Posted by AU on 8/25/2001, 5:29 pm

And furthermore.... Posted by Cliff on 7/3/2001, 12:14 am , in reply to "Re: A reply to nonsense" You said that I said: God cannot die Jesus died Therefore Jesus is not God This is a misstatement. Since God was in him, he was the temple of God and could be recognized as such. At death, God had forsaken him...and necessarily so. So at the moment of death, correct. He was not God, nor the temple thereof. So he could become sin for all of us. This is straight forward truth to me. In your fight for the constant divinity of Christ, you scuttle the value of total obedience of a man. He did what none of us could do. He raised mankind to a stature of Glory that we had before the world was. He lived as no man could live before or after. He was the pattern and the reason for all creation...not to live as God, which takes the work out of it, but to start as a man and be totally obedient. To respond in fellowship with his father, learning and obeying. He led the way, became the path to God. He shined as the Light and was all truth. Giving up the reward for total obedience, he laid it all down. He was tempted exactly as we...but passed all tests. He wanted, craved, felt the needs to sin, but passed on them all...everyone and set the pattern...that we should all aspire to. The insistence should NOT be the he was always God...rather we should insist that he WAS a man...so that there is real value in his life...not the appearance of it. That is exactly what Catholicism robbed from me...the intimate relationship of Jesus as the first successful man, and we can become co-heirs with him, if we believe that he actually died for our sins. What is more valuable than to have a MAN go through death and come out the other side victorious. This is not heresy. This is not theological mystery. This is someone closer than a brother. God was afar off. The man brought him close. The man sat with sinners. The man wept. The man willingly took on sin, was separated from his father in death and gave access for all of us to eternal life. How do you get heresy out of that? ---------- More comments.... Posted by Steve B. on 7/3/2001, 7:33 am , in reply to "And furthermore..." Cliff, I am sorry to see you resort to crudities in the defense of your beliefs, but I must also say I am puzzled as to exactly what you are replying. Nothing you say really addresses the points I have been making. I am not saying that Christ is not truly human. What I am saying is that I have found that the grounds the Chapel gave us for rejecting the trinitarian doctrine of God were false—the Chapel's own doctrine had both its biblical and historical facts wrong. The Bible quite clearly teaches the pre-existence of Christ, and the UROG doctrine failed to adequately account for those scriptures in its teachings about who Jesus is. Moreover, on the basis of the christology it constructed, the Chapel steered us into an attempt to fellowship with Jesus only as a glorified man, and this was one of the things that contributed to the set of sordid scandals that finally brought the Chapel down. I don't see that anything you say really touches the heart of these observations. You appear to be insisting that because you personally can't understand or identify with Jesus if, in addition to being truly human, he existed in the beginning with God and as God, nobody else can either. You base your argument on your own understanding of what you want Jesus to be instead of on who the Bible shows him to be. This is what seems so alarming to me. For example, you write Jesus is either a man, an apparition, or a shell. What scriptural basis do you have for limiting Jesus' nature to these three options? This question forces into a false choice. Why do you not ask "Jesus is either God, a man, an apparition, or a shell?" If put in this form, we can clearly see that picking any one of the answers would lead to a misleading conclusion. Why can't you see this with your own form of the question? He was of course a man, but he was also more than a man—he was God himself come to visit his people, as the scripture constantly remind us, and as the Chapel's theology ultimately failed to preserve. Sincerely, Steve ---------- Posted by Cliff on 7/3/2001, 3:14 pm , in reply to "More comments..." I never had the opinion that the Chapel teaching diminished that Jesus was God. When you see him, you see the Father. But in the same vein that you see a pre-existent nature to his actual being, and I do not...I find an intersting juxtaposition. You are absolutely convinced that begotten, to Jesus, does not mean the same thing as it does for everyone else in scripture. As Solomon did not eternally proceed from David.... We can spar all week when you change the definition of basic words. My point was that you are willing to abandon logic itself when you cannot produce a result that fits your theology. How can he commend the Bereans, if he does not value this struggle? Your scriptures produce turmoil that I must wrestle to a logical conclusion. If I say: Jn 1:18 No man has seen God at any time...you must find a way to fit that into your thoelogy. Likewise, if Christ died on the cross...you need to consider what or who died. That is a pivotal spot in the nature of Christianity, and with that weight you are what you are. JW, Christian Scientist, Trinitarian, Oneness, etc.... If you are Trinitarian, truly, I do not see how Christ, as a man, died on the cross. If you deny that it was only a man that died, you need to generate a philosophy that fits. Trinitarians that I have seen say God the Son died on the cross. What say you? I said He is either a Man, an apparition or a shell, because I know God cannot die. If you think God, or any portion of Him, can die, our discussion is over.