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I went to "The Creation of Christ" and George wrote:
Quote:
I believe, then, that Jesus Christ is the eternal son of the eternal father; that from the first of firstness Jesus is the son, because God is the father--a statement imperfect and unfit because an attempt of human thought to represent that which it cannot grasp, yet which it so believes that it must try to utter it even in speech that cannot be right.
McDonald is right that it is impossible to grasp Jesus being an "eternal son" and God being an "eternal Father." The very terms "son" and "Father" prove beginingness. I was not a father before I begot my first child. My child could not be a son without first being begotten.
While God may . . . may be eternal in the past and present, in no way was He eternally a Father.
I went to "The Creation of Christ" and George wrote:
McDonald is right that it is impossible to grasp Jesus being an "eternal son" and God being an "eternal Father." The very terms "son" and "Father" prove beginingness. I was not a father before I begot my first child. My child could not be a son without first being begotten.
While God may . . . may be eternal in the past and present, in no way was He eternally a Father.
Yikes that say quite a bit applying finite reasoning to an infinite God. I can not pretend to have it all figured out but "While God may . . . may be eternal in the past and present, in no way was He eternally a Father." but I will not assume the relationship of Jesus, Holy Spirit and Father God have ever been anything but that!
Yikes that say quite a bit applying finite reasoning to an infinite God. I can not pretend to have it all figured out but "While God may . . . may be eternal in the past and present, in no way was He eternally a Father." but I will not assume the relationship of Jesus, Holy Spirit and Father God have ever been anything but that!
The term "Eternal Father" is an oxymoron.
The Holy Spirit is God's spirit and not a separate "person" apart from God.
Likewise the "spirit of Christ" is not a separate "person" apart from Christ.
I believe, then, that Jesus Christ is the eternal son of the eternal father; that from the first of firstness Jesus is the son, because God is the father--a statement imperfect and unfit because an attempt of human thought to represent that which it cannot grasp, yet which it so believes that it must try to utter it even in speech that cannot be right.
I believe therefore that the Father is the greater, that if the Father had not been, the Son could not have been. I will not apply logic to the thesis, nor would I state it now but for the sake of what is to follow. The true heart will remember the inadequacy of our speech, and our thought also, to the things that lie near the unknown roots of our existence. In saying what I do, I only say what Paul implies when he speaks of the Lord giving up the kingdom to his father, that God may be all in all.
I worship the Son as the human God, the divine, the only Man, deriving his being and power from the Father, equal with him as a son is the equal at once and the subject of his father--but making himself the equal of his father in what is most precious in Godhead, namely, Love--which is, indeed, the essence of that statement of the evangelist with which I have now to do--a higher thing than the making of the worlds and the things in them, which he did by the power of the Father, not by a self-existent power in himself, whence the apostle, to whom the Lord must have said things he did not say to the rest, or who was better able to receive what he said to all, says, 'All things were made' not by, but 'through him.'
We must not wonder things away into nonentity, but try to present them to ourselves after what fashion we are able--our shadows of the heavenly. For our very beings and understandings and consciousnesses, though but shadows in regard to any perfection either of outline or operation, are yet shadows of his being, his understanding, his consciousness, and he has cast those shadows; they are no more causally our own than his power of creation is ours.
In our shadow-speech then, and following with my shadow-understanding as best I can the words of the evangelist, I say, The Father, in bringing out of the unseen the things that are seen, made essential use of the Son, so that all that exists was created through him. What the difference between the part in creation of the Father and the part of the Son may be, who can understand?--but perhaps we may one day come to see into it a little; for I dare hope that, through our willed sonship, we shall come far nearer ourselves to creating. The word creation applied to the loftiest success of human genius, seems to me a mockery of humanity, itself in process of creation.
Let us read the text again: 'All things were made through him, and without him was made not one thing. That which was made in him was life.' You begin to see it? The power by which he created the worlds was given him by his father; he had in himself a greater power than that by which he made the worlds. There was something made, not through but in him; something brought into being by himself. Here he creates in his grand way, in himself, as did the Father. 'That which was made in him was life'
I went to "The Creation of Christ" and George wrote:
McDonald is right that it is impossible to grasp Jesus being an "eternal son" and God being an "eternal Father." The very terms "son" and "Father" prove beginingness. I was not a father before I begot my first child. My child could not be a son without first being begotten.
While God may . . . may be eternal in the past and present, in no way was He eternally a Father.
I agree ..... God uses words we can understand ..... if he did not mean that Jesus was his SON he would not have used that word.
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