Jehovah vs. Elohim

[johnny]

Zakuska,

1) Which YHWH was alone while spreading out the heaven and the earth?

The YHWH who is our Maker, the God of Israel.

Isa 45

[3] And I will give thee the treasures of darkness, and hidden riches of secret places, that thou mayest know that I, the LORD, which call thee by thy name, am the God of Israel.

[5] I am the LORD, and there is none else, there is no God beside me: I girded thee, though thou hast not known me:

[6] That they may know from the rising of the sun, and from the west, that there is none beside me. I am the LORD, and there is none else.

[7] I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.

[11] Thus saith the LORD, the Holy One of Israel, and his Maker, Ask me of things to come concerning my sons, and concerning the work of my hands command ye me.

[12] I have made the earth, and created man upon it: I, even my hands, have stretched out the heavens, and all their host have I commanded.

[14] Thus saith the LORD, The labour of Egypt, and merchandise of Ethiopia and of the Sabeans, men of stature, shall come over unto thee, and they shall be thine: they shall come after thee; in chains they shall come over, and they shall fall down unto thee, they shall make supplication unto thee, saying, Surely God is in thee; and there is none else, there is no God.

[15] Verily thou art a God that hidest thyself, O God of Israel, the Saviour.

[18] For thus saith the LORD that created the heavens; God himself that formed the earth and made it; he hath established it, he created it not in vain, he formed it to be inhabited: I am the LORD; and there is none else.

[21] Tell ye, and bring them near; yea, let them take counsel together: who hath declared this from ancient time? who hath told it from that time? have not I the LORD? and there is no God else beside me; a just God and a Saviour; there is none beside me.

[22] Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth: for I am God, and there is none else.

[23] I have sworn by myself, the word is gone out of my mouth in righteousness, and shall not return, That unto me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear.

2) How could he be alone if Wisdom was there with him?

Because "Wisdom" is not a seperate God.

[johnny]

maklelan,

Then don't bring it up.

I brought it up because someone asked me to support my statment "God was alone and by himself during creation. Creation is the common work of three divine persons and not three sepearte Gods because God was alone and by himself during creation. "The Word", "Wisdom", were with God during creation.".

[Zakuska]

Yet Paul Tells us that it was Wisdom who did the creating.

Col 1

16 For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him:

17 And he is before all things, and by him all things consist.

And how could Christ Create his own father?

[maklelan]

Well Johhny's got a problem with a contradicting Bible again.

2) How could he be alone if Wisdom was there with him?

The verses He provided can easily be interpreted a different way.

In classical Stoic thought, the Logos (or Wisdom) of God was the agent through which the incorrutible God manipulated all things material without actually tainting his immateriality. Matter was low and corruptible while spirit (the divine) was invisible and incorruptible, so the answer to your question will be that the Wisdom is Christ (Logos), who existed independently of God, but only as God's rational thought, and is therefore not a different God.

Early Christians latched on to the Stoic doctrine of the Logos as a means of explaining the Trinity without betraying their extrinsically forced montheism. This made it difficult to grant heaven to the flesh, though, since in Stoicism and Platonism the flesh is completely incapable of ascending to the divine. Origen felt this meant the resurrection was a spiritual one, but other Fathers decided to stick to the scriptures rather than the pagan philosophies, and they came up with a less pagan theosis. Today the consensus is actually swinging back into the Platonic realms. An immaterial, incorporeal God is the msot blatant and conspicuous consequence of wholesale abandonment of original Christian doctrines in favor of Greek allegorical interpretation of the scriptures. Christians today will fight tooth and nail to assert that God is above the flesh and completely incomprehensible, but this was never taught by the earliest Christians, it is the doctrine of Plato and nothing more.

[johnny]

Zakuska,

And how could Christ Create his own father?

Christ did not create his own father ... 1cor 8 says:

1Cor 8

[6] But to us there is but one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we in him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by him.

[Zakuska]

Johhny,

the Verse says Christ created "ALL THINGS" both visible and invisible and since his Father is Invisible... and "In Heaven".

[johnny]

maklelan,

therefore not a different God.

That is my point ... during creation their is one God ... LDS scripture reveals multiply Gods during creation.

[maklelan]

Creation is the common work of three divine persons and not three sepearte Gods because God was alone and by himself during creation. "The Word", "Wisdom", were with God during creation.".

Ha! I nailed it! I was typing my last post when this was done, but it is verbatim what I said the answer was going to be, and it is in perfect Stoic vocabulary.

Mira:

Definitions of the Logos: "A principle originating in classical Greek thought which refers to a universal divine reason, immanent in nature, yet transcending all oppositions and imperfections in the cosmos and humanity. An eternal and unchanging truth present from the time of creation, available to every individual who seeks it. A unifying and liberating revelatory force which reconciles the human with the divine."

"The Greek word logos (traditionally meaning word, thought, principle, or speech) has been used among both philosophers and theologians. In most of its usages, logos is marked by two main distinctions - the first dealing with human reason (the rationality in the human mind which seeks to attain universal understanding and harmony), the second with universal intelligence (the universal ruling force governing and revealing through the cosmos to humankind, i.e., the Divine).

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus appears to be the first to have used the word logos to refer to a rational divine intelligence, which today is sometimes referred to in scientific discourse as the "mind of God." The early Greek philosophical tradition known as Stoicism, which held that every human participates in a universal and divinely ordained community, then used the Logos doctrine as a principle for human law and morality. The Stoics believed that to achieve freedom, happiness, and meaning one should attune one's life to the wisdom of God's will, manifest in the second distinction (above) of Logos. The Christian church then extended the Stoic idea of the universal community by claiming the universal nature of salvation and the potential for all humans to participate in it."

You're preaching directly from Seneca and the rest of the Stoics and you don't even know it. You see what your Church Fathers have done to your Bible? They've lathered her up with a pagan scented Irish Spring bar, and you're intoxicated by her scent.

[johnny]

Zakuska,

Christ created "ALL THINGS" both visible and invisible

Sounds like this is straying away from the topic of this thread which is "Jehovah vs. Elohim" ...

Jehovah and Elohim are the same God. One God created.

[johnny]

maklelan,

You're preaching directly from Seneca and the rest of the Stoics and you don't even know it. You see what your Church Fathers have done to your Bible?

Is the following statement below consistent with what the Bible reveals, if it is not then please provide some scriptures to support your answer:

Creation is the common work of three divine persons and not three sepearte Gods because God was alone and by himself during creation. "The Word", "Wisdom", were with God during creation.".

[Zakuska]

Are you sure thats not... One Divine Person Created?

[Zakuska]

maklelan ,

I liked this...

"The Christian church then extended the Stoic idea of the universal community by claiming the universal nature of salvation and the potential for all humans to participate in it."

Unlike the few chosen elect of Theophilus and Calvin.

[maklelan]

maklelan,

You're preaching directly from Seneca and the rest of the Stoics and you don't even know it. You see what your Church Fathers have done to your Bible?

Is the following statement below consistent with what the Bible reveals, if it is not then please provide some scriptures to support your answer:

Creation is the common work of three divine persons and not three sepearte Gods because God was alone and by himself during creation. "The Word", "Wisdom", were with God during creation.".

I will provide scriptures when you address the evidence I have provided.

[johnny]

maklelan,

I will provide scriptures when you address the evidence I have provided.

SInce you provided off-topic stuff I will not address it ...

[selek]

That's the second time in this thread you've ignored a Call For References, Johnny.

Is this going to be a standard tactic when you can't support the insupportable?

Call for References. Please demonstrate why your interpretation is superior to that of learned theologians and scholars skilled in ancient Greek and Hebrew. Please also explain why your insight trumps the word of God.

As I noted in my earlier posts, your argument depends upon your understanding of the corrupted idea of the trinity. Such understanding has been heavily disputed among Bible scholars and experts in Near-Eastern religions.

As I asked you to earlier, please demonstrate how your interpretation is superior a/o correct.

Call For References. Please show the scriptures which show that God was alone, and that the "Word" and "Wisdom" were not separate personages represented by iconic titles. Your argument relies heavily upon your own interpretation of the Godhead. Please show conclusively that your interpretation is superior, let alone authoritative.

maklelan has demonstrated that "Word" and "Wisdom" in the sense you used them are corrupted Greek notions and philosophies. You haven't answered my questions and now you refuse to answer his.

As has been demonstrated by other posters, the scriptures you attempted to cite as proving conclusively that God was alone in the pre-existence are either contradicted (repeatedly) elsewhere in the Bible, or are subject to different interpretations.

The argument about the Greek stoic philosophy and the corruption of the trinity it not off-topic, no matter how embarrassing or inconvenient you find it. It is prood that the understanding you've been taught has been corrupted.

Instead of evasion, dissembling, or laundry lists of post-Nicean dogma, please answer the question and provide us the evidence you insist is so self-apparent.

[johnny]

selek,

The argument about the Greek stoic philosophy and the corruption of the trinity it not off-topic,

Open another thread and let's talk ... since the topic of this thread is Jehovah vs. Elohim ...

[Cold Steel]

Isaiah was speaking in an entirely different context and to an entirely different people. Jesus announced Himself that the knowledge of God would come as people readied themselves for it. This has created problems as various prophets have enountered diverse peoples. For example, according to ancient law, graven images were strictly forbidden; however, now that few people worship images any more, the Lord no longer prohibits them. And even when He did, there were exceptions as He saw fit.

Susan Easton Black discusses two of the prevailing controversies that existed in the days of the early church fathers. Far from confirming what came before, the fathers battled the prevailing notions to bring them in line with their own reasoning. After all, worshipping an anthropomorphic God implied all sorts of things that the fathers weren't spritually ready to handle. As Easton notes:

Anthropomorphism

Related to the doctrine of the Trinity are the concepts of anthropomorphism and anthropopathism-the teachings that Deity is endowed with parts (anthropomorphism) and passions (anthropopathism) similar to those of man. In contrast to the view of historical Christianity, the Doctrine and Covenants asserts that "the Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man's; the Son also; but the Holy Ghost has not a body of flesh and bones, but is a personage of Spirit. Were it not so, the Holy Ghost could not dwell in us" (D&C 130:22).

In fact, the early Christians believed in a corporeal deity, as the German church historian Adolf Harnack notes: "God was naturally conceived and represented as corporeal by uncultured Christians, though not by these alone, as the later controversies prove (e.g., Orig[en] contra Melito; see also Tertull[ian] De Anima)."

The church father Melito also accepted an embodied God, which Origen notes with some dismay. Origen and Augustine reluctantly admit that before Platonic thought was introduced to Christianity, belief in a corporeal God was widespread. Origen wrote, "I am aware that there are some who will try to maintain that even according to our scriptures God has a body," and they had maintained it for generations before his own time. Christianity, made "finer and nobler" with a Platonic overlay, would brook no such anthropomorphic crudities (anthropomorphism, by the way, is generally modified with adjectives such as crude, crass, vulgar, and primitive).

The result of Origen's "rigorous investigation" was that Deity is incorporeal. His conclusions permit his critique of the Platonist Celsus's second-century attack on Christianity. In Celsus's view, in comparison with the assumptions of Plato's philosophical theology, the corporeal Deity of Christianity was found wanting. Seven decades later, when Origen responded to Celsus (whose Platonic assumptions he had accepted), rather than defend Christianity's anthropomorphic God, he claimed that no one else he knew believed it, either.

Augustine, the man most deeply influenced by Platonism, felt himself nearly convinced by arguments for the corporeality of Deity until, "under the influence of Bishop Ambrose, he became acquainted with Latin translations of Platonist writings and with the possibility of God's being a purely 'spiritual,' i.e., totally immaterial, invisible and incorporeal being." Greatly relieved that this "stumbling block" to his faith was now removed, Augustine accepted baptism in A.D. 386, at age thirty-two. But with the conversion of Augustine the hinge of fate had turned, with disastrous consequences for the development of Christian doctrine. Augustine represented the reconciliation of Classical Antiquity and Christianity. In fact, however, this "reconciliation" meant the refraction of the doctrines of earliest Christianity through the distorting lens of Platonism-Christianity had thus been Platonized. Thereafter, nothing was to be the same again.

While the church accepted and incorporated Augustine's teachings with relief, they were a cause of distress to individual Christians. Typical of this was the experience of the fourth-century Christian monk Abba Sarapion. According to John Cassian, Abba Sarapion believed God to be like a man; since Adam was created in his image, he pictured an embodied God as he prayed. When the deacon Photinus visited, he was asked concerning the teaching that Adam was created in the image of God. Photinus replied by saying that this was to be interpreted "spiritually" and not "literally" ("non secundum humilem litterae sonum, sed spiritualiter"). Sarapion was eventually persuaded to give up imagining an anthropomorphic Deity during his devotions. Yet he was devastated. Sarapion exclaimed despairingly that "they have taken my God from me, and I have now none to behold, and whom to worship and address I know not."

Human Deification: Theopoiesis

Shortly before Joseph Smith introduced him to the doctrine of human deification in Nauvoo, a verse couplet came to Lorenzo Snow's mind intimating this doctrine:

As man is now, God once was,

As God is now, man may become.

Teachings in the Doctrine and Covenants join celestial marriage with deification: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob "have entered into their exaltation, according to the promises, and sit upon thrones, and are not angels but are gods" (D&C 132:37). Further, at the end of his life Joseph "seems to have regarded himself as revealing a wonderful mystery" in teaching that God was once a man: "God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens! That is the great secret.... We have imagined and supposed that God was God from all eternity. I will refute that idea, and take away the veil, so that you may see." No other teaching of the Restoration has been more repugnant to normative Christianity than the belief that man can attain to God's glory. And yet it is richly attested in earliest Christianity. Christ taught his disciples in the Sermon on the Mount, "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect" (Matthew 5:48).

"The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit," Paul wrote to the Romans, "that we are the children of God: And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together" (Romans 8:16-17). Irenaeus (d. A.D. 180) wrote, "For we cast blame upon Him, because we have not been made gods from the beginning, but at first merely men, then at length gods." In the view of Clement of Alexandria, who died in A.D. 215, "By thus receiving the Lord's power, the soul studies to be God." The idea of deification is vital to Athanasius. According to the German Protestant church historian Ernst Benz:

One can think what one wants of this doctrine of progressive deification, but one thing is certain: with this anthropology Joseph Smith is closer to the view of man held by the Ancient Church than the precursors of the Augustinian doctrine of original sin were, who considered the thought of such a substantial connection between God and man as the heresy, par excellence.

Susan Easton Black, ed., Expressions of Faith: Testimonies of Latter-day Saint Scholars, p.176 - 177

[johnny]

Cold Steel,

Open another thread and let's talk about Anthropomorphism and Human Deification: Theopoiesis since the topic of this thread is Jehovah vs. Elohim ...

[selek]

Open another thread and let's talk ...

No, thank you. I'd much rather have you answer the questions instead of changing the subject.

[johnny]

selek,

The subject is Jehovah vs. Elohim ... I will be glad to answer your questions about Jehovah vs. Elohim.

[maklelan]

selek,

The subject is Jehovah vs. Elohim ... I will be glad to answer your questions about Jehovah vs. Elohim.

Your arguments for Jehoah v. Elohim is based in your idea of Trinity. You believe that they are one and the same, and you use scriptures that only support your conclusions if we take the Trinity as a given, which we don't. We do not support the premise of your argument based on the historical fact that the Trinity is an admixture of Christian scriptures and pagan theology. If the Trinity is not real then Christ was a separate God and the Father was not alone. I criticize your trinitarian doctrine because it is the foundation of your argument. While a thousand hack away at the branches of your assertio, I hack at the root.

Address the evidence on the Trinity or admit that your premise is incomplete.

[selek]

The subject is Jehovah vs. Elohim ... I will be glad to answer your questions about Jehovah vs. Elohim.

Then by all means, fire away.

I've only been waiting a couple of hours now.

Or is this dissembling merely a way to avoid striking your colors?

[johnny]

maklelan,

Your arguments for Jehoah v. Elohim is based in your idea of Trinity.

My argument is based on scritpure. ELohim and Jehovah are the same God (Isa 53).

Isa 53

[4] Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God(Elohim), and afflicted.

[6] All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD(Jehovah) hath laid on him(Jesus, the Son of God) the iniquity of us all.

[johnny]

selek,

Then by all means, fire away.

Is ELohim and Jehovah the same God?

[selek]

Nice try, Johnny, but you are supposed to be answering the questions.

That whole silly, Call For References thing I asked earlier, then repeated?

And for the record, no they are not the same God, but part of the same GODHEAD.