I learned some fascinating things yesterday and thought I'd share them here.
We began by talking about Man's relationship to God...how he relates that to himself and what he does...and how that works itself out in his whole life.
While he was talking about this, my pastor was drawing images on the chalkboard to help illustrate his points. I wish I could do that here, but for now, just imagine two different circles spaced about 4 inches apart. The one on the left is labeled God, and the one on the right is labeled God. We will do several picture images so I ask you to mentally erase everything but those two circles each time we focus on a different belief.
Pantheism -- Ok, for this one, draw an arrow from the God circle to the man circle so that the arrow ends up in the middle of the man circle. This is where man makes God into everything but mainly into man. God is in everything. Pan means all or everything and theism means God. So everything and all is God. This, of course, is false.
Deism -- Deism is basically the worship of one god. For this one, draw an arrow from the man circle to the God circle so that the arrow is in the middle of the God circle. This is a belief where Man becomes god and rule over everything. Once again, this is false.
Islamism -- For this one, you're going to want to separate those two circles as much as possible. They believe that God has no contact whatsoever with man. He is so far apart that we cannot know Him at all. This will lead to something/someone else becoming God (which ultimately leads to man becoming God).
Modernism -- This is a religion similar to Islamism. They put God and man very far apart. God may have contact, but He remains very far apart. Note: Islamism, Modernism and in fact all religions must either be pagan or Christian. Islamism and Modernism both end up being Deism.
Roman Catholic -- For this image, I ask you to mentally draw a church in between the two circles labeled God and man. This is because R.C. tend to see the church as the only means for salvation. This ends up labeling the church as our only means for salvation.
And finally Calvinism -- This puts Christ in between God and man. God is personal and Christ is our means for salvation.
Next post I will have, I will begin to explain Man's relationship to Man.
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9 comments:
I find it hard to believe that your pastor is this uneducated theologically.
To begin, pantheism. Well, pantheism is indeed the belief that everything is God, and God is everything, and when it first came about this was just a pretty theory -- but modern physics has taught us that it's more of a necessity than a theory. Consider this: where is God? Everywhere, right? I mean, God is pretty universally understood to be omnipresent and omniscient, meaning there's no place that God can't be at any moment.
Now consider the nature of matter and energy. The first thing you need to know is that all matter is itself just energy. It sounds strange, but the cells that make up your body are just made of molecules, and those molecules are made of atoms, and those atoms are made of electrons jumping around in a "shell" around protons and neutrons. This is not conjecture, powerful microscopes have actually been able to film an electron in motion!! To be clear, the electron doesn't actually "orbit" the proton, but just jumps around it like a Mexican jumping bean, but jumping across extremely tiny distances while going close to the speed of light. And what is the electron made of? Well.... nothing!! It's just a particle of electricity -- and so is the proton, with the two of them being drawn together like magnets of opposite polarity, but also repelling each other (through a different force) like magnets of identical polarity. That's why the electron stays inside the "shell" -- by the way, there's not a real physical shell, just a distance that the electron won't go beyond unless it's pulled away by another proton. And that is how molecules form, because an electron is jumping back and forth between the shells of two or more atoms, tying those atoms together. Now, where is God in all this? Well, what is sustaining those electrons, keeping that charge in existence? That's the constant sustainment of God. In every electron and proton and neutron in our entire Universe. Just like a dance exists only in someone's mind until a dancer performs it, and then the dancer is the dance until she stops dancing, God is the electrons until God stops sustaining them. It's as simple as that.
So, is man God? You are made of atoms, made of subatomic particles, every single one of which is just an idea of God's perpetually sustained by the will of God. Your fingers and toes are made of these atoms. Your brain and all your nerve cells are made of these atoms. When you think a thought, is it possible for God to not know it? If you stub your toe, is it possible for God not to feel exactly the pain you feel? (Well of course not, if it was then you'd know something that God didn't -- not very likely, is it?) And every time some military force drops a bomb on a village and kills an innocent bystander, God is seared with an eternal perfect knowledge of all the pain of that person being killed, and all the anguish of everyone who cared for that person facing their loss. There's no way for that to be avoided so long as we recognize God as "all-knowing."
Now, for pantheists, this is it, this is all there is -- God is all the matter and energy that exists, and nothing more. The great failing of pantheism is not that it equates all things with God (as all things must be within God), but that it offers no explanation of why anything exists at all, nor of its purpose.
(continued)....
And finally Calvinism -- well actually, Calvinism is a form of determinism, which teaches that because God is omnipotent and omniscient, we must all be predestined to whatever fate awaits us before we are even born. This is pretty harsh. It means that God made certain people just so those people would end up in Hell, and that man has no actual choice in the matter -- that I have no choice, even, but to write this response to your post (I feel like I have a choice, but if God laid out the entire course of everything before I was even born, and knew how it was to come out, then all I am doing by typing this is fulfilling my predetermined role in God's plan -- just as you are doing by reading this.
I'm very interested in your thoughts on this. You'll probably have enough to say on it to put up a whole new blog on each major subject covered here -- pantheism, Deism, pandeism, Islam, and predetermination, and I welcome you to do just that.
(continued)....
Deism, well your pastor is right that it is "the worship of one god," but how on Earth does he get from that to man becoming God? Deists don't believe any such thing. They believe that God made the world, set it up with invioble laws of physics to follow, and set it in motion. They don't believe God intervened in the world after that because God is perfect, and the world thus created would have been perfect, and required no fixing once it was made. Deists believe that God can be proved to exist by reason alone, which is more than most religions will allow, and that the very purpose for our capacity to reason is to use it to discern the existence of God without needing any hints (scripture, miracles, revelation) to get to that point. That's all Deism is, and anyone who says otherwise is simple in error.
Deism also has a hard time explaining man's purpose (we are supposed to be able to reason this all out as well), or where exactly God has gone to while the Universe exists. There is a middle ground between pantheism and Deism which actually does cover this, and which solves the riddles laid out by both of them, and this is called "Pandeism." Pandeism is the belief that God actually became the Universe, temporarily sacrificing all of its conscious self through a radical kenosis, so that it could fully share in the experience of all entities existing in the Universe; this pandeistic Creator, like the Deistic God, has no need to interfere beyond the moment of Creation itself, the Universe unfolding as it should with no further correction beyond that moment. Like the pantheistic God, it continues to underlie and sustain all things, and this underlying presence even accounts for miracles, and people mistaking glimpses of the immense power of an unconscious God as a conscious experience of revelation. Ask you pastor about pandeism. Looking at his errors about pantheism and deism, I'll be surprised if he's ever even heard of it.
As for "Islamism," there's just no such word. Perhaps your pastor was speaking of Islam, but if so he's so far off on the doctrine that he might as well be making up a new religion entirely. The Islamic conception of God is almost exactly like the Jewish conception and the Christian conception, a loving and very involved deity that has delivered a revelation to mankind, and bestows salvation upon those who believe in this revelation. Muslims have much the same belief in the Garden of Eden, Noah's Flood, Abraham's covenant, Moses entering the promised land, and so forth. They even believe in Jesus being a great prophet of God, just not "the son" of God in any sense different from Adam and all other men being the sons of God. It is just not true to even suggest that Muslims believe God has no contact with man -- that sounds like some serious confusion with Deism, which is as far from Islam as it is from Christianity. Has your pastor read the Qur'an? Have you? It's available all over the internet, in English, and you really can't speak to it one way or another if you haven't at least glanced through it.
Modernism is not a "religion" that I've ever heard of. It's just a frame of thought, although it does probbaly lead to Deism. Now I'll grant that Roman Catholics do interpose the bureaucracy of the Church (and only their Church) between God and man, but they do have Biblical arguments in support of it. Not very good ones, though. But then a lot of denominations use Biblical arguments that are not very good ones to support what, in the end, are not really ideas expressed by God, but man's own biases and desires. There is not much greater self-gratification than imagining that the things you desire are the things God desires for you -- which is how for example Wall Street bankers end up worshipping money and living blasphemy while managing to convince a whole lot of people that God is just fine with that.
I am curious to know, Knuje, where you get this belief in Pan-deism? Where is it supported in the Bible, or anywhere else???
As for Calvinism, I offer this verse...
“According as He hath chosen us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love: having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will,to the praise of the glory of his grace, wherein he hath made us accepted in the beloved.” --Ephesians 1:4-6
Predestination is supported throughout the Bible; for more verses, visit http://hs4good.blogspot.com/2009/07/more-on-predestination-and-election.html
Knuje,
The material presented in the Sunday School class of which Sarah speaks was a condensing of Abraham Kuyper's
Lectures on Calvinism.
Should you have a problem with the material, it might behoove you to take it up w/ Dr. Kuyper.
Respectfully,
Sarah's theologically uneducated Pastor
@ Rachel, I learned of pandeism straight from the source. We have the amazing ability to question, and to discover -- why do we have that at all? What are we meant to do with that ability?
Consider, if you'd been born in Pakistan, you'd be a Muslim now, with exactly the same certainty of belief in Allah and the Qur'an; if you'd been born in Utah, you'd be insisting on the Book of Mormon, and asking me where in that book my ideas are supported. Just being born in a place where one book is put forth as the truth is not enough to rely on. Every religion has that, and every religion has revelations, and equally reliable claims to miracles and interventions. What must be true, then, is a belief that can be discerned from observation of our Universe itself, even by someone who'd never heard of any religious text (and there are plenty of people who have lived their lives and died without hearing of a one). The answer is in science, which, properly applied, can not give us any answer but the truth that our Creator is guiding us to.
Now, if predestination is true, then I'm predestined to pandeism -- and why do you suppose my Creator would choose that destiny for me? And if you seek Biblical support, you need go no further than the admonition that what you do unto the least of God's children, you do unto God. This is stated directly, not as analogy or as simile. Break a man's leg -- or his heart -- and God takes on that pain.
@ Sarah's theologically uneducated Pastor, Kuyper's been dead for 90 years, and he went to the grave without having the opportunity to learn that the electrons and protons that make up all matter are just strings of energy -- really something underlying energy even, force itself -- which have been twirled up, and are constantly held in that state (undoubtedly by the force responsible for their initial creation at all)....
For the pantheistic element, do you doubt that your Creator is in all things -- is there any thing from which the Creator is excluded? And if all the Universe turns out to be a single force, constantly held as twirling itself up in different ways, can this force be separate from that Creator?
I have said that the description of Deism is correct, but the conclusion reached is untenable; and as well for "Islamism" -- if that's what Kuyper taught, let not his ignorance be yours. Have you read the Qur'an? With an open eye to the fundaments therein that are shared with your own beliefs?
Knuje: I think that you are coming about this the wrong way. You see, you are basing all of this off of your presuppositions and I mine. This being the case, we cannot see eye to eye. Until you can begin with my beginning point, or I being with yours, we will not be able to communicate properly. And honestly, I don't want to begin with yours.
If we are each of us working off presumptions than we can not reach the truth but to each cast off all presumptions and start from none at all!! You are, after all, not beginning with your own beginning, for you came into this world with no knowledge, and were then told how to perceive it by others. What in your entire life have you ever perceived without someone first telling you that you could or would perceive it? And consider those people, did they not come to most of their current set of beliefs in the same way, by someone telling them from their childhood what to believe, how to perceive?
So let us go back to your real beginning, before anyone told you anything to believe....
Imagine that you were just came into this world a few minutes ago, with no knowledge whatsoever, and no one to impart knowledge on you -- like those occasional children abandoned as infants and raised by wolves, without language or words or abstractions. Imagine that you can see the world around you, the woods, the trees, the waters, the sun in the day, the moon and stars at night, but no one there to explain it to you. What could you conclude from considering the world from such a beginning?
Knuje: I have no doubt that I would see the world as a wonderful place where there is no evil.
And you are correct about us not understanding each other until we have cast off all presuppositions...but I think that it is impossible to cast off *all* presuppositions. We will always have some left. It is like language...we have been brought up to speak English and we can't just try to cast it off and speak something else. Everything we've learned is based upon our language and therefore nothing works without it...same thing with our presuppositions or religion.
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