Your assessment of Orthodoxy remains mistakenly and positively dead wrong, FK. Kolo has spent much of his time providing you with Orthodox sources and teachings.
What are you talking about? Or, then what have we been arguing about? :) I asserted that God is personal and you took me to task immediately. And that wasn't just one exchange, we've been going back and forth about this for a while now. I was actually surprised that Kolo backed you up. That's what made me assume it was an Orthodox position and not just your own. If God is mostly unknowable mystery, and He doesn't have personal relationships with His children (as you recently said and argued that Jesus did not), then it follows that you do not see God as personal. You are not alone. Many philosophers/theologians also took this approach all the way unto this day.
You are really changing horses with that one. :)
Orthodox Catechism teaches that we have a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ, and through Him only. Otherwise, God is ineffable, a supreme Mystery.
Oh come on, Kosta. :) Since when have YOU EVER followed anything called the Orthodox Catechism. :) We both know what you have been arguing. I really DO read all of your posts. :) Again, another of our current discussions has you saying the Jesus did NOT have personal relationships with His own disciples! :)
Why would that surprise you? Orthodoxy believes God to be both a personal and impersonal. He is "personal" in as much as we can relate to Christ in his human nature without imagining burning bushes and pillars of fire, but he is not our "personal" God. He is everyone's God.
If God is mostly unknowable mystery, and He doesn't have personal relationships with His children (as you recently said and argued that Jesus did not), then it follows that you do not see God as personal.
What abut the Reformed God who has preordained everyone according to his will to either go to heaven or hell? How personal is that? If God is impartial ("no respecter of persons" is what the Bible says!), then how can he also be personal? It is rather we who adopt God as our personal pet and make him into whatever we want him to be. I got news for you, FK: the world is the way it is whether we understand or like it. It's not your world; it's everybody's world. The same with God; God is everyone's God, not yours, or mine.
You are not alone. Many philosophers/theologians also took this approach all the way unto this day.
Good for them. Only the self-centered would imagine that God exists for them and not for others.
You are really changing horses with that one
I don't think so.
Since when have YOU EVER followed anything called the Orthodox Catechism.
I do all the time, FK. I defer to the Church no matter what my opinion is. I do not presume to have the collective wisdom and knowledge of the Church.
We both know what you have been arguing. I really DO read all of your posts
My arguments are just that, my arguments.
Again, another of our current discussions has you saying the Jesus did NOT have personal relationships with His own disciples!
No he didn't. He was their master; they were his disciples. It was a strict teacher-student relationship. Jesus always reminds them that they do not know or understand him, that he is not like them. Every one of the instances in the NT where he address them it was for a purpose of teaching them. He never treated any of them as his peers.
You, on the other hand, fantasize about them socializing together. Where in the Bible does it says God socialized with anyone? But you will find "personal" relationship eve with the OT God who does not much more than rebuke and threaten (not to mention destroy and kill). There is no intimacy in any of that. Even when Christ washes his disciples' feet, it is a duty and obedience, not personal favor or an expression of affection.
Jesus even had a fairly dysfunctional home life when you think about it; his own family thought he was not althogehter right in his head; and he even denies them as his family. No special smoochy affection in that household, FK, nothing as we would think in terms of "personal" or "intimate." God is our Lord and we are not his peers or friends or cousins, not in the way we think of it.
That is a big problem in western Christianity: the absolute drop-on-your-knees-face-to-the-ground reverence you see in Orthodoxy is lacking. Oh no, in the west we have "Daddy," we accept the Eucharist in the hand, etc. God is our Lord and Master, not our peer or buddy or fellow.