melanie@cornell.UUCP (08/21/85)
From: melanie (Melanie Grace Nesheim) Greetings, Charles Hedrick (hedrick@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU) wrote in article 1111: > This is a response to a couple of issues that Frank Silbermann > raised a few days ago. . . . > You say that many of the ideas that I mention are also present in the > OT prophets. Of course. I don't claim that Christians say things > that contradict the OT. However in the OT there is a sense in which > God is a mathematical point. We know what he wants us to do because > he sent a prophet to say "Thus says the Lord". We know he loves us > because he revealed that fact to us. But in Christ we believe we see > God. So we are no longer dependent upon messages about him. However > that doesn't mean that what we see is different from what had been > revealed before. This description rings true to me exactly for the reasons Charles describes above. It's a neat way to put it. (I enjoyed the rest of the article, too--thanks, Charles!) Another way to describe why God is no longer like a mathematical point to us is that Christ is God up close and personal, on a scale small enough that we can grasp it. In other words, He showed us how to apply somewhat nebulous phrases like "Love your neighbor" and "Love God" and "pray" by actually doing it, amongst us human beings, where we could see it happen on our scale. It's awfully hard for us to grasp things on God's scale, from His perspective, which isn't even bounded by *time* (that's the hardest thing to imagine). That's why He had the quality of a mathematical point, where much of Him was unknowable, before Christ came to earth; also He had that quality for me before I knew Him through Christ. C.S. Lewis goes into this in his book "Miracles", which is really neat. Enjoy life, --Melanie Nesheim