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To: scripter
While the Mormon concept of deity may be interesting to some, I find this "Christian" concept of deity far more perplexing. Let's take a closer look:

1. Personal and Incorporeal...God is also incorporeal. Unlike humans, God is not uniquely associated with one physical entity (i.e., a body). This is why the Bible refers to God as Spirit (John 4:24).

So does God have a body or not? Well, uh, sometimes. Christ came to earth as a mortal. He died and was resurrected. Did he later shed that resurrected body and become a "spirit" again? (We won't even get into whether a spirit is "incorporeal" or not.)

2. The Creator and Sustainer of Everything Else that Exists...the God of classical theism created the universe ex nihilo (out of nothing). Consequently, it is on God alone that everything in the universe depends for its existence (see Acts 17:25; Col. 1:16, 17; Rom. 11:36; Heb. 11:3; 2 Cor. 4:6; Rev. 4:11).

Check all the above references. Not a single "ex nihilo" in any of them. Perhaps this doctrine was created out of nothing.

3. Omnipotent. God is also said to be omnipotent or all-powerful. This should be understood to mean that God can do anything that is (1) logically possible (see below), and (2) consistent with being a personal, incorporeal, omniscient, omnipresent, immutable, wholly perfect, and necessary Creator.

Let's see now. God is all powerful, but he is not. He cannot do that which is logically impossible. Is God restricted by the illogical or merely the impossible? Perhaps "logical" and "impossible" are attributes which humans have assigned to God based on their own (mis)understanding of Him. At any rate, I find this whole argument logically impossible.

4. Omniscient. God is all-knowing, and His all-knowingness encompasses the past, present, and future.

The future? Been there done that.

5. Omnipresent. Logically following from God's omniscience, incorporeality, omnipotence, and role as creator and sustainer of the universe is His omnipresence. Since God is not limited by a spatio-temporal body, knows everything immediately without benefit of sensory organs, and sustains the existence of all that exists, it follows that He is in some sense present everywhere. Certainly it is the Bible's explicit teaching that God is omnipresent (Ps. 139:7-12; Jer. 23:23-24).

The above scriptures are used to illustrate that we cannot "hide" from God. He can "see" us wherever we are, or from wherever He is. That doesn't mean He is everywhere at all times.

6. Immutable and Eternal. When a Christian says that God is immutable and eternal, he or she is saying that God is unchanging (Mal. 3:6; Heb. 6:17; Isa. 46:10b) and has always existed as God throughout all eternity (Ps. 90:2; Isa. 40:28; 43:12b, 13; 57:15a; Rom. 1:20a; 1 Tim. 1:17).6 There never was a time when God was not God.

Did God's nature change when he "became" a mortal and suffered death on the cross? Did God really "die," and if so, how could he still be God?

7. Necessary and the Only God.

The Jews could also use this to argue that Jesus Christ is not God.

What surprises me most about this particular "Christian concept of God," is that not once is Jesus Christ mentioned. Is/Are not Jesus and God one and the same? Why have the left the Saviour out of their philosophy of God?

15 posted on 02/13/2003 10:23:11 PM PST by wai-ming
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To: wai-ming
Why have the left the Saviour out of their philosophy of God?

It's a good question. The only plausible answer I can come up with is that the poster has not yet paid for that series of lessons yet.

21 posted on 02/14/2003 5:45:47 AM PST by Illbay (If the hunger for liberty destroys order, the hunger for order will destroy liberty. - Will Durant)
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To: wai-ming
The reason the "Christian" philosophy of God outlined does not mention Christ is that it is a product of the Western Christian preference for speculation over experience (note the only Church Father quoted in the piece is Blessed Augustine), and is really a piece of Hellenistic philosophy rather than Christian theology.

In the Christian East, a "philosophy of God" which is not grounded in the Church's experience of God as the All-Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is a non-starter.

Incidentally for Orthodox and Latin Christians, though not for protestants, the doctrine of creation ex nihilo is Biblical: there is a passage in one of the books of the Maccabees (I don't have it to hand) in which a Jewish woman, exhorting her sons to steadfastness unto death in the face of Hellenistic pagan persecution speaks of God creating the world out of nothing. At least among the Orthodox, she and her sons are numbered among the saints of the Old Covenant, and commemorated on our calendar.

22 posted on 02/14/2003 6:28:14 AM PST by The_Reader_David
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