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To: xzins
Also, you have the reality of Christianity, that in it's true form it emphasizes the "individual's" responsibility before God for his/her own actions and beliefs. Christianity, therefore, could NEVER be the supporting religious system for a this-world one-world communal social order, for its emphasis is on the individual.

You overlook the fact that the God of Christianity is the Trinity, the ultimate form of community. God's covenants make Christianity a corporate, as well as an individual, reality. A family, a church, a tribe, have identities of their own, and are not just assortments of disconnected individuals rattling around together.

Every social order is a theocracy. Every law order is a theocracy. If a culture can't explain its ultimate reasons for existence, then it's dying. Unless you can explain why laws should be kept, they won't be.

No matter how much you feague it -- a navel view is not a substitute for a world view.

Unless your faith has an extrinsic, objective, external component, then you are merely fooling yourself, fooling with yourself, engaged in emotional masturbation.

God's Kingdom is too big to fit in our navels.

26 posted on 03/13/2011 1:26:13 AM PST by RJR_fan ("Be kind to every person you meet. For every person is fighting a great battle." St. Ephraim)
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To: RJR_fan

The church is a consideration, of course, as a candidate for some kind of communal lifestyle. The problem with that is that the individual is ultimately responsible before God.

The assembly is the assembly of the saints, that is, the “holy ONES.” These ONES join together because of “love”...another choice...and not because of any teaching that the individual must be obliterated and absorbed by the communal.


27 posted on 03/13/2011 1:57:42 AM PST by xzins (Retired Army Chaplain & proud of it: Truly Supporting the Troops means praying for their Victory!)
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To: RJR_fan
You offered: "You overlook the fact that the God of Christianity is the Trinity, the ultimate form of community."

God is ONE being manifesting in three very distinct personas but not three separate beings. Oneness is not a form of community. There are cults which have some resemblance to Christianity, but they tend to define God as three separate beings in a troika. A troika of beings would be community, but God is One. Here's a little essay which, I'm told, tends to make this more clear:

The One God evidences Himself in the work He is doing

The following will be 'a way' to understand the notion of the trinitarian nature of the Deity, not a strictly Biblical explanation, but one which is applicable to the teaching of the Bible. Here goes:

God The Father Almighty is greater than His creation, thus greater than created dimension time and dimension space, thus we may think of The Father Almighty as beyond time and space but not prevented from touching and indeed penetrating His creation.

The universe of space and time is likened to a bubble: what is inside the bubble is in time and space. But the nature of what is inside the bubble is only partially understood in modern Physics.

The Bible relates scenes which defy the simplistic notions we use for assumptive science. We'll get to that 'assumptive' notion shortly, but let us make the statement that God The Father Almighty is as comfortable outside the bubble as He is inside the bubble.

Modern Physics has discovered that the balance of forces and tensions sustaining the universe necessary for human life to arise within the universe is extremely delicate, on the order of a mathematical improbability, represented as a 'one in less than' fraction so tiny that a one over a one followed by more than one-hundred zeros defines the probability that the whole thing remains in balance! Such a delicate balancing act is but one of the continuing 'works' of the Holy Spirit of God. It is by the Spirit of God, The Word, that the universe came into existence and it is said in the Bible that by His Spirit the whole is maintained.

But the Bible also states that The Word was with God in the beginning and was God. In John's gospel we find that Jesus is The Word made flesh Who dwelt among us. So, inside the bubble Created by The Father Almighty, sustained by God The Holy Spirit, is the Word, God made flesh Who dwelt among us. The Creator does not stop being greater than His creation bubble, nor does His Spirit cease to sustain it all in balance, when Jesus comes in the flesh to dwell among us.

Here's an address to 'assumptive science limitations': Now, when one reads the Tanakh/Old Testament, one finds scenes like the fifth chapter of Daniel where a being is in one spacetime 'where/when' reaching into another 'where/when' to write on the palace party central wall of king Belshazzar. Just the forearm/hand is seen in the where/when of Belshazzar and the party folks, the rest of the being remains in 'another' where/when.

God The Father Almighty created this 'other' where/when, His Holy Spirit maintains its balance and separateness from our where/when, and Jesus has moved in and out of this other where/when: as shown when He resurrected from the tomb without rolling away the stone, just passing out of the tomb where/when, into 'another' where/when; then back into our where/when as He spoke to the women come to the sepulchre; and when He appeared in a locked and shuttered room with the disciples present; or appeared suddenly with the disciples walking on a road and broke bread with them then abruptly left our where/when to go to the 'other' where/when.

The trinitarian nature of God is shown in the Bible, even in the Tanakh. Trinity IS the nature of God as we have been given to know. Even in the Old Testament/Tanakh, we do have instruction on the Three nature of God as Creator, Sustainer, and Deliverer. God Is manifested as three yet one, seen identified by 'the work He is doing'.

With each manifestation, we are given to realize His presence simultaneously as Creator--because we exist in the realm He created, as Sustainer--because the balance is too delicate to stand alone without His sustaining the separation and interdependence, and as God with us in the person of Jesus our Lord and Savior.

28 posted on 03/13/2011 8:24:54 AM PDT by MHGinTN (Some, believing they can't be deceived, it's nigh impossible to convince them when they're deceived.)
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