ECT Our triune God

1Mind1Spirit

Literal lunatic
God has taken full responsibility for creation...

And we in it, who were created in Adam to be gods of God, have responsibility for creation..
Arsenios


This is an oxymoron.

Yer talkin' out both sides of yer mouth and saying nothing coherent.

You cant have God taking full responsibility, then say some of it is on mankind.

Are you truly that ignert?

ox·y·mo·ron
ˌäksəˈmôrˌän/
noun
a figure of speech in which apparently contradictory terms appear in conjunction (e.g., faith unfaithful kept him falsely true ).
 

PneumaPsucheSoma

TOL Subscriber
I have to say that you are closer to him than I was to you, so we are learning through him that you are closer to Orthodox than I was??

That was JUST a joke...!! :)

There is no difference in your distinctions... Linear sequences that endure and elapse IS chronology, and the temporary nature of creation during the age of the Fall of Adam is chronological as well... This condition will come to an end, but "Time marches on" in such sequential temporality...

It sounds like you are trying to place a temporal value on the pre-Fall vs the post-Fall creation, when the difference lies in the quality of life corrupting into death vs the quality of Eternal Life - "And this is life eternal, to know the one true God, and His Son, Jesus Christ..." The "know" here refers to the Marriage of the Lamb to man...

You had started out with NO time, then time without end, then time that ends...

I countered with NO time, then the creation of time with the creation of the cosmos [creation], and then the detour of the Fall of Adam, where time since the Fall is experienced as corrupted and animalistic leading to death... You want to make this a second KIND of time, rather than a secondary QUALITY of time caused by the Fall... I want to think that Adam could manipulate time prior to the Fall, but not after it... And today, some Saints can manipulate time in their supra-natural states of being... And can do all manner of "impossible" things...

I would be more sympathetic to your saying that before the Fall, Adam controlled time, and that after the Fall, time controlled Adam, and we in him... And in God's curse of creation in the wake of the Fall, time itself had to change somehow, from what it was to what it is, and then to what it will be, because there is, in this approach, a THIRD category of time, which is beyond Adamic time, for it is time in the Marriage of the Lamb, which itself is but a foretaste of the Time of the Age to Come...

So you can see how quickly time slips...

That then makes John problematic:

John 17:3
And this is Life Eternal,
that they might know thee the only true God,
and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.


Eternal Life means unending life... The word is aionic, which you assign to fallen existence...

Perhaps not - I would agree... We are on a temporary detour, because the Physis of the Kosmos was ALTERED by God when Adam sinned... Adam KNEW what he had lost, and Holy Tradition has him sitting at the gates of Paradise in tears and grief until he died...

You could even say that Adam became Prodigal, and that the difference between the time he remembered and the time he suffered was the difference between the Father's House and the Pig-Styes where the Prodigal was not even allowed to eat what the pigs were eating... But whatever it WAS, we CANNOT know, except in an earnest, and we DO know that it has a different "feel" to it, but there is no way to know the cause of that feel, whether it is simply normal time experience in union with God, or if it is pre-Fall Adamic time native to an un-cursed cosmos, or first earth... Or if it is some combination of the two "contaminated" by the fact that we are still in our fallen flesh and souls...

We certainly cannot legitimately lump all that together and call it "ever-eternity" or everlasting or some such... It is aionic time, perhaps peculiar to this age and to no other... Given the limitation of our conditions, both universally and severally...

And btw, is that 3D enough for ya!? :)

Then you cannot use the term "sempiternal" which combines semper with eternal and which you define as everlasting... Because if eternal is non-temporal, no beginning, no middle and no end within time, then it cannot be used of creation at all, because it can ONLY be attributed apophatically to God...

In fact, eternal means forever...
Timelessness applies to God...
Temporal applies to creation...
Temporary applies to the corruption of creation...

I hope you are having a good TIME reading this! :)

Jes' sayin'...

Arsenios

Okay... This is how it never gets anywhere. I begin to outline what I'm saying, and you immediately filter it all through your own perceptions and then start correcting while caricaturing. I'm not attempting to convince you or debate with you. I'm trying to get you to understand what I'm saying without paralleling it to something else. You can't ever reject it if you don't comprehend it. That's all I'm after. Your understanding and inevitable rejection of it. You will remain Orthodox regardless, but you'll never understand my balk at Orthodoxy if you don't stop trying to synthesize what I say into your own format and concept.


Sempiternity comes from semp/er (always) and ternus (a temporal adjective suffix). Though it's a compromised term, it is the best to utilize; indicating a beginning with no end (though with a durative connotation reflecting endless time). Yes, it's a temporal term, but that's a limitation of English. I qualify it carefully.

What I'm trying to convey, without all the intervening sidetracks and attempts at correction, is that heaven and the cosmos are BOTH created; thus they BOTH had a beginning and have no end. In mathematical terms, all creation is a ray. NEITHER the created heaven NOR the created cosmos are eternal; and the only true temporality of a beginning AND an end are the fallen earth aions of that everlasting aionios for the cosmos.

God alone is eternal, with no beginning or end. There is no "realm" of God. He is Self-existent. Until He creates, there are no wheres or whens or whats. No heaven, no cosmos. No heavenly creatures, no earthly creatures. Just HIM. He doesn't need a where or when or what to exist. He created every form of where, when, and what.

God IS eternity. And the created heaven is the invisible created abode in which He tents for all everlasting while also remaining utterly transcendent to both heaven and the cosmos.

Heaven is NOT transcendent and uncreated. It's His created everlasting abode. In this heaven, there are created beings. Angels of whatever type and rank and purpose. These created heavenly beings are in a created heavenly realm. This created invisible heaven, like the created visible cosmos, is sempiternal. It had an inception and is everlasting.

There is some contrast of a form of sequentiality, but it is NOT timelessness OR chronological time. In heaven, there are no celestial bodies for chronos, just as heaven has some kind of wheres, whens, and whats. And that form of linearity is more akin to the original linearity of the cosmos.

Angels aren't "in" God or an uncreated "realm of God" like fish in some supernatural fishbowl. Angels are in a created heaven as whats who go from wheres to wheres at whens. They don't concurrently occupy multiple wheres and whens as whats.

God ALONE = Eternity / Aidios
ALL creation (both invisible/heaven and visible/cosmos) = Sempiternity / Aionios
Fallen creation = Temporality / Aions

"Eternal" life is always aionios ("Everlasting" life). We have all had an inception as created beings, and our salvation begins at conversion. The quality and source OF that zoe life is God and is eternal; but it is applied to us at some punctiliar point in time by faith, repentance, etc.

Aionios can seem to be eternal because it often refers to the source and quality of everlasting life being God who is eternity. But aionios is merely a subset of aidios. This is the manner in which it is a synonym, typified by a ray on a line. But eternity is not a line. It's linelessness as timelessness. No analogy will suffice.

God created heaven. And He inhabited when/as He instantiated it into created phenomenal existence by His Logos while animating all life by His Breath/Spirit.

The Orthodox formulaic starts AFTER the Logos/Pneuma procession and creation, then attempting to account for procession and creation. Once creation is instantiated into existence, it LOOKS and predominantly FUNCTIONS like there are three hypostases and prosopa.

But the formulaic starts too late, then compensating for the omission without understanding God is transcendent UNcreated Self-Phenomenon and Self-Noumenon.

The Father's co-processed (with the Holy Spirit) hypostasis and in-shining transcendent prosopon, the Son as the express image OF that hypostasis and His uncreated immanent prosopon, and the co-inherent Holy Spirit that has no indivudated prosopon while sharing that of the Son.... THIS is what LOOKS like three hypostases and prosopa, but is not.

There is one God... the Father. And there is His eternally begotten Son. The Son OF God. And there is the Spirit OF God, the Holy Spirit.

The Orthodox formulaic starts in the created heaven (presuming it to be uncreated) and insists upon three hypostases (one ungbegotten, one begotten, one processed) that would be SEMPITERNAL and not ETERNAL.
 

1Mind1Spirit

Literal lunatic
He was the only man, besides Christ, who actually KNEW what he had lost... He could not go back into Paradise, because that would be unloving of God, lest he eat of the fruit of the Tree of Life, and make eternal what was now only temporary, and would end at death... He could not leave, lest the memory fade...


Arsenios


Adam knew nothing.

Neither good nor evil.

When Adam disobeyed God, he learned he was a sinner.

It was the first step in God's purpose to make sons.

Adam was a figure of Him (Christ) who was to come.

Adam lost ignorant bliss, and a life of rest.

The captain of our salvation is bringing many sons TO glory, not restoring Adam's never existent former glory.
 

PneumaPsucheSoma

TOL Subscriber


Yes, my only real balk at the term aeviternity has been its association with Aquinas and Scholasticism, both worthy of great despite IMHO.

Perhaps it's the better term, but the intent is to convey a medium between timelessness (eternal/eternity) and what we can only know of time as chronology.

In Scholastic philosophy, the aevum (also called aeviternity) is the mode of existence experienced by angels and by the saints in heaven. In some ways, it is a state that logically lies between the eternity (timelessness) of God and the temporal experience of material beings. It is sometimes referred to as “improper eternity”.[1] The word aevum is Latin, originally signifying “age”, “aeon”, or “everlasting time”;[2] the word aeviternity comes from the Medieval Latin neologism aeviternitas.

The concept of the aevum dates back at least to Albertus Magnus’s treatise De quattuor coaequaevis.[3] Its most familiar description is found in the Summa theologica of Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas identifies the aevum as the measure of the existence of beings that “recede less from permanence of being, forasmuch as their being neither consists in change, nor is the subject of change; nevertheless they have change annexed to them either actually, or potentially.” As examples, he cites the heavenly bodies (which, in medieval science, were considered changeless in their nature, though variable in their position) and the angels, which “have an unchangeable being as regards their nature with changeableness as regards choice”.[4]

Frank Sheed, in his book Theology and Sanity, said that the aevum is also the measure of existence for the saints in heaven: “Aeviternity is the proper sphere of every created spirit, and therefore of the human soul... At death, [the body’s] distracting relation to matter’s time ceases to affect the soul, so that it can experience its proper aeviternity.” [5]

The key point is that there are three disinctions, however they are most effectively and efficiently labeled.

Eternal/ity
Sempiternity/Aeviternity
Temporal/ity

The first is uncreated and is God alone with no "realm" of existence except His inherent uncreated transcendent Self-Existence by intrinsic Aseity and Persesatisity (Self-Sufficiency).

The second is created, including the invisible realm of (the third) heaven and the visible realm of the cosmos (as the second and first heavens).

Temporality is the altered physis of the cosmos and mankind, including initiation of what we know as chronological time.

The Orthodox Multi-Hypostatic Trinity presumes the merger of eternity and sempiternity by default omission, thus never accounting for the creation of heaven along with the cosmos. And this also means the Orthodox formulaic is a post-procession and post-creation compensation in arrears for not having accounted for Logos/Pneuma procession and creation.

Making the eternally begotten Son and processed Holy Spirit into individuated hypostases is a fallacy based upon starting after the Divine Utterance that was both the ontological begetting and procession concurrent with creation.

This false belated assigned sempiternity-based laterality and horizontality MUST be reconciled to its appropriate verticality of distinguishing eternity from aeviternity/sempiternity.

The express image OF God's hypostasis is the Son processed AS that singular hypostasis into created phenomena. The created phenomena was eternally only noumena in God's nous until it was instantiated into existence by being carried forth and upheld by God's Rhema.

The Trinity must be reconciled and de-horizontalized to represent the verticality of uncreated phenomena and created phenomena. And that's only the beginning, as Calvinism and Arminianism (and Open Theism) can also be completely reconciled as well.

Everything hinges on this understanding to set aside all artificial binaries of competing doctrinal extremes that are false dichotomies. This is the foundation for NON-Relativistic, NON-Pluralistic, NON-Syncretistic, NON-Subjectivistic reconciliation to know the singular central absolute truth of God and the ontological Gospel of Jesus Christ preached by Paul.

It's that monumentally vital and important.

God created heaven, just as He created the cosmos. And He tents in the everlasting heaven as His sempiternal/aeviternal abode.

And the Trinity is Uni-Hypostatic and Multi-Phenomenal rather than Multi-Hypostatic and Uni-Phenomenal.
 

Lazy afternoon

LIFETIME MEMBER
LIFETIME MEMBER
He was the only man, besides Christ, who actually KNEW what he had lost... He could not go back into Paradise, because that would be unloving of God, lest he eat of the fruit of the Tree of Life, and make eternal what was now only temporary, and would end at death... He could not leave, lest the memory fade...

Eating of the tree of life is not just making man to become immortal but introduces a whole new realm that Adam never knew of.

Actions have consequences unforseen...

God has taken full responsibility for creation...

And we in it, who were created in Adam to be gods of God, have responsibility for creation... And we worship sex and fat and tatoos and piercings and all manner of self-satisfactions... And we die by a 100... Adam lived a long time... And he died... You will too...

Perhaps not.

LA
 

RevTestament

New member
He was the only man, besides Christ, who actually KNEW what he had lost... He could not go back into Paradise, because that would be unloving of God, lest he eat of the fruit of the Tree of Life, and make eternal what was now only temporary, and would end at death... He could not leave, lest the memory fade...
How is it unloving of God to allow Adam to eat of the tree of life? Don't you know that we are the branches and He is the vine(tree)? No - He leads us back to the tree of life, but it is through the guardian Cherubim whose swords must be answered to as they keep the way.

Actions have consequences unforseen...

God has taken full responsibility for creation...

And we in it, who were created in Adam to be gods of God, have responsibility for creation... And we worship sex and fat and tatoos and piercings and all manner of self-satisfactions... And we die by a 100... Adam lived a long time... And he died... You will too... And I as well...

I have said,
Ye are gods;
and all of you are children of the most High.
But ye shall die like men,
and fall like one of the princes.


Arsenios
Not all have or will die, but I wish more would take what you are saying here to heart. Yes, God has hope that we will take responsibility for what He has given us, and to the extent we do, we meet our potential as elohim of El Elyon, the Most High, the El of elohim. Deut 10:17. :thumb:
 

Arsenios

Well-known member
How is it unloving of God to allow Adam to eat of the tree of life? Don't you know that we are the branches and He is the vine(tree)?

This is the reason for Baptism into Christ... The God-given purity needed for conjoining us to Life, lest we make immortal our mortal impurity... Adam died the day he sinned and failed to repent before God... Were he to then eat of the Tree of Life, he would have made that death immortal... So God in HIs great Mercy did not allow it to happen, and raised Adam the Third Day...

No - He leads us back to the tree of life, but it is through the guardian Cherubim whose swords must be answered to as they keep the way.

Our [fallen] Way to the Tree of Life is the wood upon Which Christ was crucified, and we in Christ taking up our own cross and following Him Who IS Life, becoming therein One with Christ, the Bridegroom...

Not all have or will die...

Christ died...
Unless I die with Him, I will die without Him...
By our death to self we gain Life in Christ...
By our death to the world, we gain the Kingdom of God...

To this worldly life, we will all die...

The only question is:

"Will we turn to God?"

Or:

"Will we grasp for self??"

If ANYone is willing...
To come after Me...
Let him first deny himself...
Then take up his own cross...
And be following Me...



Arsenios
 

Arsenios

Well-known member
Yes, my only real balk at the term aeviternity has been its association with Aquinas and Scholasticism...

Perhaps it's the better term, but the intent is to convey a medium between timelessness (eternal/eternity) and what we can only know of time as chronology.

It means aionic time, or the time of the Age... Aevi=Aion=Age

The key point is that there are three distinctions, however they are most effectively and efficiently labeled.

Eternal/ity
Sempiternity/Aeviternity
Temporal/ity

The first is uncreated and is God alone with no "realm" of existence except His inherent uncreated transcendent Self-Existence by intrinsic Aseity and Persesatisity (Self-Sufficiency).

The second is created, including the invisible realm of (the third) heaven and the visible realm of the cosmos (as the second and first heavens).

Temporality is the altered physis of the cosmos and mankind, including initiation of what we know as chronological time.

No Time...
Time...
Fallen Time...

Schmantzy terms only obfuscate and confuse...

The only thing we know is fallen time...

All mankind knows fallen time...


Arsenios
 

PneumaPsucheSoma

TOL Subscriber
It means aionic time, or the time of the Age... Aevi=Aion=Age

No Time...
Time...
Fallen Time...

Schmantzy terms only obfuscate and confuse...

The only thing we know is fallen time...

All mankind knows fallen time...


Arsenios

I thougt you were wanting me to outline what I was saying so you could understand?

The point is not a debate about timelessness, time, and fallen time, or what to call them, etc.

The point is that God ALONE is transcendent uncreated timeless eternity, and He created and inhabited heaven just as He created and pervades the cosmos.

God wasn't "in" a "realm of God" that is an uncreated heaven as some "God jar" that contains Him. Heaven had a beginning. An inception. Just like the created beings that occupy the wheres and whens of heaven as whats and whos.

Unless and until God spoke, there was no heaven. His Logos and Pneuma are inherently ontological; and when He took action to speak, His eternal uncreated divine Logos and Pneuma proceeded forth/proceeded when/as heaven and the cosmos were instantiated into actuality of existence.

The begetting and proceeding wasn't with God being "in" heaven, for there was no heaven (and cosmos) until He spoke to create it and also breathe all life into that creation.

The Orthodox procession is belated, not accounting for the creation of heaven into which the Logos and Pneuma processed for God to inhabit His creation.

The Father AS Spirit co-inheres with the processed Holy Spirit, which is the perichoretic for the Father and the Logos which proceeded forth as the eternally begotten Son. This is the hypostasis and the express image OF that hypostasis; each with a prosopon.

When not including or considering the created heaven and its inhabitation by God as He creates it, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit can LOOK like three hypostases. But that's because nobody has a 3D-type Multi-Phenomenal understanding, and just makes them lateral and horizontal in a single phenomenality of existence rather than the true verticality of their Multi-Phenomenal existence.

You cannot reject what you don't understand and misrepresent by caricature and filtration through other views. All I want is for you to reject it for what it IS rather than what you presume it to be.

God is timeless, which is eternal. NOTHING else is timeless eternality. Only He has Self-Phenomenal and Self-Noumenal Self-Conscious Self-Existence. Aseity. Persesatisity. Immutability. Impassibility.

Heaven is not timeless as eternality. It had an inception, and is wheres and whens and whats. It's created, and has created beings "there".

And this is different from the cosmos, which was created as everlasting but has aions that are terminal in some manner upon/within the overall linearity of aionios.

THIS is the omission of Orthodoxy (and all others), and which prompted all the dichotomies of historical formulaic to compensate. ALL can be reconciled to this singular central absolute truth.
 

1Mind1Spirit

Literal lunatic
Heaven is not timeless as eternality. It had an inception, and is wheres and whens and whats. It's created, and has created beings "there".

Yes.

And this is different from the cosmos, which was created as everlasting but has aions that are terminal in some manner upon/within the overall linearity of aionios.

The cosmos was created to represent the everlasting.

In the new heaven on earth, the cosmos will be gone.

No sun, moon, or stars.

ALL can be reconciled to this singular central absolute truth.

Only partially.
 

Ask Mr. Religion

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The Trinity must be reconciled and de-horizontalized to represent the verticality of uncreated phenomena and created phenomena.
In God's eternity if the Father, Son and the Spirit are ontologically identical, and God is not "speaking" did the Son and Spirit exist in eternity? Seems to me your statement "He took action to speak, His eternal uncreated divine Logos and Pneuma proceeded forth" implies something otherwise and is at odds with the pure actuality of God.

AMR
 

PneumaPsucheSoma

TOL Subscriber
In God's eternity if the Father, Son and the Spirit are ontologically identical, and God is not "speaking" did the Son and Spirit exist in eternity?

Yes, of course. Logos isn't just speaking, but is all functionalities of intelligent thought, rational reason, wisdom, ponderance, comprehension, and apprehension of/as Self-Consciousness AND expression if/when there is any (whether spoken or written).

In His inherent eternal Self-Noumenon, the Logos IS the Son. In His intrinsic eternal Self-Phenomenon, the Logos is the singular hypostasis. This is the eternal begetting, for there was not "when" the Son was not.

God's Logos is both Self-Phenomenal and Self-Noumenal, because He is Self-Conscious and Self-Existent. Phenomenally, the Logos is God's own eternal Logos; Noumenally, the Logos is the eternal Son.

Seems to me your statement "He took action to speak, His eternal uncreated divine Logos and Pneuma proceeded forth" implies something otherwise and is at odds with the pure actuality of God.

AMR

No. Creation was only noumenon as potentiality of existence, given its phenomenal actuality of existence at the Divine Creative Utterance whereby the Logos and Pneuma were expressed and exhaled as the eternal Son and the Holy (hagios - set apart) Spirit.

As Spirit, thrusting the Rhema sword via the Logos, God pierced to the dividing asunder of the Self-Noumenon of Himself as Self-Phenomenal/Self-Noumenal Spirit out from Himself (ekporeuomai/para/pempo; and remember, ekporeuomai is in the middle voice).

With His Self-Noumenon partitioned and distributed out from "beside" (para) Himself into noumenal creation as it's given phenomenality by being carried forth and upheld by God's Rhema (which IS His singular hypostasis); the Holy Spirit is the perichoretic for the Father and Son, having no individuated prosopon as God's omnipresence in the created heaven and cosmos; sharing the prosopon of the Son with whom the Holy Spirit co-inheres by qualitative two-fold procession from transcendence into both created realms of immanence.

The Logos and Pneuma are God's literal ontological uncreated eternal Logos and Pneuma. And in His inherent uncreated Self-Noumenality and Self-Phenomenality, both His Word and His Spirit are Him and His. And in eternal noumenality, the Logos is eternally the Son, begotten "before" all ages.

And once the created heaven is instantiated into existence, God's timelessness interfaces with aeviternality so that the uncreated eternally begotten Son has eternally been the Son. The eternality of the Son is the eternality of the Logos. They're coterminous, bridging uncreated eternality with created aeviternality. It's the processed noumenon of the Holy Spirit inhering with the intrinsic phenomenality of God as Spirit that is the perichoretic for the internal Logos as the external Son, and for the interpenetrating of Father and Son in both eternality and aeviternality.
 
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1Mind1Spirit

Literal lunatic
The son of God has his own soul.

Only a soul is capable of rejoicing.

PROVERBS VIII

22 The LORD possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old.

23 I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was.

30 Then I was by him, as one brought up with him: and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him;

31 Rejoicing in the habitable part of his earth; and my delights were with the sons of men.


No trinity.

ZIP, ZILCH, NADA.

It is an unbiblicle figment of carnal reasoning.

The Father,Son, and Holy Spirit are oneness, not one as understood by conceptual language.

Prayer for all Believers

20"I do not ask on behalf of these alone, but for those also who believe in Me through their word;

21that they may all be one; even as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they also may be in Us, so that the world may believe that You sent Me.

22"The glory which You have given Me I have given to them, that they may be one, just as We are one;…
 
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Arsenios

Well-known member
ETERNAL

adjective
1.
without beginning or end;
lasting forever;
always existing
(opposed to temporal ):
eternal life.
2.
perpetual;
ceaseless;
endless:
eternal quarreling;
eternal chatter.
3.
enduring;
immutable:
eternal principles.
4.
Metaphysics.
existing outside all relations of time;
not subject to change.
noun
5.
something that is eternal.
6.
the Eternal, God.

PPS - I do understand that in your own technical language
you can designate any definition you like for any words you like,
but your usage of eternal to mean timeless drives me bats...

Eternal means ongoing, without beginning or ending - eg everlasting...

It does not mean timeless, or a-temporal...

It is a category of time...

So there you have my tuppence...

A.
 
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