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To: count-your-change; Cronos; kosta50; boatbums
" ....Jesus was God, so His God is God.”

And THAT makes sense? Perhaps it does to you but not by any sensible use of the English language I am aware of.

This is just going to be a rant, feel free to throw rocks or ignore it or whatever:

I think at some point we have to think hard about what "making sense" can mean in conversations about God.

Jesus says,"I am the door of the sheep"(gate of the sheepfold, whatever). We have some idea of what he means because we have seen and used doors. And doors are wonderful. There is a long and hysterical series in the comic strip Pogo about a door standing all by itself somewhere. And in the last book of the Narnia books, a door by itself plays a big role. A principal work in the Zen school is the Mumonkan, the Gateless Gate.

We start by thinking Jesus is just making metaphor. He is saying he is LIKE a door in that, in some sense, we must pass through him.

But then I began to think that actually He IS the door, and the doors I use are pale imitations of him. And so with "Way" or with calling God "Father".

Being a father, I learn something about God from my role. But then I learn something about how to be a father from God, and I realize that I am an imitation father, while he is sho' 'nuff FATHER.

Now it gets worse. I encounter "individuals" -- by which I take us to suggest that a human person is somehow not divided-- an a-tom, a not-cut. And I encounter single objects, one cup of coffee.

But for all our lives and from before they began, physicists have been precisely 'cutting' the 'not-cut', the atom, and so we take for granted that there are sub-atomic particles.

I start to wonder if "one" is a word like "door","father", "way" where I think I know what it means but maybe I don't, where MY experience of 'one' teaches me something important about God, but after a while maybe my experience of God will teach me something important about 'one'.

And in the meantime, I am not so certain that the 'sensible use of the English language' can get me as far as I need to go in worshipping Him with my heart and mind. The English language, and any language, is well suited to creatures. It shatters like crystal on tile when it comes up against The Lord.

290 posted on 05/24/2011 4:52:45 AM PDT by Mad Dawg (Oh Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.)
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To: Mad Dawg
And in the meantime, I am not so certain that the 'sensible use of the English language' can get me as far as I need to go in worshipping Him with my heart and mind. The English language, and any language, is well suited to creatures. It shatters like crystal on tile when it comes up against The Lord.

Thanks for sharing that, I feel exactly that way when I read:

Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. (Rom. 8:26)

364 posted on 05/24/2011 3:24:10 PM PDT by boatbums (God is ready to assume full responsibility for the life wholly yielded to him.)
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