The Archeology of the Kingdom of God: Diving a Bit Deeper into a Baha'i Approach to Metaphysics

Ahanu said:
Based on the understanding of pneuma prevalent in the Hellenistic world during Paul's time ...
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Paul was well-schooled. Then, on the way to Damascus, something happened.

Careful reading of Galatians (as other than Acts) suggests Paul underwent some kind of epiphanic event, and withdrew to Arabia for perhaps as many as 14 years, before completing his training in the Gospel and beginning his missionary journey.

So everything Paul says, the language and lexicon he uses, has to be seen against the background of that event.

What Paul did not bother with was a forensic investigation into the nature of pneuma. The Septuagint uses that term in translating the Hebrew texts, and Paul's education was Jewish, albeit in an Hellenic setting. He would have read Stoicism in terms of the Prophets and Scripture generally; pneuma in terms of nepesh, ruah and neshamah, for example.

This entry on the Stoic Philosophy of Mind offers a lot on pneuma, and how slippery that term is.
 
Ahanu said:
Well, it is bound by Greco-Roman thought that features heavenly beings - star beings - literally descending through celestial spheres, as we see in Paul.
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Oh, sure ... Paul believed in archons, as do I. As did John.

Pneuma ascends and descends, it swirls from inner to outer ... it's amazing stuff ... so pneuma at the level of star organises itself thus, and at the level of planet organises itself thus ... the rings of the heavens were concentric, each related to the other in a hierarchy.
 
Ahanu said:
This argues the nature of Christ's resurrection was distinct and unique, something completely different from the nature of Greek resurrections.
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OK I accept the criticism.

But in other aspect, just to be clear, it is unique.
 
wil said:
Long thread, but can I get a handle on the OP here, I looked at the definition...from Miriam Webster and oxford....

And neither mention G!d.

That would be a metaphysical theology eh? Not philosophy?
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If you would elaborate on your questions and what you're talking about in more detail, it would really help me understand what you mean. At first, I thought you were saying metaphysics and philosophy were separate disciplines that never intersect.

wil said:
I thought theology provided answers to the physical world...not the other way round.
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Please elaborate.
 
Thomas said:
Oh, sure ... Paul believed in archons, as do I. As did John.

Pneuma ascends and descends, it swirls from inner to outer ... it's amazing stuff ... so pneuma at the level of star organises itself thus, and at the level of planet organises itself thus ... the rings of the heavens were concentric, each related to the other in a hierarchy.
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Bahá’u’lláh states in the Kitáb-i-Íqán: "To every discerning and illumined heart it is evident that God, the unknowable Essence, the divine Being, is immensely exalted beyond every human attribute, such as corporeal existence, ascent and descent, egress and regress."

This statement explicitly states that attributes like "ascent and descent," which are central to the ancient understanding of pneuma and its movement within the cosmos in the ancient Greco-Roman world, cannot be applied to the divine Essence. God is utterly transcendent, beyond all such physical descriptions.

This brings us to the profound statement of the Báb (which ties in with the concept of universes of discourse mentioned earlier in post #520): "And he hath not shed upon anything the splendour of His revelation, except through the inmost capacity of the thing itself." This means that the ancient Greco-Roman world, with its limited scientific and philosophical understanding, could only conceive of pneuma within the framework of their existing cosmology. This was the limit of their "inmost capacity" to understand such concepts.

The Baha'i Faith, through the revelation of Bahá’u’lláh, transcends and cancels this limited understanding. The concept of God being "exalted beyond every human attribute, such as… ascent and descent," as stated in the Kitáb-i-Íqán, provides a higher level of discourse. It reveals that these physical descriptions, while useful for understanding the historical context of figures like Paul, are ultimately inadequate for grasping the true nature of spiritual reality and the relationship between God and creation.
 
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Ahanu said:
The Baha'i Faith, through the revelation of Bahá’u’lláh, transcends and cancels this limited understanding. The concept of God being "exalted beyond every human attribute, such as… ascent and descent," as stated in the Kitáb-i-Íqán, provides a higher level of discourse. It reveals that these physical descriptions, while useful for understanding the historical context of figures like Paul, are ultimately inadequate for grasping the true nature of spiritual reality and the relationship between God and creation.
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The ancients experienced spiritual realities, but their capacity to express those experiences was limited by the available language and concepts, leading to the use of physical descriptions like pneuma as a subtle, mobile substance. As Erik Hoel puts it, this means "our experience (phenomenal consciousness, what it is like to be us) outstrips in complexity our ability to express it (the parts of our consciousness we can express)." This gap is further shown by Dr. Davudi's statement: "Note that even in divine revelation, the use of spirit is associated with the concept of 'breathing into' the physical frame. This indicates that from the outset the explanation of a spiritual phenomenon appearing in a physical body had to be expressed in sensible and material terms comprehensible and imaginable by the believers..." Consequently, maintaining these old intrinsic perspectives that were understandable in their historical context necessitates a new, more encompassing framework to resolve the resulting conflict and contention in the modern world, such as the one we see between Muslims and Christians over the nature of Christ.
 
Thomas said:
Paul was well-schooled. Then, on the way to Damascus, something happened.

Careful reading of Galatians (as other than Acts) suggests Paul underwent some kind of epiphanic event, and withdrew to Arabia for perhaps as many as 14 years, before completing his training in the Gospel and beginning his missionary journey.

So everything Paul says, the language and lexicon he uses, has to be seen against the background of that event.

What Paul did not bother with was a forensic investigation into the nature of pneuma. The Septuagint uses that term in translating the Hebrew texts, and Paul's education was Jewish, albeit in an Hellenic setting. He would have read Stoicism in terms of the Prophets and Scripture generally; pneuma in terms of nepesh, ruah and neshamah, for example.

This entry on the Stoic Philosophy of Mind offers a lot on pneuma, and how slippery that term is.
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I have already addressed this idea that Paul's understanding of pneuma was solely derived from scripture, and I disagree. His understanding was influenced by both.

The interview with Matthew Thessien I posted earlier directly addresses the question of Stoic influence on Paul's concept of pneuma. He acknowledges that Stoic philosophy is widely used to support the idea of pneuma as a "light material substance," citing Engberg-Pedersen, Matt Novenson, and others. When asked if there were Second Temple Jewish sources supporting this material understanding, Thessien makes a crucial point: "Although Paul is Jewish this does not mean that he was uninfluenced by the philosophical and scientific currents of his day."

Thessien explains that while Paul wasn't a Stoic philosopher, we must consider how his gentile audience would have understood his use of pneuma. Paul's own background makes this influence even more likely. As Thessien points out, "Paul came from the city of Tarsus, a known hotbed of Stoic philosophy." The concept of pneuma as a subtle, material substance was "the conceptual air that most people in the Greco-Roman world breathed," as Thessien puts it. It is hard to believe that someone like Paul would not have known how the term pneuma was being used more broadly in his day.
 
Thomas said:
"No one can serve two masters" Tony (Matthew 6:24).

If one worships God "in spirit and in truth" (John 4:24) then one worships God, who transcends all names.
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You are just saying what I am also offering.

If you conceptualise what you offered me, then you would also agree God transcends the Name of the Christ, Jesus.

Yet we know God because of Station of the "Christ"

Regards Tony
 
Thomas said:
In so saying, as a Perrenialist, is that the Perrenial Tradition offers the idea that the One is like a many-faceted jewel, and that the source and origin of each religion is a face or facet of that one jewel, and that because of that, those who worship 'in spirit and truth', that is who look beyond the world of phenomena and form, toward the transcendent principles, will see the likeness in every other facet, and if time allows, delight in comparing notes.
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The idea of the many faceted jewel is an idea I had when I was a kid. I wonder if I read or heard it somewhere? I think I might have even put that on my Headcanon thread... I thought of the throne of God as like a multifaceted gemstone he was within, like a shuttlecraft, and each religion could only seem him through one window, one of the angled facets of the gemstone.

If something like that is a Perrenialist idea, then I think it must have been in a book or on TV or a tape or something and I ran across it.
 
Ahanu said:
Bahá’u’lláh states in the Kitáb-i-Íqán: "To every discerning and illumined heart it is evident that God, the unknowable Essence, the divine Being, is immensely exalted beyond every human attribute, such as corporeal existence, ascent and descent, egress and regress."
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No-one says otherwise. Such terms are used figuratively.

The Divine is immensely exalted beyond every attribute, being One, Simple and Undifferentiate, yet clearly the Divine can and does work in and through the human according to the Divine Will (cf eg 1 John 4:7).

In ascribing qualities to the Divine, the understanding is that for us these terms are relative and contingent, whereas in the Divine they are Absolute and Infinite (cf eg Mark 10:18). Thus we have the Ninety Nine Names in Islam – the All-Knowing, the All-Hearing, the All-Seeing, the All-Speaking, and so on, yet Islam understands God does not 'know', 'hear' 'see' or 'speak' in the corporeal sense.

The Unknowable Essence of God is immensely exalted beyond 'being' as such, which is itself an attribute.

If "unknowable" and "immensely exalted above every human attribute" then surely there is no possibility of any kind of communication between Creator and creature, between the Divine and human?

No covenant with Israel, no prophecy, no scripture...

Ahanu said:
This brings us to the profound statement of the Báb (which ties in with the concept of universes of discourse mentioned earlier in post #520): "And he hath not shed upon anything the splendour of His revelation, except through the inmost capacity of the thing itself." This means that the ancient Greco-Roman world, with its limited scientific and philosophical understanding, could only conceive of pneuma within the framework of their existing cosmology. This was the limit of their "inmost capacity" to understand such concepts.
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But Scripture is not about science or philosophy – that's for the likes of us to quibble over – and the Gospel (Gk: evangelion, 'Good News') was about the love of God and His will for His creature to be saved, which the faithful understood sufficiently enough to aspire to it, as they do today, without a necessary recourse to science or philosophy.

Ahanu said:
It reveals that these physical descriptions, while useful for understanding the historical context of figures like Paul, are ultimately inadequate for grasping the true nature of spiritual reality and the relationship between God and creation.
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Oh, I think you're quite wrong there. The Bible as a whole has been acclaimed by spiritual masters in all the great traditions.

Kataphatic (affirmative) language has its place in all the world's Spiritual Traditions, as does the apophatic (negative).
 
Ahanu said:
The ancients experienced spiritual realities, but their capacity to express those experiences was limited by the available language and concepts, leading to the use of physical descriptions like pneuma as a subtle, mobile substance. As Erik Hoel puts it, this means "our experience (phenomenal consciousness, what it is like to be us) outstrips in complexity our ability to express it (the parts of our consciousness we can express)." This gap is further shown by Dr. Davudi's statement: "Note that even in divine revelation, the use of spirit is associated with the concept of 'breathing into' the physical frame.
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Then the burden of proof is upon you to evidence this.

It's not enough to say the language or lexicon is inadequate. Where is the better language, where are the better terms?

It seems to me that the Baha'i simply denies that which is being affirmed in Scripture, that the love of God is Infinite and knows no bounds, and again, while there is a constant repetition of the Transcendence of the Divine, the Immanence of the same is, it seems to me, severely constrained under insufficient, flawed or inadequate arguments.

Ahanu said:
This indicates that from the outset the explanation of a spiritual phenomenon appearing in a physical body had to be expressed in sensible and material terms comprehensible and imaginable by the believers..."
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But that does not invalidate the language or render it inadequate. What is comprehensible and imaginable to the believers clearly far transcends sensible and material terms in which it is couched.

If the understanding was so limited, we have to question why Marcion of Sinope (c. 85- 160AD) was refuted and excommunicated – his more literal interpretation of texts would have surely reached a wider audience and been more favourably received? Likewise his belief that Jesus only seemed to possess a physical body, and denied His birth, death and resurrection, another error, Docetism, that was rapidly rejected.

The onus of this argument is to demonstrate a better language – not simply to say 'this is inadequate' but show a language adequate to the task and evidence the distinction.
 
Ahanu said:
The interview with Matthew Thessien I posted earlier directly addresses the question of Stoic influence on Paul's concept of pneuma. He acknowledges that Stoic philosophy is widely used to support the idea of pneuma as a "light material substance"
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But that's not sufficient in itself, or rather it allows for errors of assumption –

"Pneuma passes through all (other) bodies; in its outward motion it gives them the qualities that they have, and in its inward motion makes them unified objects (Nemesius, 47J; cf. Helle 2021). Pneuma comes in gradations and endows the bodies which it pervades with different qualities as a result." (Standford)

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In addition to being the substance of the particular souls of living organisms, pneuma was also held to be the organising principle of the cosmos, that is, the world-soul. The Stoics identified this world-soul with God (or Zeus). One source described God as an intelligent, artistic fire that systematically creates the cosmos as it expands; in the same passage God is called a pneuma that pervades the whole cosmos as the human soul pervades the mortal body. In contrast to contemporary physics and cosmology, the Stoics saw the world as a living organism. (Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy here and below)
I can agree with that in principle, if not the empirical detail. In other words, creation is a theophany. We do not see a distinction between the Logos of God and a world-soul.

The pneuma permeating the body was held to be a portion of the divine pneuma permeating and directing the cosmos. The human soul is a portion of God within us, both animating us and endowing us with reason and intelligence.
Again, in later terms this is the idea of the human soul is created by the Divine Logos, and is imprinted with the logoi (image and likeness, Genesis 1:27). This is not to say the human soul is intrinsically divine, but carries the potentiality of its divinity by the will and grace of God.

The Stoics argued that the soul is a bodily (corporeal) substance.
OK. We would say the soul is a spiritual body/substance, the blueprint of its corporeal body/substance – substance in the sense the soul is something and not nothing.

Although the soul is a body, it is best to avoid calling Stoic psychology materialist.
Which is, perhaps, where misunderstanding arises.

The Stoics contrasted soul and matter. Matter is but one of two principles underlying every bodily substance. These two principles are the active [to poioun] and the passive [to paschon]. Matter is identified with the passive principle. Its complement, the active principle, is reason [logos] or God and is held to extend through matter providing it with motion, form, and structure. Both principles are bodily or corporeal principles (that is, they occupy space and are causally efficient) but neither exists in isolation. Substances can be dominated by either principle; the more active the substance, the more rational and divine it is; the more passive, the more material.
Which emphasises the need to observe the pneuma / matter distinction
 
Tony Bristow-Stagg said:
You are just saying what I am also offering.
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Actually, I don't think I am.

Tony Bristow-Stagg said:
If you conceptualise what you offered me, then you would also agree God transcends the Name of the Christ, Jesus.
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For me to agree that would mean God transcending Himself.

Tony Bristow-Stagg said:
Yet we know God because of Station of the "Christ"
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Well 'station' in that context would suggest a rank or position?

The same Latin term is used to translate two Greek terms that sound similar, but carry different meanings:
Chrēstos – meaning "good," "righteous" or "useful", which we can discount, and
Christos – meaning "anointed" or "chosen to rule."

The Greek Christos is a transliteration of the Hebrew Mashiach (מָשִׁיחַ) means 'anointed' or 'one who is chosen to rule' – however, as in Jewish custom priests, kings and prophets were anointed (although the form varied), the Tabernacle and its utensils were anointed, altar stones were anointed ... its meaning depends on context.

Generally I'd say Christos in the New Testament sense took on a very particular meaning specific to the person of Jesus, in the same way that The Prophet is specific to the person of Muhammed (pbuh).
 
This started off as a discussion of a work by Jean-Marc Lepain.

It’s now become a sustained critique of Christian scripture and exegesis. As I get the sense we’re walking round in circles, I suggest we end the discussion here, or continue it elsewhere?
 
Thomas said:
For me to agree that would mean God transcending Himself.
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Thomas said:
A Divine Name ... big difference
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To me, this is the fundamental purpose of God's Messiah, "Christ", is to show us how the Messengers transcendent all names and in our reality they are all of what we do know of and about "God", (but in the human station they are not God). I have no issue with you seeing Jesus Christ as God, I would only observe that this view will never be able to reconcile with the knowledge that many Messengers have been given by the One God, and all can be seen in that light, if we so choose.

Divine names are many, even in the Bible, and Jesus made it known to us how in embracing "Christ", there is only One Name, that is "God".

Many Bible verses are available to support both perspectives, as you well know.

Baha'u'llah explains how they can be seen as God in the divine station, but in the human station they are a man like us, so I will finish with a quote from Baha'u'llah, you can too if you wish, as arguments will get us no where and we would both be wrong.

".... Were any of the all-embracing Manifestations of God to declare: “I am God,” He, verily, speaketh the truth, and no doubt attacheth thereto. For it hath been repeatedly demonstrated that through their Revelation, their attributes and names, the Revelation of God, His names and His attributes, are made manifest in the world. Thus, He hath revealed: “Those shafts were God’s, not Thine.” And also He saith: “In truth, they who plighted fealty unto Thee, really plighted that fealty unto God.” And were any of them to voice the utterance, “I am the Messenger of God,” He, also, speaketh the truth, the indubitable truth. Even as He saith: “Muḥammad is not the father of any man among you, but He is the Messenger of God.” Viewed in this light, they are all but Messengers of that ideal King, that unchangeable Essence. And were they all to proclaim, “I am the Seal of the Prophets,” they, verily, utter but the truth, beyond the faintest shadow of doubt. For they are all but one person, one soul, one spirit, one being, one revelation. They are all the manifestation of the “Beginning” and the “End,” the “First” and the “Last,” the “Seen” and the “Hidden”—all of which pertain to Him Who is the Innermost Spirit of Spirits and Eternal Essence of Essences. And were they to say, “We are the Servants of God,” this also is a manifest and indisputable fact. For they have been made manifest in the uttermost state of servitude, a servitude the like of which no man can possibly attain. Thus in moments in which these Essences of Being were deep immersed beneath the oceans of ancient and everlasting holiness, or when they soared to the loftiest summits of Divine mysteries, they claimed their utterances to be the Voice of Divinity, the Call of God Himself...."

Regards Tony
 
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