Was Jesus The Son Of God Before The Earth Was Created?

[JLHPROF]

You don't believe that we are operating on a limited data set here on Earth? 

 

You don't agree with Paul, that we see through a glass darkly? 

 

You don't agree with the statement that "his ways are higher than ours"?

 

That he uses the foolish things of the world to confound the wise? 

 

Here's one way to look at the nature of God.

 

We are human and primarily physical, and we have a spirit.

 

God is Spirit, and in the person of Christ, he also has a body. 

 

We are in one moment at a time. He is in all moments at the same time. 

 

You are mixing how God operates with the kind of being God is.

I would argue that according to Mormonism the first may be incomprehensible but the second may not be.

[JLHPROF]

It's actually a huge mistake to look at that verse (eternal life is to know him), and interpreting it as "knowledge" means factual knowledge about God.

 

We wouldn't say that about the statement that says, when "Adam knew his wife and had a son…" would we?  

 

Well, we might.  "Knowledge" of his wife may be exactly what the word means.

[danielwoods]

You are mixing how God operates with the kind of being God is.

I would argue that according to Mormonism the first may be incomprehensible but the second may not be.

 

I agree, they are interdependent ideas so yes they are mixed. How God operates is connected to the kind of being he is. 

[JLHPROF]

I agree, they are interdependent ideas so yes they are mixed. How God operates is connected to the kind of being he is. 

 

Which is why I am glad I have a spiritual testimony that God IS the God expressed in Mormonism.  I don't think I'd like the alternative if it were true.

[danielwoods]

Which is why I am glad I have a spiritual testimony that God IS the God expressed in Mormonism.  I don't think I'd like the alternative if it were true.

 

That's a curious statement. What does "like" or dislike have to do with it? If God's nature is what it is, why wouldn't one just accept it? I don't understand the attitude. How would it change anything one way or another? 

[JLHPROF]

That's a curious statement. What does "like" or dislike have to do with it? If God's nature is what it is, why wouldn't one just accept it? I don't understand the attitude. How would it change anything one way or another? 

 

"Like" is relevant because of the worship element.  To truly worship a being you would need to feel a certain way towards them (unless you are worshipping out of fear/force/requirement, which I would argue is not true worship).

I worship God precisely because he is a perfect man AND he gave me life.  I worship Christ because he was a perfect man AND he died for me.

 

I wouldn't know what to worship in a being that was so completely different from me as to have no commonality.  I would be little more than a dog that thought their owner was the alpha dog.

I find God and Christ worthy of worship because I know that they have gone through mortality and proven it is possible to become/be perfect.  I find them worthy of admiration and worship by their deeds, not some incomprehensible nature that is meaningless to my understanding.  That is what I mean by "like".

[danielwoods]

"Like" is relevant because of the worship element.  To truly worship a being you would need to feel a certain way towards them (unless you are worshipping out of fear/force/requirement, which I would argue is not true worship).

I worship God precisely because he is a perfect man AND he gave me life.  I worship Christ because he was a perfect man AND he died for me.

 

I wouldn't know what to worship in a being that was so completely different from me as to have no commonality.  I would be little more than a dog that thought their owner was the alpha dog.

I find God and Christ worthy of worship because I know that they have gone through mortality and proven it is possible to become/be perfect.  I find them worthy of admiration and worship by their deeds, not some incomprehensible nature that is meaningless to my understanding.  That is what I mean by "like".

 

That is different. Thanks for explaining. 

 

The Israelites had a similar feeling, and so they fashioned a golden calf so they could identify with their object of worship. The danger of creating our own gods to worship is real. 

Edited May 27, 2015 by danielwoods

[JLHPROF]

That is different. Thanks for explaining. 

 

The Israelites had a similar feeling, and so they fashioned a golden calf so they could identify with their object of worship. The danger of creating our own gods to worship is real. 

 

Nobody is talking about creating Gods.  That may be how Mormonism seems to traditional Christians.  We believe God has given us a clearer understanding of his nature.  I would argue that "traditional" Christian understanding of God is the created version.

[mfbukowski]

I agree with all of this.  Me and my fellow Trinitarians attempt to describe an inconceivable reality using words from the only reality we experience.  Nevertheless, we believe this other reality exists and we strive to understand it, since we believe that is where God "dwells".  We're forced to use time- and space-bound concepts like "outside space and time" to describe that which is "beyond".  Even though we recognize the limitation, we still believe that that "beyond" exists.  Over the centuries, many theologians and philosophers have tried to capture the essence of God using words and concepts.  As you point out, and as I've tried to explain, all of these attempts must necessarily fail.  How, then, do we know about the unknowable?  We believe the Unknowable desires to be known, made Himself known in Christ, and makes Himself known through the Holy Spirit to those who follow the Way of prayer, humility, and repentance.  We Orthodox believe there are men and women to whom God grants a 'vision' of His true nature in this life through intimate union with them, permeating them, revealing Himself to them in an intimate way beyond thought that strips away all concepts, and makes them while in union with Him to be all Light (theosis).  We believe what we believe because of Revelation, even though those who have had this experience must inevitably use language and concepts to describe that experience and its content.  Put another way, those who have a direct experience of the ineffable and transcendent Divine Presence and "see" God with their spiritual eyes, and who then try to describe that experience, only end up putting God within a human-made linguistic and conceptual box.  That's why so many of the Fathers and Saints of the Church say that after being gifted with this overwhelming experience beyond thought or concept, the only appropriate response is silence.

Great post and I agree completely.

 

But if the most appropriate response is silence, they certainly have spent a lot of words explaining the trinity using--- yes, words, and unsuccessfully at that.

 

This is not a put-down by any means.  I treasure our intellectual heritage and some of those words attempting to describe what cannot be described are sheer poetry and must be to accomplish anything close to achieving the goal of saying what cannot be said.

 

Perhaps a symphony on the Trinity would have worked better.  Music communicates also what cannot be said.  Maybe we should be arguing about what piece of music describes God best instead of worry about words. 

 

But here we are with words.  I have had those ineffable experiences and can only describe them with the words that I have no doubt that i was absorbed in a Personal Intelligence who radiated and submerged my entire self in infinite love, so that I was nothing and It/He/She was All There Is.  My self was gone- there was just oneness.

 

But those are words.  We need a model we can work with in words to be able to communicate it.

 

I will say that He is my Father and the Source of my self-ness, which also makes no sense.

 

I like our stories better I guess.  They can tell me where I came from, why I am here and where I am going.  In words, and those images work to change how I am in this life.

 

Other views do not do that.  They attempt to describe what cannot be described and then pretend that those words mean something.

 

I prefer a whole story that works in my little brain.  I think God is smart enough to tell us stories like that that will bring him closer to Him, instead of dazzling us with something that is, in my opinion, beyond human ability to find useful.

 

I mean we can sit in a monastery all day contemplating the ineffable, but as a Dad myself, work has to get done or there is no food on the table.

 

I can relate to a God who is a Father but an ineffable Trinity is a little abstract to make for my Ideal.

 

Yes we have Christ, always.  But if we believe the gospels he is a little hard to relate to as well.  No visible kids.  No teaching on families. Nothing real to hang onto, at least for me.  No "other reality" that is invisible and beyond my ability to even visualize.  God has to be able to do better than some invisible realm to explain himself.  

 

I mean Newton had his little clockwork universe, but Einstein told a better story.

 

No thanks, I am staying where I am.     But I like your story just the same. 

Edited May 27, 2015 by mfbukowski

[mfbukowski]

Exactly.  Any attempt to describe God and the "place" where He "dwells" only leads to placing Him in a conceptual box of our own devising.  "The only solution is to stop speaking and point a lot".  Just be silent, lead people to the path of prayer, repentance, and humility, and point the way.  Yes.

OR come up with a story that works, at least for the newbies 

[mfbukowski]

One man's causal influence is another man's shared terminology.  Those who see a causal link between Neoplatonism and Trinitarian thought beyond the use of shared terms defined differently misunderstand one or both systems.  Terms such as "the One", "the Many", "hypostasis", "homousious", and "three" may be shared but as applied to either context have different meanings.  True, Neoplatonism uses terms that imply that God is both One and Three, posits three hypostases and a single, shared essence within the divine being, but that's where the similarity with traditional Christianity ends.  Both developed within the same cultural and intellectual milieu and used the same terminology, but in terms of the content and meaning of the shared terminology, the two systems are alien to each other and the most notable Fathers of the Church (esp. Origen and Evagrius) who made the error of attempting to incorporating Neoplatonist concepts into their writings (as distinct from using similar terminology) were condemned and those parts of their writings were anathemetized.

 

Neoplatonism is a pantheistic system and describes a cosmos created ex deo (not ex nihilo, as in traditional Christianity) that comes into being through a series of emanations derived from the primordial source of all being, the One who is beyond being.   The three hypostases in Neoplatonism (the One, Intellect, and Soul) comprise the cosmos and together are the cosmos, including matter and the phenomenological world. This is obviously very alien to what Trinitarians believe.  For us, the three hypostases are Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one God and that God is distinct from matter and made matter ex nihilo.  For Neoplatonists, everything that exists is an emanation of God and is God.  You, me, the universe and everything material derive from the One through a series of emanations of the divine substance and share in that substance.  The One emanates the Intellect (Nous), which emanates the Soul, which is comprised of the the World Soul and the phenomenological world of matter.  The phenomenological world of matter, which includes humans, is the furthest removed from God but since they emanated from God, humans are material beings that contain a divine spark and whose intelligences derive from from the second hypostasis (Intellect); in other words, humans are gods in embryo. We are gods by nature, since we are of the same 'species' as God.  It follows from the principle of emanation that souls or spirits are also pre-existent.  it's interesting that Mormons, Neoplatonists, and gnostics (whose systems were all Neoplatonist) all believe in the co-eternality of matter, preexistent spirits, and that humans are gods in embryo.  None of this is part of the traditional cosmological system of Trinitarian Christianity.  In fact, as I said, Greek Church Fathers who believed in these things (Origen, Evagrius, Valentinus) were all condemned by the Church.  

 

Greek Christian philosophers of the Patristic era indisputably used Neoplatonist terms to describe and persuade (the Neoplatonist framework was the dominant mode for all philosophical discourse, after all), so this use is not a surprise, but the Church filled those terms with Christian content in its missionary efforts and reorganized them into a framework based on Christian teaching and concepts that were already in use in the century before Plotinus was born, namely ex nihilo creation and the oneness, immateriality, and timelessness of the divine being (Ireneaus, student of Polycarp, who was a student of the Apostle John, wrote about all of these 25 years before Plotinus' birth and 80 years before Plotinus first compiled and shared his Enneads).  Christianity shares with Neoplatonism a belief in the tri-hypostatic nature of God and the oneness and timelessness of the divine being (and also shares this belief in God's oneness and timelessness with the ancient Hebrews who built the first temple in Jerusalem and from whom Plato got his ideas about the nature of the divine, if Philo of Alexandria and Margaret Barker are to be believed), but that's where the similarity ends.   That said, insofar as Plotinus believed that the divine being is One, timeless, and undivided, then he got some things right.  Mormons would agree with Plotinus that matter is co-eternal, that spirits are preexistent, that our intelligences derive from an uncreated 'pool' or primordial source of Intelligence (Plotinus' second hypostasis, the Nous), and that humans have a divine spark, correct?  Clearly, being a pagan Greek philosopher doesn't by definition necessarily make someone wrong in everything they teach.  Since we humans are reason-endowed (a gift from God, granted to draw us to Himself), sometimes even pagans are able to approach the truth through reason alone.  Similarly, Christian use of Greek philosophical terms doesn't necessarily mean that the Christian who uses the term is unduly influenced by pagans.  After all, John the Beloved used logos, a Greek philosophical term, to refer to the preincarnate Christ in his Gospel.  It makes sense that John would use terminology familiar to Greek pagans in his effort to evangelize those Greek pagans.  This is precisely what the Church did when trying to formulate the language used in the Trinitarian dogma.

Great post, brother!  You definitely know what you are talking about!

 

We are on adjoining tracks headed for the same city.  All the roads lead to....

 

Well I can't say Rome.  I can't say Salt Lake, but you get the idea....    I think we are both in the same Tribe.

Edited May 27, 2015 by mfbukowski

[mfbukowski]

But my suggestion is to put all that abstract stuff written by others into your own language.

 

But I am into creating my own universe anyway- that might not be for you. 

[mfbukowski]

Nobody is talking about creating Gods.  That may be how Mormonism seems to traditional Christians.  We believe God has given us a clearer understanding of his nature.  I would argue that "traditional" Christian understanding of God is the created version.

Perfectly said imo.

[Meadowchik]

I believe Christ was co-eternal with the Father as His Firstborn in spirit.

[mfbukowski]

I believe Christ was co-eternal with the Father as His Firstborn in spirit.

So do many of us here.

Welcome!

[JLHPROF]

I believe Christ was co-eternal with the Father as His Firstborn in spirit.

 

Please clarify?  Co-eternal but firstborn.

[mfbukowski]

Eray asked me whose truth do I seek. I said God's. 

 

It is an attitude that I have when I approach things I don't understand. 

As do we all.  And?

[mfbukowski]

Please clarify?  Co-eternal but firstborn.

See now there you go making things all complicated and all.

 

 

[danielwoods]

As do we all.  And?

 

And what? That is all. 

[rodheadlee]

I'd rather the truth, rational to me or not. 

Well here is the truth: "If men do not comprehend the character of God, they do not comprehend themselves."  

https://www.lds.org/ensign/1971/04/the-king-follett-sermon?lang=eng

 

 

It's not all that difficult.Our entire existence is patterned after Heavenly Father's. An uneducated carpenter like me can understand it.

[Storm Rider]

Well here is the truth: "If men do not comprehend the character of God, they do not comprehend themselves."  

https://www.lds.org/ensign/1971/04/the-king-follett-sermon?lang=eng

 

 

It's not all that difficult.Our entire existence is patterned after Heavenly Father's. An uneducated carpenter like me can understand it.

 

Hello Rod, this statement has always been a bit problematic for me.  I have never felt that I comprehend God; however, I believe in his perfect holiness and/or righteousness.  As I read this statement and limit the definition of character to God being holy then I have no problems with the statement.  However, if I broaden the definition to include a must broader meaning then there is a sense of being overwhelmed and an acknowledgement that this mortal existence prevents any of us from having a full understanding of God.  

 

Of course, I could just admit that I have a limited understanding of most things and call it good. 

[danielwoods]

Well here is the truth: "If men do not comprehend the character of God, they do not comprehend themselves."  

https://www.lds.org/ensign/1971/04/the-king-follett-sermon?lang=eng

 

 

It's not all that difficult.Our entire existence is patterned after Heavenly Father's. An uneducated carpenter like me can understand it.

 

Even the devil comprehends the character of God. So, clearly knowing or comprehending God's nature isn't enough. 

 

What they don't have is a right relationship with him. To Know God is eternal life, that is to know him personally, as in relationship. 

 

I agree it's not that difficult. 

[coolrok7]

So God used to be a man like us and became a god?

Edited May 28, 2015 by coolrok7

[thesometimesaint]

So God used to be a man like us?

 

Was Jesus once a man like us?

[coolrok7]

Answer me first and I'll answer you.