Chrisentheism, a new way forward

Faith & Science Conversation
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Those 14.3 billion years of history didn’t go anywhere, they’re right where they were. But that’s the view from inside the timeline! “Outside” in eternity, there’s no problem with the moment of Jesus’ conception being the actual first moment of time, the problem only occurs when you try to force eternity to fit the Creation timeline – that is, the “huge logical dilemma” only occurs if you make the timeline trump the eternal . . . “tau” time, to borrow from non-theological language.

I’ve been sitting here trying to think of an analogy from science, but the only thing that comes to mind is quantum tunneling: the Annunciation happens and the Eternal Word begins to take on the material, which makes Creation possible, so the only-barely-begun enfleshment of the Logos “tunnels” “back” 14.3 billion years and starts our timeline, and then when the timeline catches up (“when the fulness of time had come”) the Incarnation proceeds in time. Just don’t try to push the analogy any farther than that because it’s a poor analogy anyway.

Or here’s one from sacramental theology: from an eternal perspective, there has only ever been one Lord’s Supper, celebrated at one Table, where Jesus spoke the Words of Institution, and what happens on Sundays (and other days) when the Eucharist is celebrated is that the priest/pastor/elder/whatever becomes the instrument through whom that one Supper takes place in what from our perspective is a different time and place than the original. So the Incarnation is an event that transcends time and space by happening at the start of everything and in the center of everything.

That conundrum occurs anyway: the universe, sin and all, doesn’t exist on its own, it is created anew every moment – the reason one of my professors said “Creation is always present tense”. So God is creating sin all the time.

Saying that if “God created all the prior history at the moment of the Incarnation” makes God responsible for sin comes from what my brothers the mathematicians would say is “bad geometry” that views the timeline as static just due to foreknowledge. If foreknowledge doesn’t nullify free will (it doesn’t), then neither does creating the entire timeline at once.

John tells us in Revelation that – to use a translation I usually avoid – all things were created for God’s pleasure. Maybe God likes infinity so He made an infinite universe.

My notion is that each galaxy gets one intelligent race (my uncle the Navy officer says he’s waiting for the one in the Milky Way to show up). But Paul says that “all creation groans” because of humanity’s sin, which would sort of mean every other race’s fate is settled by our screw-up.

Not many translators go with philosophical renditions even if it’s obvious.

Making prototokos the pre-incarnate Word ignores the tense of the hymn: the opening line is present tense – “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation”, not “He was”. If anything it’s talking about the Ascended Logos. Besides, making it about the pre-incarnate Son also destroys Paul’s point against the gnostics: he’s saying that this Logos-made-flesh is the image of the invisible God (which fits with several scripture texts), that this God-Man is that Image – or as I prefer to translate it, He is the Icon of the Invisible God, Whom having seen, we have seen the Father,

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I have no idea what you mean by “Actuality”.

I also disagree with your description of “Classical Theism” as saying “All things are not of God”; all things are of God in that nothing has been made apart from Him, and that isn’t just about back at the beginning, it’s about everything that ever came into existence as a result of what started at the beginning.

But that’s not what the words mean.

“We are expanding into God”, in term of infinities, especially when you reference Hilbert’s Hotel, is a form of panentheism.

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A UNIVERSE FROM NOTHING

St Roymond posted this:
“I think Krauss may have been on the discussion panel with Neil DeGrasse Tyson and some others on an Asimov symposium where the topic was “Nothing”. It was a fascinating discussion as they tried to differentiate between different meanings and pin down what each one meant by the word.
[I think this is the one I’m thinking of: [2013 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate: The Existence of Nothing - YouTube](2013 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate: The Existence of Nothing - YouTube) I watched it a few years ago and immediately went back to the start and listened again.]”

Thank you for your comments and for sending me the YouTube video. I watched about a quarter of it and concluded that the scientists hadn’t appreciated that the pre-universe the state of affairs any of them envisaged was nothing like absolute nothingness, indeed nothing like nothing. Metaphysically, the philosophical arguments for God’s existence (e.g. the Contingency argument and the Cosmological argument) establish that if anything at all exists then a self-existent being must exist. So, in order to remove the necessity of God atheists have to demonstrate how and why there is something rather than nothing, and they can’t cheat by offering a state of affairs that is clearly something (because they can describe it) and therefore nothing like nothing. Krauss and the rest of the atheist scientists who wish to offer their facile arguments need to be exposed as metaphysical charlatans.

To this end, you (and others) may be interested in the following comments on Krauss’s book ‘A Universe from Nothing’ from an interview with South African Quaker cosmologist George F.R. Ellis (who, with Stephen Hawking, co-authored the seminal book The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time) which I reproduce in my book:

Horgan: Lawrence Krauss, in A Universe from Nothing, claims that physics has basically solved the mystery of why there is something rather than nothing. Do you agree?

"Ellis: Certainly not. He is presenting untested speculative theories of how things came into existence out of a pre-existing complex of entities, including variational principles, quantum field theory, specific symmetry groups, a bubbling vacuum, all the components of the standard model of particle physics, and so on. He does not explain in what way these entities could have pre-existed the coming into being of the universe, why they should have existed at all, or why they should have had the form they did. And he gives no experimental or observational process whereby we could test these vivid speculations of the supposed universe-generation mechanism. How indeed can you test what existed before the universe existed? You can’t.

"Thus what he is presenting is not tested science. It’s a philosophical speculation, which he apparently believes is so compelling he does not have to give any specification of evidence that would confirm it is true. Well, you can’t get any evidence about what existed before space and time came into being. Above all he believes that these mathematically based speculations solve thousand year old philosophical conundrums, without seriously engaging those philosophical issues. The belief that all of reality can be fully comprehended in terms of physics and the equations of physics is a fantasy. As pointed out so well by Eddington in his Gifford lectures, they are partial and incomplete representations of physical, biological, psychological, and social reality.

"And above all Krauss does not address why the laws of physics exist, why they have the form they have, or in what kind of manifestation they existed before the universe existed (which he must believe if he believes they brought the universe into existence). Who or what dreamt up symmetry principles, Lagrangians, specific symmetry groups, gauge theories, and so on? He does not begin to answer these questions.

“It’s very ironic when he says philosophy is bunk and then himself engages in this kind of attempt at philosophy. It seems that science education should include some basic modules on Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hume, and the other great philosophers, as well as writings of more recent philosophers such as Tim Maudlin and David Albert.”

cf. Physicist George Ellis Knocks Physicists for Knocking Philosophy, Falsification, Free Will - Scientific American Blog Network, extract from ‘Physicist George Ellis Knocks Physicists for Knocking Philosophy …’, by John Horton, Director, the Center for Science Writings at the Stevens Institute of Technology, Scientific American.

Elsewhere, physicist Rev. John Polkinghorne comments:

“Only by an extreme abuse of language can a quantum mechanical vacuum be called nothing.”

Extract from p.80, One World – the Interaction of Science and Theology by John Polkinghorne. © Copyright John Polkinghorne 1986.

THE INFINITY OF GOD

I’m afraid my brain doesn’t do mathematics beyond the basics, so I must recuse myself from these parts of the debate. However, the concept of infinity in mathematics and physics has preoccupied some participants and has been allowed to cross over the theological barrier with it seems to me very confusing consequences. I suggest that these participants read ‘Infinity Is a Beautiful Concept — And It’s Ruining Physics’ on the Discovery Magazine website for a cold dose of reality.

What I feel competent to say is that this cross-over is a profound mistake. The infinity of God and his attributes is unlike the infinity debated in physics and mathematics. In his book 'New Proofs for the Existence of God", Fr. Robert Spitzer presents contingent beings as realities which depend for their existence on other realities to fulfil the conditions they needs to exist. If all that existed were such realities then nothing at all would exist. Therefore there must an unconditional reality which has no dependence on anything outside its own nature for existence - we call this God.

‘Infinity’ when applied to God means that there are no conditions needed for his existence, no limits on his being. This is a metaphysical concept, not a mathematical one. He has infinite attributes in terms of love, power, wisdom, etc. because he has infinite being. He is pure, absolute, unconstrained, eternal being. The idea is totally divorced from notions of infinite physical energy or space - they are irrelevant and do not bridge any supposed divide between faith and science

The Trinity expresses a truth we would never have known unless it had been revealed to us. The Son as perfect image of the Father contains all possibility of derivative being so that it is through him that all created beings arise ex nihilo. There is a creative potential within God’s nature which the Father sees within the Son and he decides what creation would be holy and pleasing to him, as Oxford philosopher Keith Ward argues.

Created being is dependent for every moment of existence on the word of God, and should he stop thinking of us for one instant we would disappear back into the divine potentiality from which he summoned us. Ex nihilo means there was no pre-existent non-divine substance used to fashion the universe. It is his infinite power which gives existence to the creation which he envisages and desires.

Very hard to imagine, indeed, as it would be easier to propose that creatures are no more than thoughts and images in the divine mind. But our experience as human beings tell us that somehow he has given us a freedom of thought and will which we can exercise in defiance of his perfect plan for us. Can we explain this? No. As Paul wrote: “Now we see in a glass darkly, but then we shall see face to face.”

As we know, western science was Christian and theocentric in origin, and many of the great names in the history of science were devout believers. This changed in the last two centuries and many scientists today have no faith and think they have reason to reject God. The sin of intellectual pride that caused our downfall in Eden continues to blight our race and produce false gods.

But the fundamentals have not changed, and there seems to me to be no call upon us to find some intellectual reconciliation between faith and science as Troy has been striving to do. God reveals himself both through his word in scripture if properly understood and through his word in creation if properly understood, and all we need to do is find and present a correct understanding of both. The former is what Christian ecumenism seeks to achieve so that Christians can unite in confronting the massive challenges humanity faces today. Many believing scientists seek to achieve the latter and reverse the anti-God culture which distorts the presentation of scientific findings.

So, I’m sorry, Troy, but I don’t think Chrisentheism is either correct or coherent enough to help with these objectives.

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I haven’t read your whole comment, but from what I perceive @Troy’s objective to be, I agree with your last line summary.

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Great dismantling of Atheist nothingness! I agrees it makes No sence and is incoherent metaphysics. But our Christian “nothing” also has problems if God is an Actual (a completed totality AKA greatest being) . If God is all there is then there is no room for a “nothing”. Or in your language, All potentials are already Actualised in totality so no creation is possible.

So God used a pre existent divine substance to create the universe? I agree (The Son), Now explain that and avoid pantheism… that’s the dilemma. I avoid the dilemma by a juxtaposition of the divine substance by the cross. Jesus, who is All in ALL, light, ordered, alive. Became in death, Dark, chaotic, void Gen 1vs 1,2.

My main point is that

  1. Pantheism affirms Gods Actuality, but denies His holiness
    All things are of God
  2. Classical Theism Affirms Gods Holiness but denies His Actuality
    All things are not of God
  3. I’m seeing a middle way, that affirms God Holiness and Actuality.
    All things are In God but not Of God.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uj3_KqkI9Zo

Lets use the Hotel language

  1. God is An actual infinite hotel with no rooms. everything is a part of the Hotel (no distinction, God is not holy)

  2. God is not an Actual infinite Hotel. Everything is sitting outside the hotel. (God is Not Actual )

  3. God is an actual infinite Hotel with many rooms (in my Fathers house…many rooms). Everything has a room. (God is both Actual and Holy)

All the rooms (ontological separation, vacuum) are made possible by the work of Jesus, and timeline doesn’t matter just like atonement reaches forwards and backwards. RC and protestants disagree on this point. That is why Protestants dislike the notion of the constant sacrifice of Jesus in the mass. Our disagreement over the nature of time, is a presupposition about the work of Christ as unbounded by time and therefore no need to be constantly redone.

But I will say my view does concede to Rome in one major way. That being if protestants are correct about the unbounded power of his atonement (life ), We must also be consistent about the unbounded power of His death. The unbounded power of his life and death are present in the mass. Therefore His Body and Blood are really held in the form of the elements as actual Of Christ !! For all things are created by His death that includes the elements! We can reunite over Jesus if this doctrine is developed properly in humility.

“In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, 8which he lavished upon us, in all wisdom and insight 9making knownc to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ 10as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.” (eph 1 : 7-10)

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You got it! that’s why I call it Chrisenthiesm! In not Of

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Agreed Chrisentheism!

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Interesting article in DISCOVER. I have just one comment: there is a place where we know there are infinities – the digits of constants such as pi, where it’s been proven that they don’t stop. But outside of mathematics, I’ve become less than enamored of infinities even in black holes or relativity.

I have to agree. In part that’s because I have two mathematician brothers who maintain that in mathematical terms infinity isn’t even needed to describe the attributes of God, and that’s something I don’t think I recognized was nagging at me until I read your post here: if two PhD-level mathematicians can use math to describe the attributes of God and they don’t need infinities to do so, of what use is it to try to talk about infinity in connection with God?

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But there’s absolutely no necessity for God’s eternal viewpoint to shuffle the creation timeline as presented in God-inspired scripture to make Luke 1;35 its first moment alongside Gen. 1:1. Under Occam’s principle, don’t seek a complicated solution to a problem that has a far simpler one. In his eternal mode of being, God sees the creation timeline from beginning to end and this timeline works perfectly well as scripture presents it and the whole Church has always understood it. As Joseph Ratzinger wrote in The Feast of Faith, “The whole Old Testament is a movement of transition to Christ, a waiting for the One in whom all its words would come true, in whom the ‘Covenant’ would attain fulfilment as the New Covenant.” Later, as Pope Benedict XVI, he repeated the point in his Apostolic Declaration, Word of God.

Even if, as you claim, God has the power to manipulate the timeline as you and Troy envisage, to imagine he was/is willing to do so and has actually done so in a way akin to the mysterious quantum analogy of a collapse of the wave function in order to satisfy some imagined problem with classical theology (which I’ll come to) is simply a recipe for incredulity and rejection by the vast majority of Christians. As a way of bringing them together, it’s a really terrible idea, and I say that having for three years of my life been Chair of a local Churches Together group in southeast England.

Troy is trying to solve a problem with classical theology that doesn’t exist because he has misconceived the conclusions of some of the most brilliant minds in history such as St Anselm and St Thomas Aquinas and their modern successors. My own acquaintance with Thomist theology began when I was a young man and read a large tome entitled ‘Natural Theology’ by a Fr Joyce. I have spent over sixty years since as a member of the RC community theologically awash with neo-Thomist thinking.

I can therefore promise you that Catholic theology, and I suspect Eastern Orthodox and Protestant theology too, finds no problem with the infinite God being both actual and holy. When properly understood, classical theology concludes that God IS his attributes of omnipotence, omniscience, love, truth, holiness, etc. because there is no partition in his nature. God doesn’t need to create a vacuum within his own nature to accommodate creation. Creation of finite beings and finite universes ex nihilo has zero impact on his changeless nature and in no ways detracts from it or makes it impure. Even unrepented grievous sin and its punishment in the hell created for the fallen angels does not in Aquinas’s thinking negate the beauty and perfection and holiness of his creation because the self-inflicted fate of lost souls still testifies to the goodness and holiness and justice of God.

I don’t know if you agree, but there seems to be a vagueness and looseness of thinking in Troy’s presentation of Chrisentheism. When he tries to equate the formless void and the darkness over the deep at the beginning of Genesis with the physical fluid in Mary’s womb and the physical darkness as clouds covered the sun on Calvary, this is just a poetic way of linking quite different realities. Cosmologists tell us that the early stages of the universe were indeed chaotic as space-time expanded very rapidly from the first moment and light did not emerge for eons with the formation of stars. This is perfectly compatible with Genesis 1:2. But this has everything to do with creation of a material universe distinct from the infinite being of the Creator and nothing to do with creation of a vacuum within God himself.

Incidentally, you talk of an infinite universe as if it were a fact, but it isn’t. Cosmologist George Ellis puts it this way in his article about a supposed multiverse: “The [multiverse enthusiasts] are telling us we can state in broad terms what happens 1,000 times as far as our cosmic horizon, 10,100 times, 101,000,000 times, an infinity – all from data we obtain within the horizon. It is an extrapolation of an extraordinary kind. Maybe the universe closes up on a very large scale, and there is no infinity out there. Maybe all the matter in the universe ends somewhere, and there is empty space forever after. Maybe space and time come to an end at a singularity that bounds the universe. We just do not know what actually happens, for we have no information about these regions and never will.”

In his attempts to conflate the moment of incarnation with the first moment of creation, Troy does not clearly distinguish the pre-incarnate Word and the incarnate Word. The Word of God in his divine nature is forever at the centre of initiating and sustaining creation, therefore there is no reason to insist that the incarnate Christ must also be there. The incarnate Christ is at the centre of salvation history and the gift of his Holy Spirit and head of the church, and that is primarily what scripture is about. As you have eloquently said, the Genesis creation myth was written to crush the ANE creation myths circulating in the time of Abraham and for centuries thereafter. The author of Genesis wanted to kick-start the account of God’s saving work and create a pre-historic context, and I think we should accept its overall structure with its natural time progression as God’s inspired word.

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Mathematician David Hilbert’s Infinite Hotel is a thought experiment in which all the rooms in the hotel are occupied but at the same time new guests can be admitted because room 1’s occupant can be moved into room 2 to accommodate a new guest, room 2’s occupant moved to room 3, etc. etc. ad infinitum. This process can be repeated for any number of new guests.

Hilbert’s hotel thought experiment cannot be applied to God because it is a category B-infinity which is a potential infinity but can never be an actual infinity. So a numeric sequence beginning 1,2,3,… can theoretically go on for ever but an end point can never be reached. The infinite hotel belongs to this category and cannot exist except as a hypothesis. Hilbert’s category A-infinity is not a mathematical infinity at all and applies to the absence of any restriction on say power. It does apply in scholastic (classical) tradition to God. Category C-infinity is like B-infinity as a mathematical infinity but is used to signify an actualised infinity within a finite or aggregative structure, e.g. an actual infinite number of members, an existing infinite spatial manifold, or an infinite history of past events. Hilbert argued that a C-infinity can never be actualised in the real world and I understand that most mathematicians agree.

Heaven of course is a created environment prepared by Christ for those who are saved and although potentially unlimited is therefore not infinite.

You used this thought experiment in response to my argument.

You conclusion from this is: “So God used a pre existent divine substance to create the universe? I agree (The Son), Now explain that and avoid pantheism.”

But I didn’t say that God used divine substance to create. He did not use any of his divine nature as the material out of which our universe was created. Nor did he create a vacuum within himself and fill it with creation, so that creation became a part of his nature. Classical theology never gave house room to any such notions. It proclaims that he used his infinite power to create ex nihilo, which as you know means from no pre-existent material, either divine or otherwise. God saw within his own image that finite beings other than himself were possible and he willed them to exist.

Pantheism states that all that is in existence is God, so our endlessly changing universe is God. Where have I ever said that? I am a monotheist, not a pantheist.

So now my position is clear, how does your Infinite Hotel fit in?

As for the Catholic mass and doctrine of the Real Presence, it would good if Protestants actually took the time to properly understand what Catholics believe. In the mass we are fulfilling exactly what Christ commanded his disciples to do (‘Do this in remembrance of me’) and what Paul tells us to do in 1 Corinthians 11. It is a re-enactment of the Last Supper where the separation of Christ body and blood (‘This is my body, this is my blood’) anticipated his unique sacrifice on Calvary, not in any way a repeat of it. We call it the sacrifice of the mass because in obedience to Christ’s command we offer to God a non-bloody offering of the consecrated species in contrast to the OT sacrifices which so offended God if made by evil hearts (Isaiah 1:11-17) and in this way we reconsecrate ourselves and our world to God. There is no “constant sacrifice of Jesus in the mass.”

Having said that, I was interested in what you write in your next para. as it seems to come close to the Catholic doctrine of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, however one might express that.

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[
First things Terry, thank your well thought out responses! They are helpful to my formulation of what my view is suggesting and where it lacks clarity and I appreciate them greatly !:smiley:.

And let us all in principle agree with St. Augustine “We don’t rightly understand anything until we understand its connection with Jesus Christ.”

This must be true of creation.

I chose to come onto this forum to discuss this view precisely because bio logos aims to balance the conflict between Christian faith and science which vexes many and causes some to stumble and fall from the faith. In order to encourage believers I have suggested an interpretation of Genesis that is consistent with the gospel. Instead of frustrating faith we can use the text to build it. In my view this can be a new way forward. I think St Augustine would agree with this goal.

Most simply, Genesis read as gospel narrative tells the reader, God can make the dead come to life, so trust in Him. That progression in the narrative is fairly clear, if looking for it. Darkness first then Light is born. Jesus is the Light as firstborn of creation. Jesus is also first born from the dead. The earth(Adam) is raised out of the sea (death). Man made of earth is then formed dead but then made alive by the Spirit. The earth (Christ of Adam/earth) under the waters, is like Jonah, in the belly of the great fish (death). Lots of connections.

Chrisentheism in its mildest form suggests the text is another supernatural foreshadowing of the coming Christ and his work. Thus the inerrancy of the text is salvaged as gospel truth not scientific facts. Chrisentheism in its strongest form suggests the narrative becomes the foundation of metaphysical reality.

I don’t know why a Christian should reject this view immediately. A suggestion that Christ accomplished more than redemption at the cross. For me, it makes His work greater, “without Him nothing was made that was made”. The work of Jesus is of universal necessity not plan B

The first century apostles where arguing for Christ in a mixed Greek and Jewish culture. The Greek mind was not interested in atonement of sin primarily, instead the Greek mind was preoccupied with ontological questions, trying to understanding and explain reality, logic, metaphysics, and ethics etc. Our modern scientific worldview is an extension of this type of thinking. Whenever we see ontological language in the apostles, they were preaching and evangelizing to the Greek mind. “In Him”, “Through Him”, “All things consist in Him” and Christ’s necessity in creation are examples of this. The Spirit of Truth moves Paul to replace Zeus with our God in Greek poetry and claim,
“In Him, we live and move and have our being” this is ontological language for the Greek.

The Gospel I believe can satisfy both Greek (science) and Jewish (faith) questions in a logical way.

Chrisentheism is a work in progress. I am attempting to Christianise the construct of panentheism. I believe the work of Christ is the only way to clarify this position. This unsympathetic article gives background on the position and its challenges in light of the other Theistic views. I think the work of Christ can clarify this position with carful and humble theological effort.

I agree, I am suggesting the potential infinity B is all things (people in rooms each in correspondence with a number) created by God. These things exist as separated substances within the Actual infinite hotel.

Time would be a good example of this. Our Time is potential B infinity, it is in correspondence with spatial locations in an expanding universe. All events occur at a certain time but also at a specific location in the universe (thing in a room). Our potential B timeline/expansion can continue infinitely into an actual timeline which is completed totality (a time that has no spatial location, presentism of God)

We could also apply the same model to knowledge. Human knowledge is potential b infinity, All true knowledge comes from Gods infinite Actual knowledge, but we being finite can only know individual truths, one piece at a time as they correspond to other truths (thing in a room). And like the Hotel, we can never know all that God knows. Even after 10 million years of learning about God we will never exhaust new truths in him. With God there is always more truths to discover! Exciting eternal future ahead !

The same model to energy (ability to work). All created things are energy in correspondence with a form. particles, substances, planets, people, ect. But to avoid Pantheism I have suggested Gods energy was put in juxtaposition maintaining his Holiness. For lack of a better term God created “Dark Energy”. From this dark energy (death of the son) God creates all things. That is why in Genesis God calls formed light “Good” opposed to dark, Order is “Good” opposed to chaos, Life is “Good” opposed to death. The “goodness” of the light, order and life, is based upon the juxtaposition of the initial state Gen 1:1,2.

Classical theism avoids pantheism by claiming God created all things from no energy (ex nihilo). In my view this leaves us with no better explanatory power than the atheist who claims nothing created everything. We say God used nothing of himself to create everything. You may argue God created by his word which is the pre incarnate Son in glory. Is any OF the Son’s pre incarnate glory in creation? The Classical answer’s is no, nothing of God is in the creation. The two are utterly distinct. The classical position of creation out of nothing also holds a contradiction as brute fact. ex nihilo nihil fit… out of nothing, nothing is produced or nothing comes from nothing. We have to hold ourselves to the same logical standard we use against other positions.

Now Chrisenthesim is unorthodox as It rejects ex nihilo. It posits creation is, by and through the substance of Jesus the Son, but not of His divine Glory, but by necessity of his death. Thus logically maintaining everything came from something. God is both Holy and Actual. Furthermore one must submit to Gods power over causation, whereby the first cause of the universe is in union with His work on the cross. All this in Gods purview is a instantaneous and completed timeline, but to us its sequential progressing forward into eternity. I admit this is a mind bending concept, but it is biblical.

Now this realisation was most surprising to me, as I having been enamored by Luther’s/Calvin bombastic denial of the real presence. But they themselves were left in a muddle to explain their positions afterwards.

Upon further reflection of Chrisentheism, I realised it provides a metaphysical justification for the real presence. Here is how.

Above I mentioned all created things through Christ, not his glorified substance but juxtaposed (death). The Holy form of the elements chosen by our Lord by which to bless his church is bread and wine. In this view the elements traced back into their essence is really the body and blood of our Lord. If the described primal Earth and Water in Genesis 1vs 1,2 is the metaphysical essence of Jesus Body and Blood then the elements are 100% of Him who died. For all things are made from the earth and water of Genesis 1, 1,2!

The Elements are made Holy from all other created things by Christ’s declaration as such, they maintain correspondence with the essence of water(blood) earth (body). In other words they directly represent what they really are, as Jesus boldly asserts.

A very startling conclusion indeed.

“For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him” My hope is for the reunification of Christianity around Jesus.

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I haven’t claimed any manipulation of the timeline.
Nor am I interested in and “imagined problem with classical theology”.

I definitely agree. To argue that God has to vacate part of Himself to make the universe inherently makes God of the same order of existence as the universe.
And while poetry may make for a framework for mystical theology, I don’t see it working here.

Where did I say that?

Actually I think he’s conflating Jesus’ death with the first moment of Creation.

But it’s the Eternal Word’s capacity to become “enmaterialed” that makes Creation possible. And as Prototokos, the Word had to become material before Creation could happen: He forged the way for material creation to occur, and as a consequence everything that exists or has existed or can exist is shaped by Him – so it’s not just because the stars and such are awesomely beautiful that they testify of God, they testify of God because they took on something of His “shape” in coming into existence. Thus everything we encounter, from a falling leaf to a falling ‘star’, can tell us something about Christ.

I’m not disputing anything about natural time progression – again, that would only be true if you insist that eternity is bound by our timeline.

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So the digits of pi are a Category-C infinity, while attempting to actually recite all of them can’t happen because there are no actual(ized) infinities?

I keep trying to remember where Augustine addressed this. I think Irenaeus addressed it, possibly in Against Heresies; I think that’s where the idea of God using some of His own substance to create the universe is connected with Gnosticism.

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From a Lutheran theologian I learned that the Eucharist is not a re-enactment but a participation in the one Supper, that the priest changes nothing but serves as the instrument for Christ to speak His words to us as He did at the initiatory instance of the one Supper. I think that matches Orthodox theology as well.

Scholars are more and more coming around to the view I learned from that same Lutheran theologian as well as from a Greek Orthodox priest, that the translation “Do this in memory of Me” is inaccurate and quite misleading (the radical reformation went off the deep end with ‘memory’), because the word used was the term for a “memorial sacrifice”, which is a sacrifice offered to God to remind Him of His promises. What makes the Eucharist special is that it is no mere bread and wine that is offered, but bread and wine which have become Christ’s Body and Blood, so that when the Father sees this offering to remind Him of His promises He is seeing the sacrifice of His Son.

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This quote embodies my view so closely. But how can we avoid Pantheism? The Son in his preincarnate substance is called Glory (Actual infinite energy- capacity to work). Creed says “light of light, God of God”. And yes I would agree Incarnation of humanity preceded death and resurrection in our timeline but the power of the events is eternal in effect, but before the Lords view its in present tense. Using general relativity language, God observes the expanding universe from every infinite angle, he is always ahead, behind and In. Therefore His foreknowledge of all things is perfect as spacetime is never ahead of Him.

I’m suggesting the solution is a Juxtaposition of the Son’s Glory in order to create and avoid pantheism. Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.

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It finally hit me what you’re doing here: you’re taking metaphor for ontology.

Until the Fall, darkness and chaos were not contrary to light or order, i.e. “good”, they were tools of YHWH-Elohim – that’s one of the polemical points of the account, that there is nothing that opposes YHWH-Elohim. It was the ANE religions that counted darkness as bad, as contrary to order, and the polemical intent of the text insists that nothing that exists is contrary to the order created by YHWH-Elohim because all that exists was made to serve Him.

But the atheist has no grounds for such a claim; it’s scientific nonsense. I remember reading that book by Krauss and having to restrain myself from throwing it at a wall because it was so plain that he wasn’t doing science but was doing metaphysics, and doing it rather badly to boot. An honest version of Krauss would admit (as was argued in that Asimov symposium) that saying the laws of quantum physics were there is saying that there wasn’t nothing. So when theists say God existed, they are in accord with the necessity that if there is something then there must always have been something, and identifying what “always has been” as God – and the only counter possible from the atheist is to say no, the universe has always existed, even if it was only as a quantum vacuum subject to quantum fluctuations.

Um, what? Luther insisted on the Real Presence, and told those who denied it that they did not have the Holy Spirit but a “different spirit”. Calvin didn’t deny it, either, he just mangled things to where when he said “real presence” he just meant a “spiritual” presence.
The "bombastic denial of the real presence came from the radicals who were putting rational humanism about the scriptures – in fact the ones who historically and theologically aren’t actually Protestants at all because their confessions were never sanctioned in the first place, and “Protestant” indicated those who at the Second Diet of Speyers had their (limited) religious freedom arbitrarily (and it was later learned, contrary to the will of the Emperor) revoked.

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Troy, St.Roymond, I’ve taken a few subsidiary points first before dealing below with what I regard as the substantive flaw in the theory Troy has called Chrisentheism.

SUBSIDIARY MATTERS

“… a new universe, a new infinity.” That suggested to me that you saw a new universe and a new infinity as either the same thing or entwined. Sorry if I’ve misunderstood you.

Pi - No, St.Roymond, I don’t believe its endless decimal sequence is a C-infinity, which Hilbert prohibits, but a B-infinity which he allows. I’ve taken my info on Hilbert’s thinking from American metaphysician Fr Robert Spitzer, founder of the Catholic platform the Magis Center and author of several books including ‘New Proofs for the Existence of God’. In this, he explains that, unlike a C-infinity, a B-infinity applies a mathematical infinity to a finite or aggregative structure in only a potential way which admits “only the possibility that a finite or aggregative structure could continue to progress indefinitely. Thus, the B-infinity does not imply that a Cantorian set (with an infinite number of members) actually exists.” As a non-mathematician, I have taken this point on trust, so I may be wrong.

I’m not sure that a Lutheran theologian presumably taking his lead from 16th century reform doctrine is best placed to explain the Eucharist in contrast to Catholic and Orthodox traditions which trace their understanding of the Eucharist back two millenia. Vatican II puts the Catholic position succinctly:

“At the Last Supper, on the night he was betrayed, our Savior instituted the Eucharistic Sacrifice of his Body and Blood. He did this in order to perpetuate the sacrifice of the cross throughout the centuries until he should come again, and so to entrust to his beloved spouse, the Church, a memorial of his death and resurrection: a sacrament of love, a sign of unity, a bond of charity, a paschal banquet in which Christ is consumed, the mind is filled with grace, and a pledge of future glory is given to us” (Sacrosanctum Concilium 47).

I’m pretty sure Orthodox doctrine follows the same approach, which is why the two traditions recognise the validity of each other’s priesthood and Catholics can happily receive the Eucharist from the hands of Orthodox priests and vice versa.

There is in the mass a ceremonial re-enactment of the Last Supper since it follows the outline in 1 Cor. 11:23-29, i.e. the participants’ examination of conscience before the consecration of the species of bread and wine which become in a very real sense the Body and Blood of Christ followed by a their very reverent reception at communion “because a person who eats and drinks without recognising the body is eating and drinking his own condemnation.” Very strong words indeed. This understanding of the Eucharist brings to life Jesus’s stunning discourse in preparation for its institution at the Last Supper as recorded in John 6:22-66.

I think your Lutheran theologian may be misleading you. I’ve looked up Luke 22:19 in the kjv (1611), nkjv (1982), niv (1978), nrsvue (2022), esv (2001), nlt (1996), amp (1965), nasb (1971), nabre (2011), gnb (good news, 1976), and my own preferred version, the New Jerusalem Bible (1985 NJB translated from revised French edition 1973). Nearly all of them translate the end of that verse as “Do this in remembrance of me.” A couple use “memory” for “remembrance.” I’m sure you recognise the enormous wealth and depth of modern scholarship that has been deployed to reach such a total consensus on the meaning of this verse including teams of scholars working in the first decades of this century.

It disappoints me that serious weight should be given to claims that all this massive array of ancient Greek and New Testament scholarship have produced an ‘inaccurate’ version of the verse. If scholars were “more and more coming around to the view” you express (a suspicious phrase seemingly intended to persuade us that this is an irresistible trend), why do even the most modern versions still retain the “in remembrance of” translation which 47 scholars found appropriate in the KJV in 1611, a version by common consent one of the most faithful translations of all?

Christ’s words could easily be translated “as a memorial of me” as this means virtually the same as the almost universally preferred translation; in the above quotation even the Vatican uses the phrase “as a memorial of his death and resurrention”. But “as a memorial sacrifice”? I’m not sure.

SUBSTANTIVE MATTER

Which brings me to the really substantive issue. Putting enormous weight on your outlier understanding of “prototokos”, both of you claim that there is no problem in locating the first moment of creation at Christ conception or alternatively his death. Personally, I think there is an enormous problem, and it has nothing to do with our human perception - and indeed more importantly that of scripture’s inspired human authors - of the historic timeline trumping an eternal perspective. On the contrary, it has everything to do with acknowledging God’s clear intention as revealed by the overall message of scripture to initiate a history in which our free will, exercised in countless choices in a real timeline, would be permitted to shape the course of human history until the mess we had sadly made of it and which God had foreseen and anticipated from the beginning finally prompted him to execute the final part of his plan to send his Son into the world as its redeemer. Free will can only be exercised in a real timeline because real alternative possibilities are always available, but if a particular moment late in history (only around 2,000 years ago) had be predetermined by God as the moment that ALL things including humanity would be created then the precise history that led to that moment would be the only history which could be allowed. The fluid history which scripture presents involving countless billions of free choices and which was influenced by partially successful calls by God for repentance and for men to choose good and renounce evil (e.g. Isaiah 1:17) could not be allowed to happen because its end point had been predetermined. The past history with that precise global end point was all that God could permit to occur and the fluid situation presented by scripture would have been impossible.

Your statement, St.Roymond, that the past history created at the coming of Christ was still a real one refers therefore to a history in which no variation from the history created at the time of Christ could be permitted, and thus you falsify scripture which tells us that history was in fact fluid and being progressively determined by men’s free choices. In short, the retrospectively created history at Christ’s coming was under your theory forever fixed and such history could have not be recreated as a fluid history shaped by alternative human choices. History cannot be both fixed at some future date but also fluid in its progression in time which to be real history it must be, so your theory is self-contradictory and unavailable as a possibility for God.

Your joint theory on this point is also I think, to use a phrase coined by physicist John Polkinghorne to describe the many-worlds explanation of the quantum world as opposed to the Copenhagen theory, a hypothesis of “extraordinary prodigality”, a sledgehammer to crack the proverbial nut.

To refresh our minds of the key text, Colossians 1:15-17 states (NJB version): “He is the image of the unseen God, the first born of all creation, for in him were created all things in heaven and earth: everything visible and invisible, thrones, ruling forces, sovereignties, powers - all things were created through him and for him. He exists before all things and in him all things hold together.”

As I’ve pointed out, mainstream scholarship sees Christ here as the only-begotten Son of God in his pre-incarnate nature, and has done so from the early Fathers of the Church. The things created through him included in due course the incarnate nature of which the Son took personal ownership in the power of the Holy Spirit in Luke 1:35. In no way does this later creation triggered the first ontological creation referred to in Gen. 1:1-2 except as possibly the principal or even sole motive for God to create.

There are other challenges to Troy’s arguments for Chrisentheism which you, St.Roymond, in particular have ably challenged, such as the creation of space within the divine nature to accommodate creation and the ease with which existing mainstream theology avoids any suggestion of pantheism in orthodox Christian teaching.

CONCLUSION

I think I have stated my arguments as clearly as I am able and reiterating them would serve little point. I think God would expect me to use my remaining time on this earth (I’m 85) more productively, so unless any participants have any questions to clarify what I have said, I think I should retire gracefully.

Thank you both and others like Adam and Dale for hearing me out in the kindly spirit promoted by this forum, and I am sure the Lord Jesus will find ways to bless you all in your mission to spread his word in a disobedient world.

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Lutheran theology traces the Eucharist back two millennia. The whole point of the Wittenburg Reformers was to stay true to the catholic church from which they saw Rome as deviating.

None of that is inconsistent with what I related. I’m terrible at remembering sources, but my recent reading on the Eucharist shows that the Fathers saw the priest’s role in the same way, that he was a stand-in essentially loaning his mouth and hands to the Savior to speak in our hearing the same words as in the Upper Room. They also emphasized that there is but one Supper, not many, and that as we are all baptized with one Baptism so also we all eat one Supper from the one Lord. To us it seems a re-enactment but it is just the one meal.

Translators tend to be inherently conservative. Any new scholarship takes a half generation or more to make it into translations.
I’m going to have to see if I can find it, but some time ago I read a Catholic scripture scholar who made the same argument is a memorial sacrifice – and indeed is treated as one in the liturgy.

Not at all – what transpired between “Let there be light” and the Annunciation in time is not determined in the least just because the moment of conception is the beginning of Creation. You’re making the same error other here are by insisting that the eternal has to be bound by the temporal.

History within the timeline flows freely, but it inevitably converges on the Incarnation. The free flow within the timeline has nothing to do with the view from eternity. The contradiction only appears if things are constrained by linear binary thinking. The Incarnation as an inevitable event in the fulness of time does not bind free will at all any more than the inevitable judgment does, indeed no more than God’s foreknowledge does.

Does the Second Coming require everything in the timeline to only happen one way?

No, it doesn’t – that’s one-dimensional thinking. God sees the entire timeline at once; the future is as real to Him as what we call the present. The timeline flows like a river in a plains setting where the stream meanders this way and that, but must eventually come to a point where massive bedrock constrains the stream to pass between two great outcroppings: how the river meanders is not determined by the outcroppings except to constrain the flow to pass through that point. God has set such constraints in the scriptures, such as the promise to the woman that her seed would overcome the serpent, or that a son of David would sit on Israel’s throne, or on a lesser level that Israel would wander in the wilderness for forty years: their wanderings were constrained by the date at which they would finally cross into the Promised Land, but that set date put no restrictions on what happened during the forty years.

That is contrary to the grammar of the hymn and thus cannot be correct: it does not say “He was the image…”, it says “He IS the image…” and that tense governs the succeeding clauses. The pre-incarnate aspect does not begin until the third clause, “for in Him were created…”, which shifts the viewpoint to the past rather than the present. I suspect that is where the Fathers and those following them are finding the pre-Incarnate Christ, not in the opening clause, not just because of the grammar but because if the present tense is replaced with a past tense then Paul’s argument against the gnostics is nullified – and as he unfolds that argument he uses phrases which come from the philosophical meaning of prototokos.

To amplify, the gnostics held that no human being could be in any way divine because creation emanated from “the fullness”, which was immeasurably remote from physical creation, and that fullness was the “unseen god” who was not involved with creation and could not be seen from material creation. Paul shatters all of this by saying that Christ, a man who had actually lived and died, was in fact the icon – the very representation – of the unseen God, who was at that present time the One who had opened the way for Creation to be possible, and all those “thrones, ruling forces, sovereignties, powers” – the layers of beings that to the gnostics were successive emanations down through the levels of existence – “were created through Him”, i.e. they came through the Way He had opened, and were “for him”, and that in the present tense Paul used that same Man was existing “before all things” and was in fact the One Who was holding all things together". The use of the present tense is what makes it a devastating rebuke to any gnostics trying to lead the church astray.

Keep in mind that what Paul writes here is a hymn, and it would have been sung as an affirmation that the Savior Who had ascended on high was at the very moment in worship was the very things the phrases proclaimed: He IS the image of the unseen God; He IS the Prototokos of all Creation; etc. [I encountered an argument that this might have been sung antiphonally, with one group singing “He Is” and the others responding with each of the phrases – kind of sketchy, since “He Is” applies only to the first two phrases and extending it to the third clause where the tense shifts seems a bit awkward, though I admit I haven’t set it down in Greek to check how it works or doesn’t.]

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It defiantly is metaphor in one sense, but it lines up with oncological reality as well. The universe is dark (dark matter doesn’t interact with light, if proven), chaotic (quantum), and void of life (vacuum) . Also interestingly science now says the universe at its smallest point was about the size of a human. being.How Small Was The Universe At The Start Of The Big Bang?

This view also establishes a theodicy grounded in Gods Holiness. Entropy, sin, and bio death make sence in this view before Adams sin. Adams sin brought 2nd death to mankind not first, natural death. This disobedience required atonement to save the elect from eternal judgement, not natural death. In fact I think bio death is essential for faith creation. Why is Satan un redeemable? he can’t generate faith as he is eternal, and can see God. We are vessels capable of generating faith aided by Gods hiddenness and our bio death. just a hypothesis

Creation is not Of God’s substance (light, order, alive), its made of a juxtaposition of Gods substance. God then uses this juxtaposition and forms by his word the “Good” but not perfect creation. Only God is and will always be ontologically perfect.

If everything is quantum, this is the essence of chaos. But that chaos collapses by an observer into order (thing in a room AKA Hilbert’s hotel) which causes matter to exist. i believe, the only reason material forms/ exist is the omnipresent/ will of God to maintain those forms from chaos (held together in Him). Christ is alive, light, ordered, So all forms relate back to Jesus Glory.
I’m suggesting the power of Christ’s death, is the means for this Chaotic/quantum vacuum state, that allows God to be Actual and Holy. So God doesn’t create the universe from nothing, he created the universe through Jesus juxtaposition on Golgotha and its held together in Him. And yes the incarnation and resurrection also are necessary roles in creation. But the death is the juxtaposition state, but as you note incarnation is necessary for death! So you really can’t separate the two events. Better to say the work of Christ as an instantaneous whole is what allows for reality to exist.

I’ve been flushing this out in a draft paper if your interested. (its rough carpentry at this point! :slight_smile: ). Troy G Clark - Academia.edu

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Please don’t trouble yourself with further research as I admit with apologies that I made an assumption about Luther’s understanding of the doctrine of the real presence which a moment’s online work would have told me was untrue. I’m happy if the eventual translation becomes memorial sacrifice!

I’m sure you have been trying to understand my argument as much as I have been trying to understand yours. I repeat, however, emphatically that I am in no way “insisting that the eternal has to be bound by the temporal.” I’m insisting that what we know of the temporal as occupants of the space-time dimension in which we live proceeds from the nature of God’s creation of this dimension. This tells us that the past is immutable. The present tense creeps forward moment by moment setting in stone the moments which have gone.

For amusement, I looked up time travel online and found an article about findings by Hong Kong scientists which confirmed that Einstein’s prohibition of speeds greater than the speed of light is correct and that time travel is therefore impossible. That’s a relief, because otherwise an enemy might travel back and kill one or both of my parents to render my existence null and void!

So at any moment in history all previous history has been fixed. Therefore, if the moment of creation occurred approximately 2,000 years ago, the 14.3 billions years of history which you agree led up to that moment was unalterably fixed. But scripture paints a very different picture, showing us that, at least as far as human history from Adam and Eve onwards - Adam and Eve: a mythological couple whom Francis Collins thought might represent 10,000 ensoulled hominids - history was entirely fluid, even allowing the possibility that the Fall might never have happened and the Incarnation might never have been necessary. God did not force Eve to succumb to Satan’s temptation, and she so was empowered by her free will and knowledge of God’s command to make a different choice and to remain faithful. This is another reason which to my mind renders it inconceivable that the first moment of creation coincided with the Incarnation. The Incarnation became necessary in God’s plan should mankind fall into disobedience but was unnecessary otherwise.

The Adam and Eve question Dr. Collins raised in ‘The Language of God’ is irrelevant to this debate, so I’m not going to comment further. What I am saying is that, because of the nature of time God has created, the history of mankind must in your scenario have been fixed at the first moment of creation about 2.000 years ago, but scripture records an actual history full of fluidity. Therefore your scenario, which envisages a real history as described by scripture leading up to the Incarnation, contains a logical impossibility, a fatal fallacy.

As all theologians agree, God cannot accomplish a logical impossibility because, whilst all things are possible to him, a logical impossibility is not a thing at all. Therefore, I stick with scripture’s location of the first moment of creation in Gen. 1:1.

As you can see above, I don’t accept that the Incarnation was inevitable - if it was, this means that Adam and Eve’s disobedience was inevitable, that they were not truly free to obey God. Moreover, I am not arguing that an incarnational first moment of creation 2.000 years ago binds men’s wills in the past; I’m arguing that their precise exercises of free will during the period covered by scripture up to whatever incarnational moment - Christ’s conception, birth, death on Calvary, resurrection - which you decide to select as the first moment of creation has frozen all the free choices mankind made into an immutable historic pathway from the Fall until that moment. You have therefore, contrary to scripture which plainly envisages that other paths may have been taken, precluded alternative exercises of free will, i.e., thus precluding the fluidity I am referring to.

Of course not.

Precisely! The passage begins by referring to the eternal God whose only-begotten Son acts in perfect unity with the Father and the Holy Spirit. therefore IS is appropriate. But as we know, Christ did act in the historic past , beginning with the first moment of time-space creation and acting many times in human history (e.g. as pillar of fire in the desert). In reference to these acts, the past tense is appropriate. Paul quotes the hymn to underline to the gnostics disturbing the church at Colossae the gospel message that Christ is above and before all things, to emphasise his supreme preeminence against those who challenged it. Christ himself as the second person of the Trinity was not one of the things created through him and for him, although his human nature was a created being.

The fact is that neither Paul, nor any other NT author, nor any Father of the Church, nor any of the theological and ecclesiastical leaders in the Church since those days have drawn from this hymn or the word Prototokos the inference you and Troy have drawn, viz. that the first ontological moment of creation happened during the Son’s incarnation in Jesus Christ. This is a momentous addition to the gospel message which you and Troy have proposed, and from what Paul wrote in Gal. 1:8-9 I do not think he would have approved.

I would also remind you of scripture’s warning about interpreting Paul’s teaching in 2 Peter 3:16. In these matters we should all be humble and allow the Holy Spirit to guide the Church into all truth, as we are all “looking in a glass darkly” and speak from ignorance of the hidden mysteries of the eternal God.

Lastly, I would caution you and Troy not to imagine that these vivid speculations about the first moment of creation have any prospect of promoting unity in Christendom. On the contrary, if these ideas were widely known they would cause upset, confusion and division and harm the very cause you both espouse.