The epistle to the Galatians
is perhaps the most remarkable of Paul’s existing letters that have made it
down to us through time inasmuch as the Apostle seems at times wroth with the
Galatians or Gauls of a Roman district that may or may not have been Celts. If
these church goers were actual Gauls it mike be a good idea to change the word Galaxy
to something else, such as Nuraghe in order that we do not seem to
encourage a bad end along with the Universe in some sort of Apocalypse.3:1-”
O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye should
not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set
forth, crucified among you?” That
may well have been the Gnostic mistake. It does happen that what is wisdom for
man is foolishness to God.
Philo of Alexandria
presented most of the Gnostic metaphysical paradigm before the crucifixion of
the Lord in 30 A.D. The Apostle John may well have encountered those ideas in
followers in Ephesus. It is possible that the Gnostic heretical field of
scholarship wasn’t terribly well received in Jerusalem either. Thus exporting the pursuit of the Gnostic
topic to Antioch, Ephesus
and elsewhere that religion had a lively public interest and was received with
a modicum of tolerance might have been a logical course. Gnosticism in the
first century may have camouflaged itself within the garb of traditional
Judaism better even than Christianity for a time socially speaking.
Gnostics were people thought
of as regarding themselves as having deeper metaphysical knowledge of reality
than ordinary people. Some claimed that Jesus was actually a Gnostic traveler-a
sort of astral projector perhaps to other planes of existence around this
Universe. It is still a tempting yet silly doctrine popular on late-night radio
shows and perhaps with dope smokers of the U.S.A. along with Bigfoot and extra-terrestrials
manipulating the Obama administration’s homosexual policies.
Christian disputes with
Gnostics occurred because Gnostics tended usurp Christian doctrine and
insinuate their own. They might believe in dualism such that the material world
is evil and was made by an evil demi-urge. While some might regard original sin
in a fallen Universe of thermodynamics instead of eternal spiritual perfection
as another way of saying that, the practical consequence of false belief are
substantial.
Gnostics tended to deny
Jehovah as the true God and the sacrifice of Jesus Christ to overcome sin for
those of faith. The emanationist (simplified for Christian practical purposes
to’ let their be light’) theories of Gnostics are though coincident with some
aspects of logical insight into the nature of the material Universe such as the
big bang, inflaton or even a cyclical Universe expanding and flowing through a
thermodynamic process.
Paradoxically those that
believe the Universe had no real beginning-just proximal ones such as time=0
located at a temporal hourglass very small singularity before an oppositely
sequenced pre-Universe shrinking down in scale, share the idea with Christians
that all things that exist are ultimately based in the eternal with temporality
being expression of phases within eternity. At this point physical cosmology research
hasn’t evolved terribly deeply into physical reality and temporality of a
hypothetical multiverse within an eternal context replete with conservation of
energy and ordination by God.
Paul as a student of
Gamaliel might have been somewhat learned himself in Jewish mysticism. The contemporary
of Jesus Christ, Philo of Alexandria, was marginally mainstream and perhaps not
unknown to Jewish theology training centers. By the time of the third century Plotinus-a
famous student of Ammonius Saccus developed a beautiful, logically satisfying,
mystic, theologically simplified cosmology that is similar in many respect to
contemporary cosmological paradigms including origin from a singularity or One
(En Sof-the ineffable infinite) with universal and broken form theories
acceptable to Plato and quantum mechanics.
It is a bit of a paradox
that the mysterious, spiritual Kabbalah shares with Mohammadanism the term for
spirit –Ka that the Egyptians used as
well as ba or shelter. Hence one gets
the spirit house or Ka-ba such as at Mecca and the Kabballah going even further in honor of a
transcending spirit. The spirit house of Mecca existed long before Mohammad’s syncretistic
enterprise.
The danger of simply
becoming intellectually lost as an individual self-standing within the created
material world is a danger that Lucifer succumbed to. Since everything exists
and one may reason within the given steady-state field or any existing
alternate spiritual field, there is a temptation for the ego to alienate itself
from the transcendent God and the opportunity to renormalize from sin in the
contingent field of being and try to exist forever as a contingent being or
even a nearly omnipotent contingent being without God imbued with a false
consciousness denying His existence. That effort is in disregard to the actual
facts of being-that God is all-in-all and the Son is the sole way to
renormalize the estranged-by-sin relationship.
A generic emantionist
paradigm for cosmological origin of quanta of any type from a state of being ‘void
and without form’ requires some emanation of virtual quanta or
proto-particles/strings/membranes etc from an existing field containing or
heteronymous with the void. Math isn’t theoretically of much help in describing
the non-dimensional infinite, indivisible field that emanates with quantum
uncertainty perhaps on occasion into a void.
Mathematics represents
some form of coordinate system-even a theoretical one with scalable dimensions.
Without coordinates or quanta it would be challenging to use math references for
describing one infinite field with no extension and all possible dimensions
unactualized prior to emanation from super-positions decohered into forms in a virgin
formless void. Theological contemplation might be easier, although it’s better
and simpler to recognize Jesus Christ as the only way to understand God containing/promulgating
the one field engendering any potential or actual Universe.
Ultimately Plotinus’
paradigm is mostly a horse-shoe toss description of the theosophical state of
the cosmos without either modern technical terms. Plotinus did not provide
Christian information about how to be saved from the fallen realm of materially
imperfect forms and original sin that is implicit in the temporal world. Living
a couple centuries after the Lord he may have felt that wasn’t his role. The
age was philosophically confused enough and just the canonized Bible such as
the Muratorian fragment provided was a plain and accurate guide to eternity.
No comments:
Post a Comment