It was only during the period of the Maccabean revolt that any concept of life was created. Christian theologians in later ages were concerned with the almost impossible task of holding together the "immortality of the soul" and.
After Death: Life in God by Norman Pittenger
The Loss of Belief in the
After-life’
Human Existence in Body and Mind
One's lures or attractions, invitations or opportunities are not the same as another's. There is a kind of memory that is deep in the hidden areas that the depth psychologists refer to when they talk about the 'subconscious'. The additional quality is awareness of the self as conscious; it is 'self-awareness'.
But if an adequate phenomenology of human existence begins with a proper acknowledgment of our mind-body condition, it must continue to speak to the dynamic quality that we all recognize so well in our experience. Moreover, it is very difficult to draw a precise and definite line of demarcation between our bodily existence and that of the world around us. In that excellent study of Greek thought among the common people of the country, Erwin Rohde's Psyche (Kegan Paul 1920), there is a clear indication of this stress in what I may call
This leads us to consider freedom, which our analysis also reveals as an integral part of human existence.
Relationship with God
In the tradition best known to us from the Judeo-Christian heritage, the way in which this constant factor is represented is through speech in terms of "spirit," human and divine. On the other hand, the events in the historical order make their contribution to God and thereby make available to God different ways of how to Part of our problem is the unfortunate belief that the divine is not susceptible to any change.
Granting that such an infallible relationship exists, surely one of its main modes is that God provides ultimate certainty in the universe. Human existence and human experience are not all that matters in this universe as we know it, or in creation in general. Along with this third aspect is the way in which every event or opportunity in the world is 'lured' (again Whitehead's term) to the realization of its purpose.
I was discussing what Whitehead called some aspects of God's 'secular function' in creation.
Resurrection: Christ ‘Risen from the Dead’
And the first thing to study is the significance of the resurrection in the case of the Lord, in which Christians find both the decisive revelation of God and also. What he can do is to try to uncover the earliest layers of material in the Gospel narratives and thus indicate what the earliest disciples very likely believed. The notion of a pure 'revival' in which the Lord's physical body was revived is one.
One of these emphasizes the risen Lord as somehow known in the life of Christians. By the italicized word in the last sentence I mean Jesus Christ himself in the integrity of the event we designate when we name him. In this case, we must believe in a transformation of the physical body into a "spiritual body" or speak of the persistence through death of either the soul or the "personality" of Jesus.
This, I insist, is what is affirmed when we speak of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, 'raised from the dead' and 'living unto God'.
Resurrection: Our ‘Risen Life’
Although not, strictly speaking, among the "last things," an intermediate state -- commonly called "purgatory" in the Western Catholic Church -- is also part of the more widely accepted picture. In Protestant circles this was rejected, for historically understandable reasons, at the time of the Reformation in the sixteenth century. In the Pauline literature, much emphasis is placed on membership in the "body of Christ."
The church in the Pauline sense can be defined as Christ in and with his members. To be now included in union with such Love, with God as Love-in-deed, is 'eternal life', in the expression used in St. one with the reality depicted and expressed in his human existence brought, namely this reality.
For the Christian faith is about the nature of God as revealed in the event of Christ.
God as Recipient
I quite realize the difficulty some have found in emphasizing the divine memory. To remember' was to 'bring alive' some event in the past in the present. What was done in the remote past is therefore alive in God; and it also becomes 'alive' to God's.
Placing such a strong emphasis on the view of God as receiver requires, as we have seen, a radical change in the model we use. What does it mean to speak of humans as “created in the image of God”? To view God as love-in-action means to say that those who are “in the divine image” are also intended by that God to be lovers-in-action themselves.
Whitehead put it; and as such they are both the creatures of God's love and the participants in God's ongoing purpose of good in the creative.
Conclusion and Summary
Therefore we have every right to think that in that dynamic life, which is unsurpassed and therefore divine, there is not a question of becoming more and more divine, which would be absurd, but of an increasing ability to find opportunities through which God can somehow make use of , that which is always remembered; and also, in this very action, as it continues in God's relationship with creation, a growing acceptance of those who have contributed to the cosmic enterprise of love at work in creation. Having your ultimate destiny in God's reception and in God's use of all that you have done, and therefore all that you are, is the result of a sincere faith in God. To talk in that way does not mean to speak of some meaningless reenactment of what took place during creation; it involves a vital, living and progressive movement, in which God knows and experiences (if that word, as I believe, is appropriate to the divine life) what has taken place, but knows and experiences it with a continuous progressive movement. freshness and delight—and, if what has taken place has been evil, with a constant tinge of sadness and regret—as must be proper to the chief creative and chief receptive power worshiped and served by God's human children.
The recognition that the great saints, above all the Blessed Mother of our Lord, are also still present in God's vital memory is our way of understanding that God can and still 'uses' them to enrich God's own joy and to the grand design of God's love. St Ignatius Loyola saw this clearly enough when he prayed that he, and all of us, may learn to 'labour and not to ask for any reward, but to know that we do [God's] will'. If by God's 'glory' we understand a majestic court scene in which God sits on a great throne, ruling over creation and reveling in his divine majesty, then the phrase suggests ideas exactly opposite to the 'Galilean vision'. of the Love that is self-giving, willingly receptive, completely merciless in generous openness to all that takes place in the created order.
God always does what is for the best; and surely for us men and women it is best that we are received into God's life and thereby enabled to make our own limited, finite, undoubtedly flawed, contribution to God's lasting intention for creation.
An Additional Note: Addressed to Those Who Mourn
What is more, for any Christian, and indeed for any theist, whatever hope we may have must be in God. Unfortunately, not a few people see this as a way of saying that God is the guarantee that what we hope for, or think we want, will be granted. But to think so is not to hope in God at all; it is hoping for what we want and then accepting that God is, so to speak, the reliable agent who will get it for us or give it to us.
The whole point of our discussion in these pages was to insist that we do indeed place our hope in God; It is God, and God alone, who is our hope, not what we expect to receive or to have been. On the contrary, it is the sure affirmation of the faith that everything is safe with God and in God forever—and safe in the only way in which it can be permanently safe, namely, in God's appreciation and reception of it in the divine life. to be cherished there forever. The comfort and consolation are given to us in the sure conviction that God always “does more than we can ask or think,” as the ancient prayer puts it; God will do it.
In the course of these remarks it was said: 'Those of us who shared our friend's deep faith in God as Love can be confident that nothing he did, or said, or wrote, or thought can ever be lost. don't go