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“I Am Also Much More Than a Person.”

April 18, 2024

I wanted to know whether the world is separate from God or, in some sense, is God.

Neither is an adequate formulation. It would be ridiculous to say that everything—the bruise on your toe—just is God. I am the principle of life, the telos and end of all activity in the universe. So I am neither removed as a thing apart nor simply identical with the things in the universe.

Later I learned that there is a theological view with a respected tradition called panentheism. This view holds that God is both in the world and more than the world, both immanent and transcendent. This is distinct from pantheism, which holds that God is entirely within the world.

But, if God was, in some sense, the world—the physical universe—how could He also be a Person? “But, Lord, You are also a Person.”

Yes and No. I come to you—but not to raindrops—as a Person, and therefore I am a Person. One cannot be a Person in some modes without being a Person.

But I am also much more than a Person. Just because I seem so familiar to you—we talk just as persons do—should not mislead you into thinking I am “just a guy.” It is true that I have many of the attributes of a person—desires and a history, for example. But again do not assume that desire and history mean just the same for Me as they do for human beings. Keep in mind that I am definitely not a human being.

________

Listen to this on God: An Autobiography, The Podcast– the dramatic adaptation and continuing discussion of the book God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher by Jerry L. Martin.

He was a lifelong agnostic, but one day he had an occasion to pray. To his vast surprise, God answered- in words. Being a philosopher, he had a lot of questions, and God had a lot to tell him.

“I Breathe Life Into Matter.”

April 11, 2024

God continued,

I breathe life into matter, and matter starts responding. As one translation of Genesis puts it, I “flutter over the waters” and nurture, incubate life. And I am filled with joy. It is like a child picking up a harp and being surprised to find that strumming it makes beautiful sounds—and delightedly playing with it.

At the beginning, the cosmos was My playpen, My garden of delights. It was beautiful, dazzling. I could play it like a vast organ, but one attached to laser shows and fireworks.

I Am the Point of Interaction Between Man and the World.

April 4, 2024

I read about the great scientific debate of the eighteenth century: is space absolute or relative? Today, the standard view is that science and religion are opposites. But it was his theology that led Newton to regard space, “the sensorium of God,” as absolute; and a different theology that led Leibniz to uphold relativity, two hundred years before Einstein.

“Lord, what does this reading have to do with my assignment?”

The history of science is My story.

“Do you mean the history of the physical world?”

No, the history of man’s efforts to understand the world is the history of man’s relation to Me.

“Then You are the world?”

No, I am the point of interaction between man and the world.

What Are We to You?

March 28, 2024

Like others before me, I wondered how a Supreme Being could possibly care about us human beings. Job asks (7:17-18): “What is man, that you make much of him, that you fix your attention upon him—inspect him every morning, examine him every minute?”

“Lord, what are we to You?”

You are my face onto the world. And onto each other—you, whom I love. I want you to love each other. Christ’s two commandments …

Matthew 22:37-39: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind” and “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

… are right. They are rooted in the Old Testament. It is hard for Me to love people directly (hard on them, that is). I need people to do it for Me.

It seems that we open the world to God. He experiences the world through us. I remembered French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s argument that, since perception is essentially perspectival—from a vantage point—there is literally no God’s-eye point of view. We are his eyes and ears

Evil is a Power of Its Own.

March 22, 2024

As for Satan, that is the symbolism for the evil that is loose in the world. I do not “inflict” it on people. It is just part of the structure of reality. “Satan” represents the fact that there is (an actual) force for evil. That evil is a power of its own, a temptation, and fault-line in human nature, not just the accidental byproduct of (natural) human desires unrestrained.

Pure being is not an abstraction but a living force.

March 7, 2024

To the philosophers and theologians, feelings, along with other affects, are weaknesses. So God is regarded as passionless, so passionless that it is difficult to see how He can love. St. Anselm puzzles over how a passionless God can be com-passionate. His solution is that “we experience the effect of compassion, but Thou dost not experience the feeling.” You can see the logical puzzle: we experience God’s love, but God feels no love for us. For the philosophers, even to speak of a personal God is at best a metaphor or analogy. But, in my experience, God is not a metaphor. He is a Person to whom we can pray, who can give us guidance about our lives. However, I was told,

They have some aspects of Me right.

“What do they have right?”

They understand that I am pure Being, Being unto itself. They understand My metaphysical essence. They do not understand My dynamic existence, a force …

“A Person?”

… yes, and a Person. They use these categories in a way that makes them mutually exclusive, but they are not. Pure Being is not an abstraction but a living force, focused personally. Do not avoid metaphysics, but always listen to Me or you will go on the wrong track.

The Consequences of Actions Are What They Are

February 22, 2024

Like a slick lawyer, I shifted my line of questioning. “Lord, are You saying that, if someone really believed that he or she could do something, like jumping over the moon, they could do it even if it violated the laws of nature?”

No, even I operate under the constraint of physical laws. This talk about what other physical laws I might have decreed is wrong-headed. The consequences of actions are what they are—I don’t make them up. The relations of matter and energy, the speed of light, etc., are fixed. In that sense, there are no other possible worlds. Every world would have these same relations of act to consequence.

Putting Me First Rather Than Last

February 15, 2024

I had now accepted the assignment, but God wanted more. He wanted me to “purify” myself.

You need purification. Transformation is a good word. It is obedience, which at its fullest is transformation.

“What does that involve, Lord?”

Putting Me first rather than last. Living every moment, making every decision, in response to My call.

“How do I go about doing that?”

You know this—start every day with prayer and let prayer guide you through the day.

“The World is All Part of Me.”

February 10, 2024

“Is this connected with the idea of Nature as the Body of God?”

Yes, but it is a clumsy metaphysics. What is valid is the respect in which the world is all part of Me. But (it is) not correct to say, (in a) reductionist (way), that I am merely the physical world. There are levels of mind and spirit not apparent in the (physical) world.

“The Great Apes Are Wonderful Creatures . . . So Close But Yet So Far.”

February 1, 2024

“And so, Lord, You call forth the first human beings?”

Yes, the first inklings, forerunners, of man. The great apes are wonderful creatures, full of intelligence, energy, and drive. But it is frustrating to interact with them. They are so close and yet so far from having full interactive personalities. They have teleological urges but they are only effective, for the most part, at the biological level. Their social life is rudimentary and their spiritual awareness is diffuse and inarticulate. They lack a symbolic order. They can’t project ideals beyond the sensual. They can’t respond to Me either.

“But they evolved?”

The transition to early man is both slow and sudden. Remember what the first two years of a child’s life is like, and (then) imagine each day to be a century. In a sense, nothing is happening. One day looks much like the last, and there is no single great leap forward.

So imagine My excitement when the first protohumans arrived. At first, you couldn’t tell them from animals but I could see their potential. They didn’t have language but their sounds and marks had representative purposes. They could connect one thing to another, one thought to another. They could remember their past and replay it in their minds. They slowly developed a sense of the future.