Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I put the words for "the logos" in bold. Literally translated (with amplification to bring out the import of the tenses and prepositions), it says:
In (the) beginning the Logos was being, and the Logos was being towards (the face of) God, and God was being the Logos.
"The Logos" does not refer to the "mind of Christ", it refers to Christ Himself, it refers to the God who was being the Logos. The Logos is the light who "is coming into the word", and that light is Jesus. The Logos is not, as you say, "it", the Logos is He, incarnate God, as John goes on to say:
John 1:14--
Καὶ ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο καὶ ἐσκήνωσεν ἐν ἡμῖν
And the Logos, flesh (He) became and tented (or pitched His tent) among us.
"Tented" or "pitched his tent" was an idiom for saying that someone was physically present, so this is a Hebrew-style parallelism: 'the Logos became flesh' = 'he pitched His tent among us' -- both are saying that the eternal divine Logos became an actual physical flesh human like us and living among us.
The Logos is thus God with a body in such a way that we can point to that body and say, "That is God". He is not some disembodied "mind", He is a human person -- one of us.
We are not in significant disagreement. My main point was that the Logos NEVER referred to actual "words written in ink" in the Bible. It DOES refer to Jesus, but Jesus is present in His "Mind of Christ," NOT His physical body. Our carnal-minded conditioning to consider ourselves physical beings blinds us to the spiritual truth that we too are Spirits, NOT physical beings.
That has been oneof the main ways dogma has gone off the rails. Jesus taught the Spiritual reality but our ancestors (and apparently most Christians today) were mired in physicality and could not comprehend Him. He tried with Nicodemus, but even that learned Hebrew could not comprehend Him. Paul tried with 1 Corinthians 15 but that failed as well. Our ancestors were terrified of Spirits and not receptive to spiritual interpretations.
The idea that we have to keep re-presenting Jesus as a sacrifice is another. And it goes on and on and on.
The "re-presented sacrifice" idea gets pounced on a lot because it isn't understood -- though it's only fair to note that many priests, bishops, and theologians through the centuries have themselves misunderstood it, so the rest of us can be forgiven for being a bit confused!
First, Jesus isn't being re-presented as an additional atoning sacrifice; that was done once and for all on the Cross. The term for the kind of sacrifice that catholic Christians proclaim is happening in the Eucharist is a "memorial sacrifice". This is a matter of making present to us a sacrifice already presented (in the Old Testament, on the altar; in the New, on the Cross). What Jesus said at the Last Supper is better translated as "Do this as a memorial sacrifice of me".
That sounds silly to modern ears, but Paul makes a statement that can make it clearer: "Christ our Passover has been sacrificed; therefore let us keep the feast". What feast goes with the Passover lamb? The meal where that lamb is eaten goes with it! When Paul wrote this, the Crucifixion was long past, yet Paul speaks of that sacrifice as something we can join in with in present time. The verb "sacrificed" (aorist indicative passive, for those who want the details) indicates an event in a point in time, so how can we "join the feast"?
We can join it because the body and blood of Christ are "re-presented', not sacrificed anew as added atonement but made present again for us. In this memorial sacrifice -- what in more modern terms we might call a "reminder sacrifice" -- we are reminded that our Passover lamb was offered in an atoning sacrifice, and in the other side of a memorial sacrifice God is "reminded" of that sacrifice so when He looks at us He sees the Body and the Blood broken and poured out for us.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BaptistFundie
Infused vs. imputed righteousness.
We don't need grace infused into us like a blood transfusion because it keeps leaking out. Jesus took care of the problem once and for all. By his stripes we were healed. He made one sacrifice and then sat down. His righteousness is enough-- once and for all. Stop trying to add to what he did.
Yeah, infused grace was one of those errors I indicated in my previous post here: making the scriptures fit a current worldview rather than learning its worldview. In this case that worldview was Aristotelianism, where everything was viewed in the terms under which Aristotle viewed the world -- and while Aristotle was plainly a genius, his worldview just doesn't mesh with the Bible. Specifically in this instance, for Aristotle everything that is real has (a) substance, and so Thomas Aquinas, kind of the ultimate Aristotelian, looking at the word "grace" understood it as something with substance -- and how does a substance get imparted to a different entity with its own substance? Well, compare it to making tea: you have water, which is one substance, and to turn it into tea you infuse tea into the water, you take some of the substance that is tea and you actually transfer some of it into the water so the water is no longer merely water but has become tea (where "Earl Grey, hot" or ice-cold Arizona).
This, BTW, is why Rome accused Luther of heresy when he said salvation is by grace alone: they understood him to be saying that by God infusing a bit of substance called "grace" then that was it; with that additional substance in us we were saved -- so when you understand that they were thinking, like Aristotle, of a substance, it's obvious why they said it was heresy! But Luther didn't care about substances (or Aristotle), he was a doctor of the scriptures and he saw that the scriptures present grace much more as an attitude God holds toward us than anything else.
Now as for the memorial sacrifice, if we aren't eating our Passover Lamb then we aren't doing what Paul explains Jesus as commanding. And one aspect of a memorial sacrifice was that the very same thing that had been offered on the altar was shared with those participating. In a very real sense -- and this was said long long ago -- what happens at the Eucharist is that the table where Jesus sat so long ago is extended through time and space for us to sit at! So the bread and Body, the wine and Blood, are given to us by Christ our Lord, handed down the table by the Apostles who were there, and then to their heirs, and in turn to the heirs of those heirs, and down along the same table until our share in the Passover that has been sacrificed comes to us.
With that view, the ancient church defined the priesthood as a matter of providing lips and tongue and hands for Jesus to borrow so we might hear the very same words the disciples in the Upper Room did, so the priest is nothing in himself. And they looked on sin as a sickness for which we need medicine, and pointed to the Body and the Blood of Christ as that medicine (cf. John 6). So we re-celebrate the Last Supper not because Jesus' righteousness wasn't enough, we do so because we are sick and the Body and Blood of Christ are our medicine (best taken regularly), what the early church called "the medicine of immortality".
So we present again to God the bread and the wine, and He presents again to us the Body and Blood of His Son, which aren't sacrificed anew, they're the very same sacrifice now presented anew to us.
The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ?
The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?
For as often as [we] eat this bread and drink the cup, [we] proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.
That's 1 Cor10:16 and 1 Cor11:26 btw - seems rather scriptural to me, is it not?
Bingo. (And this deserves a + the site won't let me give; it seems unable to recognize that some people just deserve more pluses than a dozen others combined).
This is why the early church viewed the Eucharist as not being a new celebration but a re-joining into the one celebration: if it's a participation, then it can't be a new table and new cup, it is the same table and the same cup extended to include us.
We are not in significant disagreement. My main point was that the Logos NEVER referred to actual "words written in ink" in the Bible. It DOES refer to Jesus, but Jesus is present in His "Mind of Christ," NOT His physical body. Our carnal-minded conditioning to consider ourselves physical beings blinds us to the spiritual truth that we too are Spirits, NOT physical beings.
That has been oneof the main ways dogma has gone off the rails. Jesus taught the Spiritual reality but our ancestors (and apparently most Christians today) were mired in physicality and could not comprehend Him. He tried with Nicodemus, but even that learned Hebrew could not comprehend Him. Paul tried with 1 Corinthians 15 but that failed as well. Our ancestors were terrified of Spirits and not receptive to spiritual interpretations.
Have you ever read any works of the church Fathers? What you said here could be used as a good perspective on the arguments in Christology: the heresies tended to be "mired in physicality" and the Fathers who wrote to oppose them kept dragging the church back to spiritual reality.
When the church in the West went all-in on Aristotle for its theology, that was a dive back into physicality.
BTW, the scripture's definition of a soul includes the physical, so to say we are "NOT physical beings" goes too far: we are not merely physical beings, we are physical beings with the breath of God breathed into us.
For a Christian sound doctrine should NOT be based on the Bible. It should be based on JESUS CHRIST who is the ONE and ONLY Word of God in existence. The term is LOGOS and it does NOT refer to words in the Bible. It refers to the "mind of Christ" as the True Nature and attitude of God. HE Divinely revealed and personally demonstrated it on the Cross!!!
You Bible worshipers are seriously misguided by following our ancestors' misinterpretation of Jesus using their belief in a wrathful and vengeful War God who needed to be appeased by blood sacrifices. Based on Jesus, God is neither wrathful nor vengeful and did not ever need to be appeased by blood sacrifices! It was our savage and brutal ancestors whose wrath and vengeance demanded Jesus be scourged and crucified, NOT God.
If we don't have a basis on our faith (The Bible), then what do we go by? Didn't God breathed out His Word. Didn't God give instructions on how we should obey Him. I am a little confused by being called a Bible worshiper since I do believe the Bible is God's INSPIRED word.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
