here is the reference I was trying to attach about annihilationism.
1) Calvin, John. The Geneva Confession. The Protestant Reformation, Major Documents. Edited by Lewis W. Spitz. Concordia Publishing House, 1997.
2) Aquinas, St. Thomas. Light of Faith: The Compendium of Theology. http://www.ewtn.com/library/Theology/SIPLIGHT.HTM.
3) Tillich, Paul. Systematic Theology. The Universtiy Of Chicago Press, 1963.
4) Wesley, John. As Quoted in Responsible Grace, Randy L. Maddox. Abingdon Press, 1994.
5) J.J.C. Smart, "The Existence of God," Church Quarterly Review 156 (1955): 194
** All Biblical Quotes are New American Standard
October 15, 2001
We have come to grips as Christians, that God is far beyond our understanding. In fact we have found comfort in the rallying cry that, "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, So are My ways higher than your ways And My thoughts than your thoughts. (Is. 55:9)" There is solace that we cling to in this sentiment, that God is not us, and that we are not Him. In the bible, anthropomorphic language is often attributed to God. He is given the ability to feel emotions in His heart, to strike with His fist, and incline His ear to His people. This is all done in terms of understanding and relation. We act in this manner, and God acts with us. So in understanding His activity with us as people, we have attributed these human equivalents in His favor the only way we know how, in the only manner in which we are accustomed to. In an intimate relationship such as the one between man and God, we can identify with our participant in as much as we can identify with ourselves. For the biblical writer, they felt the hand of God comforting or judging from their position in the relationship. They felt the emotional aspect of the relationship, and expressed their own guilt, shame, compassion or jubilee through their connection with God. The relationship between man and God was so deep that man could express the character of God through their own windows of experience.
The biblical writers seem to have found identification in this type of language that many Christians today appear to reject. For the Isaiah passage above is our comfort now as we seem to have a distant concept of God's nature in relationship to our own. The Augustinian model of sinful man plagued by a fall from grace has become our predominant concept of relationship between God and creation. As we see ourselves, with the wickedness and sinfulness, we can not with any possibility see the God which we have come to identify as love and perfection. If our ways are sinfulness, drunkenness, rape, murder, neglect, and hostility, if we are to worship a God, He has to be higher than us, greater than us, different from us.
This has often given me great trouble in my understanding of God. For I have always found comfort in the idea that I am a lot like God. Truthfully, I have pushed this a lot further, and have found hope, purpose, faith and resolve in the concept that I am somehow a part of God. I have found identity and power in that life is a significant extension of His own being. Even further down, that creation: world, animals, rules of science, and human beings, are all practicalities of one true existence. We are all reality, and regardless of awareness of each other, we all share in co-existence. The furthest away star in the universe is connected in being to the most basic of elements of human life, oxygen; though the two have never, and in all probability will never meet.
Co-Creators with Christ.
There is a distinct difference between much of the bible and current understanding of it today. For the biblical writers were able see the activity of God through their own activity. They were able to see and express the personhood of God through their own personhood. God was understood as they understood themselves. This is to say that I can know God, because I know myself. However, as expressed above, today we see ourselves as such separate creatures from God, that to understand His attributes or identity through that of our own would be blasphemy. John Calvin wrote, "since man is naturally (as has been said) deprived and destitute in himself of all the light of God and of all righteousness, we acknowledge that by himself he can only expect the wrath and malediction of God, and hence that he must look outside himself for the means of his salvation." (1) God's thoughts and ways are above our own. So comfort is not found in that we can know God in the familiarity of our own back yard, but our comfort lies in that He is from a completely different neighborhood. This must be struck down, and the understanding of the nature of God and humanity through the concept of existence and being may be such a step in doing so.
Miracles
First we may ponder for a bit the concept of pre-creation. As a child I often struggled in visualizing the Christian explanation of nothingness. Reason followed that if God existed, there must have been at least space, but then that would negate the thought that God created even space. I could not imagine existence without area. God in order to exist had to have area. Ponderings led to ponderings, and I could imagine a world without God, just nothing ever existing. I could think up a person who had never been born, who had never been created. That person never existed, and to them then, neither did matter, or space, or even us. In order for existence to be comprehended there must be awareness. If there was no awareness, then there was nothing to be aware of, hence no existence. This could make sense to my child mind, only if it was allotted that then by way of there never being any consciousness, or awareness, then there was not ever any existence-including any God. For if God was ever to exist, then He had to be aware, thus demanding awareness of surrounding and space. This last conclusion then concluding that God indeed did not create space and therefore could not be the Almighty Creator of all that is.
This is where we are going to spend our efforts now for the rest of the paper. For my mind at that time could not comprehend what we will be looking at. For what can be now said is that God is existence. I demanded at my earlier stage that God in order to be, had to be aware of being itself. What I could not comprehend though was an abstraction of principles. That if God was being itself, and if God was awareness itself, then all there was to be aware of, was Himself. God had consciousness of Himself; this is propelled existence. St. Thomas Aquinas similarly argues this in his understanding of God when he states that for God, "to be and to understand are identical. (2)" Even further along these lines he asserts of God that, "intellectual activity is His existence. (2)" This opens up the thought process of understanding God as being itself.
God has always existed. As we imagined earlier of a person never existing, neither did creation, time, space, or area. For there was nothing but one living consciousness, one living awareness, one existence, and we call upon His name as God. We can close our eyes and imagine darkness, and fall into unconsciousness and experience without knowing what it was like before, "in the beginning" ever took place. Unto ourselves, in that comatose state, we do not exist. There is no dream, no intellectual stimulation, there is nothing, and nothing ever was. But for God, "intellectual activity is His existence." God knew Himself, because He was. He declared to Moses that He was "I am." God is existence because He exists. Not outside of any parameters that we have come to understand our touches with existence, but as those parameters themselves. He always has been, always is, and always will be, for He is existence itself.
The problem with the modern Christian way of thinking is that by using the concept of existence to understand God, the confines of our current understanding for our own existence then places limits on an otherwise limitless God. It puts attributes of our own human existence onto a God who is above our ways and thoughts. We realize our limits, and we preach continually of our sinfulness, and our distinct nature separate from God. To understand God as existence itself raises problematic questions that may be too damaging and consequential to handle in an affirmative manner. But to negate the idea all together, and never fully realize the potential power in such an affirmation, may be even further damaging than any perceived notion otherwise.
Didn’t he say earlier however, that God is so tied to our existence that our attributes are sort of contributed to him.
The bible says that we have been created in God's image, and this has been a steady doctrine for all believers in the God of Abraham; Jewish, Muslim, and Christian alike. When the story of humanity is opened up, and it is read that by His own initiative, "God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them (Gen 1:27)," we must cipher through in our understanding of what this image implies. While participants in the greater essence of creation, and are beings amongst being, an intimate and much more close relationship between God and man appears to exist within this text, and in fact our own Christian lives and experience. For while it is through the push of God that all existence is formalized, it is of man that God entertains the concept to, "Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness. (Gen. 1:26)" This is a very emphatic line drawn in the sand of existence. For there is matter in this world, and then there appears to be man, who is much more closer to the essence of God, or His likeness.
First though it is helpful to inspect that which we are not, and see the divine attributes of greater creation. Paul writes in his epistle to the Romans, " because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. (1:19-20)" What is evident of God is within ourselves.However, with the modern view of sinfulness being the foundation of who we are, this is a statement hard to take in. However, if this verse is to be taken strongly it suggests that we are much more closer to God than we are to sin.For we have His very eternal power and divine attributes within us. Objects speak of His glory and existence for they are not merely reflections of it, but actualization of it. In this manner Jesus says that if man will not do it, stones will cry out. If God existed in consciousness and awareness of self, then all that breathes forth from His existence is an actualization of that existence. It is a formulation of His consciousness. And God says that we are His image.
WORKS CITED
1) Calvin, John. The Geneva Confession. The Protestant Reformation, Major Documents. Edited by Lewis W. Spitz. Concordia Publishing House, 1997.
2) Aquinas, St. Thomas. Light of Faith: The Compendium of Theology. http://www.ewtn.com/library/Theology/SIPLIGHT.HTM.
3) Tillich, Paul. Systematic Theology. The Universtiy Of Chicago Press, 1963.
4) Wesley, John. As Quoted in Responsible Grace, Randy L. Maddox. Abingdon Press, 1994.
5) J.J.C. Smart, "The Existence of God," Church Quarterly Review 156 (1955): 194
** All Biblical Quotes are New American Standard
God As Existence
A Model For Understanding the Nature of God and Man
By
Shaun Hilby
October 15, 2001
The biblical writers seem to have found identification in this type of language that many Christians today appear to reject. For the Isaiah passage above is our comfort now as we seem to have a distant concept of God's nature in relationship to our own. The Augustinian model of sinful man plagued by a fall from grace has become our predominant concept of relationship between God and creation. As we see ourselves, with the wickedness and sinfulness, we can not with any possibility see the God which we have come to identify as love and perfection. If our ways are sinfulness, drunkenness, rape, murder, neglect, and hostility, if we are to worship a God, He has to be higher than us, greater than us, different from us.
This has often given me great trouble in my understanding of God. For I have always found comfort in the idea that I am a lot like God. Truthfully, I have pushed this a lot further, and have found hope, purpose, faith and resolve in the concept that I am somehow a part of God. I have found identity and power in that life is a significant extension of His own being. Even further down, that creation: world, animals, rules of science, and human beings, are all practicalities of one true existence. We are all reality, and regardless of awareness of each other, we all share in co-existence. The furthest away star in the universe is connected in being to the most basic of elements of human life, oxygen; though the two have never, and in all probability will never meet.
Co-Creators with Christ.
There is a distinct difference between much of the bible and current understanding of it today. For the biblical writers were able see the activity of God through their own activity. They were able to see and express the personhood of God through their own personhood. God was understood as they understood themselves. This is to say that I can know God, because I know myself. However, as expressed above, today we see ourselves as such separate creatures from God, that to understand His attributes or identity through that of our own would be blasphemy. John Calvin wrote, "since man is naturally (as has been said) deprived and destitute in himself of all the light of God and of all righteousness, we acknowledge that by himself he can only expect the wrath and malediction of God, and hence that he must look outside himself for the means of his salvation." (1) God's thoughts and ways are above our own. So comfort is not found in that we can know God in the familiarity of our own back yard, but our comfort lies in that He is from a completely different neighborhood. This must be struck down, and the understanding of the nature of God and humanity through the concept of existence and being may be such a step in doing so.
Miracles
First we may ponder for a bit the concept of pre-creation. As a child I often struggled in visualizing the Christian explanation of nothingness. Reason followed that if God existed, there must have been at least space, but then that would negate the thought that God created even space. I could not imagine existence without area. God in order to exist had to have area. Ponderings led to ponderings, and I could imagine a world without God, just nothing ever existing. I could think up a person who had never been born, who had never been created. That person never existed, and to them then, neither did matter, or space, or even us. In order for existence to be comprehended there must be awareness. If there was no awareness, then there was nothing to be aware of, hence no existence. This could make sense to my child mind, only if it was allotted that then by way of there never being any consciousness, or awareness, then there was not ever any existence-including any God. For if God was ever to exist, then He had to be aware, thus demanding awareness of surrounding and space. This last conclusion then concluding that God indeed did not create space and therefore could not be the Almighty Creator of all that is.
This is where we are going to spend our efforts now for the rest of the paper. For my mind at that time could not comprehend what we will be looking at. For what can be now said is that God is existence. I demanded at my earlier stage that God in order to be, had to be aware of being itself. What I could not comprehend though was an abstraction of principles. That if God was being itself, and if God was awareness itself, then all there was to be aware of, was Himself. God had consciousness of Himself; this is propelled existence. St. Thomas Aquinas similarly argues this in his understanding of God when he states that for God, "to be and to understand are identical. (2)" Even further along these lines he asserts of God that, "intellectual activity is His existence. (2)" This opens up the thought process of understanding God as being itself.
God has always existed. As we imagined earlier of a person never existing, neither did creation, time, space, or area. For there was nothing but one living consciousness, one living awareness, one existence, and we call upon His name as God. We can close our eyes and imagine darkness, and fall into unconsciousness and experience without knowing what it was like before, "in the beginning" ever took place. Unto ourselves, in that comatose state, we do not exist. There is no dream, no intellectual stimulation, there is nothing, and nothing ever was. But for God, "intellectual activity is His existence." God knew Himself, because He was. He declared to Moses that He was "I am." God is existence because He exists. Not outside of any parameters that we have come to understand our touches with existence, but as those parameters themselves. He always has been, always is, and always will be, for He is existence itself.
The problem with the modern Christian way of thinking is that by using the concept of existence to understand God, the confines of our current understanding for our own existence then places limits on an otherwise limitless God. It puts attributes of our own human existence onto a God who is above our ways and thoughts. We realize our limits, and we preach continually of our sinfulness, and our distinct nature separate from God. To understand God as existence itself raises problematic questions that may be too damaging and consequential to handle in an affirmative manner. But to negate the idea all together, and never fully realize the potential power in such an affirmation, may be even further damaging than any perceived notion otherwise.
Didn’t he say earlier however, that God is so tied to our existence that our attributes are sort of contributed to him.
The bible says that we have been created in God's image, and this has been a steady doctrine for all believers in the God of Abraham; Jewish, Muslim, and Christian alike. When the story of humanity is opened up, and it is read that by His own initiative, "God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them (Gen 1:27)," we must cipher through in our understanding of what this image implies. While participants in the greater essence of creation, and are beings amongst being, an intimate and much more close relationship between God and man appears to exist within this text, and in fact our own Christian lives and experience. For while it is through the push of God that all existence is formalized, it is of man that God entertains the concept to, "Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness. (Gen. 1:26)" This is a very emphatic line drawn in the sand of existence. For there is matter in this world, and then there appears to be man, who is much more closer to the essence of God, or His likeness.
First though it is helpful to inspect that which we are not, and see the divine attributes of greater creation. Paul writes in his epistle to the Romans, " because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. (1:19-20)" What is evident of God is within ourselves.However, with the modern view of sinfulness being the foundation of who we are, this is a statement hard to take in. However, if this verse is to be taken strongly it suggests that we are much more closer to God than we are to sin.For we have His very eternal power and divine attributes within us. Objects speak of His glory and existence for they are not merely reflections of it, but actualization of it. In this manner Jesus says that if man will not do it, stones will cry out. If God existed in consciousness and awareness of self, then all that breathes forth from His existence is an actualization of that existence. It is a formulation of His consciousness. And God says that we are His image.
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