God is an answer to the problem of our existence in reality.
The Christian God is a personal creator; and as such provides the possibility of purpose and meaning, if we choose to align with the divine.
This God loves us each as a parent loves his or her child; and therefore we may have a personal role in creation - as a member of God's loving family.
Jesus Christ is an answer to the problem of our life in this world.
This actual experienced world is a mixture: life and death, creation and destruction, good and evil, joy and despair, love and fear...
Jesus offers the possibility of a life of creation, good, joy and love - forever and unmixed.
It seems to me that Jesus's offer is the best I know of, that I can believe.
It has one disadvantage, which is that Heaven lies on the other side of death: we must first die and be resurrected if Heaven is to become possible: if we are to be fitted for Heaven, and if Heaven and our-self is to become eternal.
The only offer that I can imagine which would be better than that of Jesus is if it was possible to provide Heaven on earth now and without dying.
I don't believe that this is possible*. I believe that the nature of this mortal life and world is such that entropy, death and evil are always going to be present.
But I imagine that someone who could believe that real, unmixed, everlasting Heaven on earth and on this side of death was a genuinely possibility; would probably prefer it to what Jesus offers.
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* In case anybody is interested why I (personally) do not believe Heaven on earth is possible (others will reason differently, of course); the main reason is that I regard the free agency of Beings as primary.
Unless each and all of the Beings on earth and in this universe (i.e. every single Being, including the mass of non-human Beings - animals, plants, "minerals" etc.) were to choose to live wholly by love; and allow the elimination of everything about themselves that was incompatible with Heaven -- then there would still be evil present in this world, and Heaven could not be made on earth.
So much for evil: what of entropy and death?
I regard "chaos" (of autonomous, uncoordinated, unaware of each other Beings) as primal; and God's creation as being imposed upon that. While there is no end to God's create-ing, there is a constant tendency to revert to the primal state, which is termed "entropy". So the harmonious cooperation that is creation, is always tending to degenerate; and "death" is the end of all earthly "things", forms, structures, Beings.
In other words this is a mortal universe, everything changes, decays, "dies"; and everlasting life cannot be imposed upon it (cannot - because otherwise, with the creator as good and personally loving, eternal living would already have happened and be normal).
I regard it as a fact of life that we all must therefore die, before we can be re-made eternally; from scratch, on the basis only of love (i.e. resurrected).
I state my reasons, not to defend or debate them; but because I find them compelling. The point is not to argue about it, but to discover what You find compelling.
2 comments:
Lovely. Just a few observations.
First, while of course heaven cannot by any creaturely efforts be achieved on Earth, or in our cosmos as now constituted (and as infected sickened and devastated by evil and chaos, etc.), heaven is nevertheless in our cosmos everywhere foreshadowed, or remnant, or indeed both, as the fundamental basis of things howsoever they be diverted from its glories; is in fact already breaking forth, the eschaton and its final victory already proceeding from the very beginning (as senescence and death begin at birth); and those foreshadows and remnants can be magnified - or hurt - by what we do.
E.g., Bach, Byrd, Palestrina. Or the cathedrals. Or the mountains. Or babies. Or just settling into bed after a full wearisome day. The glory - the heavenly glow - of all such things cannot honestly or sanely be controverted.
But, no matter what we do to instantiate and magnify the Kingdom here and now, we'll need to be praying "thy Kingdom come" all the way out to the eschaton. It can't come to complete fulfillment for us creatures until then.
To think otherwise is to fall into the illusion proposed by Lucifer.
Second, John's Apocalypse indicates that at the eschaton, heaven *shall* be restored on Earth. That shall require first the death of all deadly things; which is a lot of death. But, he says, not all will at that time die; the good that is on Earth achieved shall be preserved and glorified, and the already dead bits of it resurrected. John - the closest student of Jesus, who is God - testifies that his Master has revealed this to him.
Third, it appears to me that we differ only, or mainly, in what we treat as ultimate. You treat chaos as ultimate and eternal, with God and his latter day allies contesting with the rest of it - being themselves, all, only bits thereof - and somehow eventually prevailing over the rest of the chaos, albeit not absolutely (for, if chaos be ultimate, then how?). I - and the Perennial Tradition - treat God as ultimate, with creaturely chaos and defection - Satan and his allies and victims - engaged in a futile, delusory and in the end losing conflict with God and his project of creation.
@Kristor - I'm not sure I understand what you mean Firstly.
As you may recall; I am personally sure that the Biblical Book Revelation/ Apocalypse was Not written by the author of the Fourth Gospel (mainly because Revelation fundamentally contradicts the Fourth Gospel)- and I regard Revelation as fundamentally *wrong*. So from my POV there isn't much point in discussing it; beyond re-stating that IMO there is/will be no "second coming": *Jesus completed his work*.
"You treat chaos as ultimate and eternal" - Not "ultimate", but *primal* - prior in time, and "chaos" only in a sense. You are trying to argue from assumptions that assume that time can be deleted from the discussion - I am saying that "chaos" was primal, before God began creation.
Second, what I call primal chaos is (as I have explained "a hundred times") a reality in which there are also primal Beings.
Thirdly: "Chaos" is Not total nothingness, and Not total disorder; chaos is the reality of a multitude of Beings, each of which is alive, purposive, and has a degree of consciousness - But no awareness of each other, and no cooperation or coordination.
As a "picture" one might imagine a vast number of Beings dotted irregularly around the void - but then the picture must be modified to recognize that these are spirit-Beings, not incarnate. Creation began with our Heavenly Parents' (i.e. God) mutual love.
God can continue to create - and other Being can participate in creation - forever - yet it will always be "mixed". It took the work of Jesus Christ for there to be the possibility of Heaven - which is a *Second* Creation.
I know well and from the inside what you call the Perennial Tradition (although I thought *that* was the self-name of "oneness spirituality", of e.g. Aldous Huxley and Western Hindus/ Buddhists etc!) but I recognize it as essentially incoherent for common sense and obvious reasons that are historically and widely appreciated.
And I simply do not accept the mainstream Christian theological practice (dating back to early centuries of the Church) of cranking discourse into hyper-complex realms of abstractions. This I regard as self-deception by self-confusion.
Nor do I accept stating "it's a mystery" about core aspects of Christian doctrine; nor casting word-spells; not appeals to "authorities" the question of whose authority is exactly what is at issue - I do not accept these as valid ways of escaping basic self-contradiction.
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