Dear Quinn,
I do not disagree. I am just defining. God is eternal. Matter is temporal - it has a beginning and end. Thus matter is not divine. That does not say that matter cannot be good, just not divine - immortal.
Then how do you explain the Incarnation of Jesus Christ who was both fully human and fully God? He was in a material body and was divine.
Jesus’ resurrected body was divine, but His human body was not eternal. His soul and spirit that entered the human body is divine. Just as all the divine messengers who took on a human body to prophesies like Elijah, John the Baptist and Ezekiel.
So, was Jesus both fully God in all His divinity while also being fully human in being a physical material human being who had to eat, drink, sleep, and even bleed and die? That is the question I am trying to hear out of you. While Jesus material body at first wasn’t eternal after the resurrection the material physical body became eternal but He was divine even before this took place.
The divine spirit of Jesus entered the human body at birth, just like the corrupt soul of a human enters. Jesus lived as a human in every way do, needing to eat and drink and susceptible to physical death. But His soul was fully virtuous, without sin. After His physical body died His divine spirit lived on, meeting the others in Paradise (Luke 23:43). When he returned to the disciples, He looked similar, but the not the same as when He was human. Remember, they did not recognize Him at first and He could pass through locked doors. This is because He retuned in His divine spiritual body. And His spirit had not yet healed, so it bore the woulds that had killed His physical body.
The soul is made by God, it doesn’t pre-exist.
Jesus resurrected physically with His renewed prefect body and He was able to eat and be touched. Jesus Himself says that ghost/spirits cannot as Luke 24:37-43 says. Jesus say,
Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.” 40 When he had said this, he showed them his hands and feet.
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Jesus was with God in the beginning (Jn 1:1)
Yes, Jesus became human through the Incarnation and took on human flesh, Jesus was the Word and the Word became flesh. Outside of the case of Jesus, everyone else is made by God.
So why do you say He did not pre-exist?
I’m not getting what you are saying? Christ did preexist as spirit within the Triune God before He came to earth and took on flesh in the Incarnation. Outside of Jesus all human including you and me don’t “pre-exist” but are made by God in the womb.
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My definition of the soul is that it is the “heart” of the spiritual body. So, soul and spirit are not separable. But you said the soul does not pre-exist, that is where the confusion is.
You are contradicting yourself and redefining on the fly. ‘Corrupt’ does not denote a neutral condition.
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There is a new age trend to see Gnosticism as the suppressed original Christianity usually appealing to the Gospel of Thomas. It seems to be a way of bringing in some of the religious ideas of the east like reincarnation into Christianity. A big part of the motivation is all the intolerance and nastiness that can be found in much of Christianity including a hateful God, anti-science Biblical literalism, theoretical human sacrifice, appeals to fear, obsessions with demons and the devil, misogyny and justifications for racism and slavery. Such might have appealed to me if I hadn’t latched onto an extreme anti-Gnostic approach instead, which sees a lot of what is wrong in Christianity as being an adoption of Platonist-Gnostic elements. Thus I found a way to exclude the nastiness but which keeps to a fairly orthodox understanding of Christianity.
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Thanks for your thoughts on Gnosticism @mitchellmckain. Although the best description of my Christian believe is was a heretic as defined by Justinian. I believe everything that this ruler of Rome declared anathema. This is a more developed belief than Gnosticism and it is akin to Arian. It was the Arians that Justinian killed using his edict to declare them enemies of the empire. The main difference to modern Christianity is a belief in the pre-existence of the soul, which correlates to the paranormal, i.e. angels, ghosts, and demons.
Still not getting at what you are saying. From what I get (and correct me if I’m wrong) is that since certain spirits exist outside of the material world, our souls must have an origin outside of the material?
How are we supposed to take you seriously?
I am saying that the piece of God in each of us is made of the same essence as God - spiritual, nonmaterial. So, all that is spiritual is outside the material world, even our soul and spirit that is coincidental with our physical body.
I don’t think so. Every part of who we are is contingent. He is not.
In addition to connection with elements of classic Gnosticism, it occurred to me that you can find some of this idea in Quakerism. This got me wondering if there were some connections there between Gnosticism and Quakerism. Although there is no concrete evidence that George Fox got any of his ideas from the writings of the Gnostics, I am not the first to notice numerous similarities.
P.S. The Quakers have been one of my favorite historical religions largely because of the rather influential role they had in the founding of the United States of America and what they did to improve the relationship and treatment of the Native Americans.
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Since we live in a post-truth era, New Age ideas and their progeny are quite variable, so I should not be surprised at the fluidity and self-contradiction. I think the adversary is quite okay with the effect.