the historical context within which he was writing, some of which veer in one direction, some in another, making the complete picture to be inconclusive, or at times in self-contradiction. But really what I imagine is that Paul is not writing outside of history, armed with a pristine Truth which he is passing down to everyone else, undistorted, but rather is passionately involved in the real making of the church, or many churches, bringing forth a revolution of a sorts, and not only that, he is undergoing his own very real and problematic Spiritual journey. It is this tension between his religious experience of God and his place in time in the world in relation to real people with real souls, that produces the diversity within his language. What is special about Paul though, is that he is in the very same boat each of us are in, attempting to integrate the divine into a seemingly resisting world, and thus necessarily attempting to transform the world in the process.
You bring something I believe to be extremely important. These levels should have a complimentary relationship but misunderstandings have created the impression that there is something wrong or evil about the physical. This has created all sorts of psychological harm I’ve seen manifested all over in real life and in cyber space. One of the most harmful misconceptions associated with Christianity deals with asceticism. Its initial intent was to allow us to become open. Yet the perversions associated with it have closed the mind. The result has been for many to turn to science in order to solve the questions of the heart. But science has its rightful domain and though it is completely understandable under these circumstances that people ask it to solve the problems of the heart, it’s not in its domain.
The true aim of asceticism and why some monks went into the desert to struggle with themselves was not fighting the evil flesh, but instead to become “open.”
As I’ve said, our lower nature is out of balance which is why it looses touch with the higher and imagination sets in to replace the results of conscious attention and denying the hand and glove to establish their complimentary relationship.
Again, it’s not that our lower nature is evil but only out of balance. Where are thoughts, feelings, and sensations should work together in balance with each being responsible for its domain, with us, everything has become chaotic.
Nowhere has it become more damaging in the esoteric sense then with the quality of our emotions
For that reason apatheia associated with stoicism came into being. Apatheia is the desire to become free from emotions so that we can begin to"feel" and reason as proper for human beings.
Teaching the body and emotions through self denial to become open and not dominate through their demands allows us to experience reality beyond their demands rather than being continually attached to them and justifying them. This is not fighting and condeming an evil entity or self but just bringing order to chaos so as to become human through becoming open to receive from the higher.
Yet over time religious moralism came to destroy our inner life in the name of God which initiated creation itself. Instead of the teaching allowing us to become open to the experience of the human condition, its effects have been to close us off from it and denying us the necessary inner or esoteric benefits of any ancient tradition initiating with a conscious source.
The aim of Christian exercises is to become open. Prayer when understood rightly is not an oratory, demand for God to do something, or selfish request.
Prayer allows us to become vulnerable. So Christian exercises of which some may appear as asceticism when done in a state of prayer are experienced entirely differently then when the mind is closed. The result is to become open to receive by getting out of are own way.
Of course much of Christendom has created the opposite effect through its religious moralism.
“The true aim of asceticism and why some monks went into the desert to struggle with themselves was not fighting the evil flesh, but instead to become “open.””
Do you realize that Manichaeism taught that Jesus did not even have a real body? And that Manichaeism was one of the leading forces in early Christian ascetism?
I really have not studied Manichaeism. I learned that it reflected Zoroastrian Dualism and since I believe creation and man within it based on triune principles, this duality lost its appeal.
] for asking.”