booby....I would have to read the article....the wording as you put it makes it sound kinda gnostic (or early proto-orthodox apologist) and less on the side of Arius on the "begotten not made" issue (anachronistic to the writings of the NT, as is the notion of a "trinity"). In other words, to borrow the language of the fourth century debate, your description sides more on homoousios "of the same substance" than homoiousios "of like substance", if the spirit creatures and Jesus share the same nature as God by being emanations of himself (as opposed to being creations from nothing, or productions that share some similarity with God's nature but inferior or secondary in some ontological sense, i.e. not as fully God as the Father is God). It is hard to imagine the Society saying such a thing, so I guess it would all depend on how they actually phrase things in the article.
Coptic John 1:1 makes it into the Watchtower.
by slimboyfat 75 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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Leolaia
acceptance that things can be called God's and lords is there it's an arguable point.
It was arguable for Paul because he took pains to qualify the term with legomenos, "so-called", "alleged".
but I would argue your joining christ and God under theos because while he separates christ and God he applies God only to the father completely and then separates Christ as Lord again, there is no idication that any of the God applies to the christ at all.
"Joining Christ and God under theos": I didn't quite put it that way, but that approximates rather roughly what I was saying about John, not Paul. There are important differences between how both writers talked about God and Christ. And you would face the same problem with Jesus Christ being the "one Lord", for the Father is also Lord in the NT.
All that is indicated is Christ and God's separation from the 'so-called God's and lords.
That is pretty much my point above. The purpose in the passage from Paul is very different from the one in the Johannine Prologue and does not have much bearing on whether the theos of the latter is to be grouped with the "so-called gods" of Paul, or whether Paul refers to the existence of "gods" among whom the John's Logos may be a member.
there is also the interesting line...."if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth (as indeed there are many "gods" and many "lords")", this seems to qualify the first expression to allow for there to be these gods and lords not just to be talking about false idols.
The purpose of the parenthetical comment is to emphasize the multitude of so-called gods and lords (polloi, twice), not to state that they actually exist (which runs up against what is implied in the preceding clause). The word legomenoi is not repeated again in the next clause; it is understood and would be overly pedantic to repeat it two more times. I would translate: "For even if there are so-called gods either in heaven or on earth -- indeed, there are MANY 'gods' and MANY 'lords' -- yet for us there is but one God".
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Mickey mouse
Interesting. Thanks for the heads up slimboyfat.
Thanks to Leolaia for the scholarly input.
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booby
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w569/1pp.530-531pars.16-19TheDivineOriginofMarriage***
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He performed what may be called the first operation of painless surgery. “Hence Jehovah God had a deep sleep fall upon the man and, while he was sleeping, he took one of his ribs and then closed up the flesh over its place. And Jehovah God proceeded to build the rib that he had taken from the man into a woman and to bring her to the man.” The man was overjoyed to receive and accept her at his heavenly Father’s hand, and he named her to show she was part of himself. “Then the man said: ‘This is at last bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. This one will be called Woman [or Ish·shah′], because from man [or Ish] this one was taken.’” (Gen. 2:21-23, NW) God had now divided the feminine characteristics from Adam and put them in this woman or Ish·shah′ and thus produced the human sexes. In the fatherly blessing that he now gave them as a married couple he set before them the work that he authorized them to carry on together. As it is written: “And God proceeded to create the man in his image, in God’s image he created him; male and female he created them. Further, God blessed them and God said to them: ‘Be fruitful and become many and fill the earth and subdue it, and have in subjection the fish of the sea and the flying creatures of the heavens and every living creature that is creeping upon the earth.’” “This is the book of Adam’s history. In the day of God’s creating Adam he made him in the likeness of God. Male and female he created them. After that he blessed them and called their name Man in the day of their being created.” (Gen. 1:27, 28; 5:1, 2, NW) So human marriage is a divine arrangement and should be viewed as holy.17
When Jehovah God caused Adam to sleep soundly and removed one of his ribs and used it as a base with which to build Adam’s wife, was he foreshadowing something future, something four thousand years later? No. He was not foreshadowing that his Son Jesus Christ would become the only other Adam, “the last Adam,” and would fall asleep in death as a human sacrifice for his “bride,” the congregation of his 144,000 followers, and that Almighty God would raise him from that deep sleep of death and afterward present him with his spiritual “bride,” his faithful congregation, in heavenly glory. (1 Cor. 15:45; Eph. 5:25-27; Rev. 21:2, 9) Had God done this, it would have meant that he peered into Adam’s future, that he let himself foresee that Adam would sin by eating from the forbidden tree of the knowledge of good and bad. Thus God would have foreordained that Adam should break his law and come under the sentence of death and that Jesus Christ should die as a corresponding ransom to save his 144,000 followers from among Adam’s descendants that these might become a bridal organization, a wife to Jesus Christ in heaven. To have foreordained that Adam should sin would have made Jehovah God responsible for his sin, whereas God is not responsible for sin and is not bound to make a sacrificial atonement for it.18
Rather than foreshadow and foreordain something by the way he created Eve, Jehovah God was copying on an earthly level a great heavenly pattern of his own. As Eve was taken from Adam and was really bone of his bones and flesh of his flesh, so Jehovah’s universal organization, his heavenly organizational wife, was taken from himself. It was a creation emanating from himself without pain and beginning with his Word, his only-begotten Son, and finally taking in all his holy angels of heaven. This holy organization of them all he presented to himself as his “woman,” his “wife,” whom he will never divorce, for she will never be estranged from him, come a Devil even.19
Because the first woman was taken from the first man instead of being made a distinct creation, not only was she one flesh with him but also all the human family that sprang from them is one flesh. This fact made her man’s closest relative on earth. For this reason he should stick to her. God pronounced this bond of husband and wife to be the closest relationship of two humans on earth, closer than that of a son to a father and mother, and hence the husband should stay with the one to whom he was closest, his wife. In Eden after uniting the man and the woman in wedlock God said: “That is why a man will leave his father and his mother and he must stick to his wife and they must become one flesh.” (Gen. 2:24, NW) Thousands of years later certain self-wise ones brushed aside this genuine account of the ideal human marriage in the paradise of Eden and the Son of God said to them: “Did you not read that he who created them at the beginning made them male and female and said: ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and his mother and will stick to his wife, and the two will be one flesh’? So that they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has yoked together let no man put apart.” (Matt. 19:4-6, NW) The Christian apostle Paul gave his measure of support to the trueness of this marriage account by quoting from it in his argument and saying: “For, ‘The two,’ says he, ‘will be one flesh.’” (1 Cor. 6:16, NW) A married man’s place, therefore, was to be, not with his papa and mamma, not with his gang, his men’s association or his social club, but with his closest partner, his wife. He was to stick to his wife, not send her back home to her father who gave her to him. He was to permit no one to get in between. -
Narkissos
booby,
Very surprising and interesting quote.
Indeed the current orthodox Jewish / Christian dichotomy of creation (understood as creatio ex nihilo) vs. emanation, begetting, procession and so on is not a timeless logical necessity but a historical production, in which the 2nd-century-AD "Gnostic" crisis played a major role. Upstream of its emergence there was no necessary contradiction between "son" and "creature" status. For the Hellenistic Jew Philo of Alexandria and the Christian Justin Martyr the logos can be described both as "Son of God" and "angel". Once an absolute gap is established between the uncreated divine and non-divine creation (which first happens in Gnosticism and is paradoxically confirmed in "orthodox" reaction) this is no longer possible. But this dichotomy is anachronistic to most NT texts.
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designs
Leolaia,
Being new here I am not familiar with you or your present beliefs but you used the H word (heresy) in an earlier post in writing about the two powers heresy. Were you expressing a personal position to those who understand Jesus differently than you or were you using heresy in the academic sense of a position that is contrary to a stated Creed.
Might I ask what your personal views are of Jesus and do you attend or congregate with any particular fellowship or denomination.
Thanks in advance
designs
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Leolaia
booby....Wow, that is a pretty fascinating theological statement from the Society. The Adam-Eve typology confirms that indeed the author was talking in terms of a sharing of some derivational commonality between Jehovah and his creation, whether one calls it essence or substance or nature is basically besides the point; the analogy of Adam means that Jesus and other "spirit creatures" are really X of the Father's X, whatever X is construed to be. I never would have thought I'd read such a thing in the literature....I bet LittleToe would have something to say about it (what happened to him?). The real interesting question is what led the author to take such a position. Is it motivated separately from the present application or was the author simply led to this view through the Adam-Eve parallel? I would have thought it was the latter, but then again maybe not? I recall that until the late 1940s or 1950s it was acceptable to speak of worshipping Jesus and I wonder how far Pastor Russell pushed the idea that Christians who are spirit-begotten participate in the mystery of redemption with Christ -- any leanings towards the idea that they really have divine nature, at least once they have passed on the "other side of the veil"? It would be great to see if this article is an oddity or whether there were other statements that repeat similar ideas. It suggests that the Watchtower, without intending to develop any contradictory theological views, may not always be as Arian as they make themselves out to be. I think Narkissos has made a great point on this because it seems like the author in a rather similar naive (and I mean that non-pejoratively) way is not seeing much distinction between emanating from the same Xness and being created; he sees the former as a possible way of talking about the latter.
designs....Good point about the terminology....I was not stating a personal position but instead using the parlance that is readily found on the subject found in academic studies of early Judaism; it would have better served me if I had placed the word in quotation marks, 'heresy'. The term is relevant because the term refers to the rabbinical construction of a certain monotheistic scheme as a heresy. Scholarship on the "two powers" theology is interested as much, if not more, in how the rabbis "heresized" binitarian monotheism in order to define an emergent non-binitarian orthodoxy. This process is very similar to what was happening in early Christianity. In fact, the same theologies spanned between Judaism and Christianity; we just know them under different labels. In Christianity, non-binitarian monotheism became known as "modalism" whereas in Judaism it became the dominant orthodox theology (which construed the dual if not multiple hypostases of God as manifestations of only one person), while simultaneously binitarian monotheism (which construed a duality of hypostases as manifested in two distinct persons of one God) was well on its way to becoming orthodox in second-century Christianity while it was being constructed as a heresy (the "two powers" heresy) in proto-orthodox rabbinical Judaism. This is one aspect of the parting of the ways between Judaism and Christianity in the second century.
I have no personal views of my own, if you are asking about any ontological reality; I am interested in how the development of ideas took place and how the writers of texts may have viewed things (probably beyond our grasp of understanding fully but the journey towards this goal is an interesting one).
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slimboyfat
I have no personal views of my own, if you are asking about any ontological reality
Reminds me of the Paul Simon song that goes: "I have no opinion about this, And I have no opinion about that."
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designs
Thanks Leolaia.
Slimboyfat, I would take Leolaia's comment in a way that Erasmus mused- We will not be judged on whether we view the Holy spirit proceeding from the Father alone or from the Father and the Son, but we will be judged on whether or not we practice the fruitages of the spirit, love, joy peace etc.. paraphrased.
designs
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slimboyfat
Slimboyfat, I would take Leolaia's comment in a way that Erasmus mused- We will not be judged on whether we view the Holy spirit proceeding from the Father alone or from the Father and the Son, but we will be judged on whether or not we practice the fruitages of the spirit, love, joy peace etc.. paraphrased.
Does Leolaia believe in divine judgement, or even in God for that matter? It's news to me. I can understand the confusion though, because it took me a while to catch on that Leolaia and Narkissos will discuss others' beliefs but not their own. I don't know what is with that.