Saturday, July 4, 2009

He has spoken through the prophets

Here are some profound ideas from The Faith of a Physicist by John Polkinghorne.

Spirit as inspirer of scripture - once again we find an entanglement of the Spirit with creation which will not be susceptible to precise unraveling. Scripture arises from inspiration, not dictation; it mixes continuing truth about the divine with the culturally limited expression and understanding of its authors...and reinforcing this notion - the creative insight of Paul and John and the writer of Hebrews, three original thinkers, that have not been surpassed in the subsequent history of theological thought...

Bible - is not a kind of divinely guaranteed textbook in which we can without any trouble, look up all the answers...it is rooted in its own age but possessing through its underlying universality the power to speak across the centuries to other ages...it is stories told in such a way as to make its inner meaning accessible, revealing what was happening on the inside of what was going on in the events of Israel's experiences with God, and the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ

Powerful - the Bible has the power to speak freshly to each generation of its readers, revealing further truth, which becomes available, not by a process of alien imposition, but by continuing elucidation of the profundity of the text....

Believer's - in the Holy Spirit do not find it difficult both to acknowledge his work in the development of doctrine and to expect that development to exhibit a continuous relationship with its biblical origins....we don't take an a la carte approach, relying on carefully selected favorite passages, but recognize that all parts of the Bible are not of equal spiritual stature (Epistle of Jude / John's gospel), yet we can use each part of the scripture in a way which proves possible and appropriate for it....only then does the untidiness yet hopefulness of life find its match in the untidiness yet hopefulness of scripture.

Theologians distinguish - between divine essence (God-in-himself) form divine energy or economy (God as he is known in interaction with his creatures)...and we try to understand the economy of the Trinity in seeing God encountered as Father (the transcendent Creator), as Son (made visible in the incarnate life of Jesus Christ) and as Spirit (discreetly at work within the process of our lives and of the cosmos), while holding fast to the fundamental intuition derived from our heritage in Israel, that there is but one true God.

Trinitarian discourse - has it origin in the Church's struggle to come to terms with its threefold experience of divine encounter...the Pauline necessity to speak of God the Father and of the Lord Jesus Christ and of the Spirit of God and the Spirit of Christ (Rom. 1.7;8.9) proved persistent..it was the driving force of Trinitarian thinking...the proclamation of the One in Three and Three in One is not a piece of mystical arithmetic, but a summary of experience

Three-Person God - carries some hint of the richness of the transpersonal in a way whose precise articulation is beyond our limited powers of comprehension.

Eastern Church - has often been willing to take seriously a more "social" picture of the community of the divine Persons within the Trinity that has been accommodated in much of Western thought - which tended to minimize Trinitarian insights...a social Trinity delivers us from a static and narcissistic interpretation of the great text "God is love" (1 John 4.16) and permits a more dynamic account of the divine agape, and so of the divine nature...

Being-as-communion - has a degree of congenial consonance with modern sciences' way of speaking about the physical world...with the advent of both relativity and quantum theory that has replaced the Newtonian picture of isolated particles of matter moving along their separate trajectories in the "container" of absolute space, with something much more interrelational in character, both in its description and behavior.

Quantum system - both space-and-matter and observer-and observed display a quality of mutuality...parts of a quantum system that retain non-local "togetherness-in-separation", however far apart they may become

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