Infinity and God!

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So when Christ said," My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me", he was in communion with the father?
 
Deus Deus meus. Christ’s passion: and the conversion of the Gentiles.

[1] Unto the end, for the morning protection, a psalm for David. [2] O God my God, look upon me: why hast thou forsaken me? Far from my salvation are the words of my sins. [Psalms 21:2] [Latin] [3] O my God, I shall cry by day, and thou wilt not hear: and by night, and it shall not be reputed as folly in me. [4] But thou dwellest in the holy place, the praise of Israel. [5] In thee have our fathers hoped: they have hoped, and thou hast delivered them.

[2] The words of my sins: That is, the sins of the world, which I have taken upon myself, cry out against me, and are the cause of all my sufferings.

[6] They cried to thee, and they were saved: they trusted in thee, and were not confounded. [7] But I am a worm, and no man: the reproach of men, and the outcast of the people. [8] All they that saw me have laughed me to scorn: they have spoken with the lips, and wagged the head. [9] He hoped in the Lord, let him deliver him: let him save him, seeing he delighteth in him. [10] For thou art he that hast drawn me out of the womb: my hope from the breasts of my mother.

[11] I was cast upon thee from the womb. From my mother’s womb thou art my God, [12] Depart not from me. For tribulation is very near: for there is none to help me. [13] Many calves have surrounded me: fat bulls have besieged me. [14] They have opened their mouths against me, as a lion ravening and roaring. [15] I am poured out like water; and all my bones are scattered. My heart is become like wax melting in the midst of my bowels.

[16] My strength is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue hath cleaved to my jaws: and thou hast brought me down into the dust of death. [17] For many dogs have encompassed me: the council of the malignant hath besieged me. They have dug my hands and feet. [18] They have numbered all my bones. And they have looked and stared upon me. [19] They parted my garments amongst them; and upon my vesture they cast lots. [20] But thou, O Lord, remove not thy help to a distance from me; look towards my defence.

[21] Deliver, O God, my soul from the sword: my only one from the hand of the dog. [22] Save me from the lion’s mouth; and my lowness from the horns of the unicorns. [23] I will declare thy name to my brethren: in the midst of the church will I praise thee. [24] Ye that fear the Lord, praise him: all ye the seed of Jacob, glorify him. [25] Let all the seed of Israel fear him: because he hath not slighted nor despised the supplication of the poor man. Neither hath he turned away his face from me: and when I cried to him he heard me.

[26] With thee is my praise in a great church: I will pay my vows in the sight of them that fear him. [27] The poor shall eat and shall be filled: and they shall praise the Lord that seek him: their hearts shall live for ever and ever. [28] All the ends of the earth shall remember, and shall be converted to the Lord: And all the kindreds of the Gentiles shall adore in his sight. [29] For the kingdom is the Lord’s; and he shall have dominion over the nations. [30] All the fat ones of the earth have eaten and have adored: all they that go down to the earth shall fall before him.

[31] And to him my soul shall live: and my seed shall serve him. [32] There shall be declared to the Lord a generation to come: and the heavens shall shew forth his justice to a people that shall be born, which the Lord hath made.
 
I think your understanding of Catholicism is mundane. You substitute love with obedience. Our savior’s sacrifice was real, not symbolic.
 
Paddy,
Please explain. Are you suggesting that I do not love God, and need scripture to set me right? Please, actually read my posts , perhaps your estimation of me will change.
 
wittgenstein said:
So when Christ said," My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me", he was in communion with the father?
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Right, the words on the Cross are a prophecy fulfilled from the Prophets in Psalms 22. You’ll see the same verse there.

The humanity of Christ never distracts from His Divinity. God is always God in Communion with Himself in the Trinity. Hypostatic Union is where its defined.

We are Biblically called to Communion with Jesus Christ, Biblically, by large man has refused to cooperate. The theory being while God creates without cooperation, He will not save you without your Cooperation [Augustine].
 
Death is a consequence of the discontinuation of communion with the life and love of God. Biblically that is.
 
As you might have guessed, my greatist sin is a lack of patience.
I feel frustrated when I really should not.
 
  1. God the father is infinite and invulnerable.
  2. Only by being vulnerable can God understand our suffering.
  3. God can only understand our suffering by being vulnerable and finite.
  4. Therefore God became vulnerable and experienced pain.
    That is the reason for the incarnation!
 
wittgenstein said:
  1. God the father is infinite and invulnerable.
  2. Only by being vulnerable can God understand our suffering.
  3. God can only understand our suffering by being vulnerable and finite.
  4. Therefore God became vulnerable and experienced pain.
    That is the reason for the incarnation!
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1 and # 2 are contrdictory.​

If " god " is vulnerable, by definition, he cannot be god, at least not the Christian God.

Again, this could not be the Christian God

I will grant this much. God experienced physical pain through Jesus Christ whose physical human nature was assumed by the Second Person of the Trinity. But I don’t think that means that before the coming of Jesus the Trinity did not understand and experience physical pain. We have to remember that the Trinity exists in Eternity, the Eternal Now. So Jesus was eternally present to the Trinity. I am just SPECULATING here, the Church doesn’t say anything about this as far as I know. Perhaps some reliable philosopher has but I don’t know that.

But God did not become man so he could experience physical pain. No main stream Christian theology teaches that, the Scriptures do not teach that, and the Catholic Church certainly does not teach that. And I don’t know any of the Fathers of the Church who held that opinion.
👍
 
So 1 and 2 are contradictory?. So, what did Christ mean when he said, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me”?
The whole idea behind this thread is that our finite minds think God is weird. But he aint! Our finite logic is not God’s logic ( Hilbert’s hotel)!
 
wittgenstein said:
So when Christ said," My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me", he was in communion with the father?
Click to expand...
Absolutely, he was always in communion with his Father because the Person of Christ was the Second Person of the Trinity.

You must understand. As Catholics we accept absolutely what the Church teaches and if the Church has not spoken authoritatively we go to the most reliable Catholic Theologians and the Fathers of the Church.

I really do wish you had a Douay-Rhiems Bible with the Fr. Haydock commentary. His comment on Mathew 27 verse 46 is much too long but very enlightening. He gives several explanations taken from the Fathers and the Philosophers. The one I like best, I think my be attributed to St. Thomas at least it is along the lines of his thinking. These words express the real suffering of Christ in his human nature to his Father.

But they are not words of dispair as we see in what follows, especially in his final words, " …Father into thy hands I commend my spirit…" ( Luke 23: 46). Haydock goes on to explain that it was Christ’s purpose to drink the cup of suffering to the last dreggs as an expession of his love for his Father and to show his desire to make perfect attonment for the offenses committed against his Father.

So these words express the fact that the Father has left Christ’s human nature without consolations during his period of sufferings throughout his life but especially here and he is giving human experession to that fact. He wants us to know how much he suffered in his mind and soul as well as in his body. 👍
 
The messianic psalm reveals Christs suffering from the viewpoint of Jesus Himself. So as stated the prophecy is fulfilled. The idea that Christ suffers a very real human pain is what we all come to know in this world, as you age and your body breaks down you encounter pain, humility etc. We as individuals question our own thinking in these moments or reflections.

What we see is the normal human conflict, and what prevails is " Father, Into your hands I commend my Spirit" This is the right result of the human condition in seeking Communion with God.

There are many scripture verse’s to consider, the Agony in the Garden, the Temptation etc. This is all reflective of us and our trials to overcome this Valley of the Shadow of Death as Psalm 23 states.

The humanity of Christ doesn’t distract from His Divinity. Nor has there ever been a comparison to the humanity of Jesus Christ. Who would we compare? I can’t see in history where a man as Christ ever lived.

Love of His creatures is what is displayed.
 
wittgenstein said:
How can something know ( first person, qualia) what it is like being finite, without being finite (even if only temporarily ).
To understand something from outside (a second person narrative) is not a first person understanding.
Pain (qualia) is a first person understanding. * For God (the father) to understand suffering he must experience suffering from a first person,finite perspective. That is the reason for the incarnation.
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The problem is that, unlike Sean and Will, God is not a human person with finite knowledge. He is omniscient, infinitely knowing. I cannot understand your life first person, even if you listed every fact about it, because I am not in your head - I cannot see your life from the inside. But, that is because of my finite limitations. God’s omniscience means more than simply knowing all things as some list of facts. He knows perfectly what it is like to be a conscious finite being from the inside, even if Himself is not a finite being.
Not as an experiment, Star Trek like( whatever that means) but as the only way to have empathy. The only way God ( or anything ) can love us.
To love us without understanding us is like saying,“I love"x”. “X” being something undefined, not understood. That is meaningless. God’s love for us is not meaningless. And that is the reason for the incarnation!
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This seems dangerous - once again, you seem to reduce God too much to the condition of a finite person. And I do not see how it must follow that if God has not in fact been finite and suffered, He can’t love us. Even granting that He has no first person knowledge of finitude, He still knows us completely - why would it follow that He cannot love us? Even if I don’t have perfect knowledge of somebody, I can still empathize and love them.
For example, suppose I have never experienced pain. Suppose, I have never experienced being vulnerable. Can I truly be said to understand your pain? God the father became (temporarily ) finite (the son) to understand our suffering, have real empathy and truly love us.
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Well, this understanding of the Incarnation is not the Catholic understanding (though, apparently you’re unitarian) - God the Father did not become God the Son. God the the Father and God the Son co-exist eternally with the Holy Spirit, and God the Son became Incarnate.
 
So (according to your version of Catholicism ) God (the father) is not God the son? It seems to me absurd (at least illogical) to believe that God (the father) became the son,since you believe that they are co-eternally the same.
My belief system at least is coherent and dove tails with Catholic doctrine.
 
wittgenstein said:
So (according to your version of Catholicism ) God (the father) is not God the son? It seems to me absurd (at least illogical) to believe that God (the father) became the son,since you believe that they are co-eternally the same.
My belief system at least is coherent and dove tails with Catholic doctrine.
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You belief system is coherent, but not accurate, because you have made a false premise, that is, that God HAD to become man in order to experience human suffering. God is by his definition all-knowing and does not NEED to do anything in order to fully understand it. Unless you accept that this original premise of yours may be false, we can’t understand each other.
 
wittgenstein said:
So (according to your version of Catholicism ) God (the father) is not God the son? It seems to me absurd (at least illogical) to believe that God (the father) became the son,since you believe that they are co-eternally the same.
My belief system at least is coherent and dove tails with Catholic doctrine.
Click to expand...
I’m a little confused - I’m not sure if you misunderstood my post or if I’m misunderstanding yours. :hmmm:

I (and Catholicism) do not believe that God the Father became God the Son. Also, it’s not completely clear to me what you mean by “eternally the same.” It sounds to me like you’ve interpreted my statement to mean that I believe God the Father is eternally God the Son (and vica versa). Correct me if I am misunderstanding you. In any case, that’s not what I was claiming - what I said was that God the Father and God the Son eternally exist as distinct persons within the Trinity. In other words, from eternity the Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Father, neither of them are the Holy Spirit.
 
wittgenstein said:
“In the famous game of chicken, two drivers hurtle their cars toward each other, and the one who turns away at the last minute loses. Or they collide, and both lose even bigger, or they both swerve and have reciprocal embarrassment. Before you play this game, you might make a matrix of your actions (stay the course vs. swerve) against the opponent’s actions (same two choices), and see what happens with the four different possible outcomes. But then imagine that your opponent is omniscient. He knows just what you are going to do. Surprisingly, this restricts the results of the game in unexpected ways so that you cannot lose. If your opponent is omniscient, all you have to do is to stay the course. He will know that you are not going to swerve, and (assuming that he does not want a collision), he will have to be the one to do the swerving himself. You win whenever you play chicken with an omniscient being!”
FROM
amazon.com/Paradox-God-Science-Omniscience/dp/1403964572
The above shows that in some cases having less then perfect knowledge is superior to being all-knowing. By definition God is all powerful. Therefore, he must include the power of finite ( less then omniscient) understanding. Perhaps, that is why he became a man?
Please don’t answer, “Well God being all powerful could simply change the rules” or “God is immortal so would not care if he crashed.” Those objections are en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring s because my point is that God would always lose the game of chicken because one of the rules of the game is that a crash is the worst possible outcome. To say that God does not have to follow the rules is similar to saying that God would always beat me at chess because he could always zap me with a thunderbolt. The fact is that that would not really be winning the game of chess.
God being infinite continually surprises us finite minds!
youtube.com/watch?v=BRn_GNcglKo *
Imagine a number line. Let “1,000,000,000,000” ( or even infinity, see above video) represent our most sophisticated concept of God. Let “2” represent an incredibly primitive concept of God, for example a giant hominid with a huge white beard and wearing a toga. 2 is just as close to infinity as 1,000,000,000,000! In other words our intellects get us no closer to God!
*
biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+14%3A2&version=KJV
Mansions are bigger that houses. A reference to the weird math of infinity?
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Paradoxes DO NOT EXIST!
It is only in our minds…😦
 
Response to post 55
God the son is not omniscient.
Matthew 24: 36
 
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