kairos
eggus
– (the time is at hand)
What
if someone asked you to
“write 60 pages explaining and defending your eschatological view.
I
thought about that, as might anyone before making a reply.
I should say that I am not sure that I have an eschatological view.
At least my eschatological view of what the end is does not
necessarily coincide with a common definition of the end times of
human life on or above (or below) Earth within a philosophical
paradigm of naïve realism.
I
actually tend to think that I will be out of here before the world
comes to an end. The end times of the world thus would be for some
other people-lucky ducks.
My own end time probably
will
precede theirs and occur
without the fanfare, prestige and pomp that would be common in a
pre-mill tribulation paradigm with a glorious
fearless leader who is an extraordinary anti-Christ incessantly being
an obnoxious twit-for-others.
I
believe the post-mill eschatology has about a 70% chance of being
correct with pre-mill and amill rather splitting the 30% balance. One
must rely to a certain extent upon one's own judgment in these
matters of reading what data is available and so I stipulate a
minuscule yet existing possibility of error myself...it is after all
about faith and trust in Jesus.
Later
I will write a little about why I think that the pre-mill paradigm is
somewhat of a natural interpretation of the Revelation that is
incorrect. While incorrect the pre-mill paradigm is paralleled in
several other traditions from Buddhism and Taoism to Islam and
Zoroastrianism. It seems as if many cultures have awaited for the
return the god-king to overthrow a wicked ruling class and
restabilize the chaos rollicking like a tsunami under heaven (and
sometimes in heaven too).
The
Acts 7:49
49Heaven
is my throne, and earth is my footstool: what house will ye build me?
saith the Lord: or what is the place of my rest?”
Is
this metaphorical language or an analogy given so that people may
have a notion of God’s power and dimensionality, that he is
transcendent and visits the Universe as the absolute spirit that
could visit a room or use the Universe as a king might use a chair,
or as a throne if he especially regarded it as meaningful?
This
passage gives the idea that God does rule the Universe or Cosmos, and
that it his order that comprises the physical laws of the Universe
perhaps. Kosmos in ancient Greek meant order, and it was given to
mean the order of the stars in the night sky and of the Universe by a
Greek philosopher. The physical laws of the Universe and all else are
subject to the judgments and will of their ‘ruler’ and Creator.
The Earth is God’s’ footstool’, or place that he rests his
feet, perhaps not the center, most important and highest place of the
Cosmos as some post-Copernicans have attempted too often to use as a
straw man argument against creation by intelligent design. That is,
Earth cannot be ‘nowhere’ as in some utopian and ethereal scheme
of infinity in all directions, but must instead be at the center of
what cannot have a center except in the context of being in a right
relationship with the will of God.
This
universe/throne may be one of many mansions that God has created. In
the language of Arthur C. Clarke; God may have something very
wonderful in mind for the future of the saved.
The
Acts 7:50 “Hath not my
hand made all things?”
John
3:5-6
“ 5Jesus
answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of
water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.
6That
which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the
Spirit is spirit.”
The
creation is of matter, mass/energy and is a phenomenality arrayed in
a marvelous time tensor of actualization through various phases. Yet
it is a creation of God and might be considered to be the
practico-inert to borrow a phrase from Jean-Paul Sartre.
Humanity
must overcome the self-concept of just being of mass-energy to
realize the intangibles that are valuable to the Absolute Spirit that
has created the material Universe and left it standing or existing in
a configuration of a very subtle array of spin and
string/waveform/particle appearances as the phenomenal Universe
evident to human senses. Humanity has eyesight able to convert the
light of photons at wavelengths of approximately half of one
millionth of a millimeter (half a micron) into ‘visions’ that
represent configurations of existential mass/energy. (ref.) page 110
‘Five Ages of the Universe’ .
It
is possible that an infinite spatial universe volume is something
like a container in which the will of God may actualize appearances.
It may have a consistent monistic appearance for one eon, and an
infinite number of bubble universes in it the next.
It
is not logically necessary that God be subject to the physical laws
of the contingent created universes nor of a non-contingent field
generating the content of universes. One may actually find a
theological speculation I suppose about sentience, locality and the
Universe that allows the creation of whatever it is that God wants to
exist without use of implicit or evident finite spatio-temporal
connectors to the Creator. The transfinite infinities of Cantor as
examples can lead the way to infinities qualitatively transcended by
other than spatio-temporal processes. If a new DVD is dropped in to
the universe's infinity is that a bad thing?
Jesus
Christ said that “the kingdom of God is within you”. God is
eternal and the temporal is temporal hence one wonders in what sense
'the end' has meaning or meanings. Maybe a human characteristic is
impatience. Assuredly the biological clock is ticking for human
beings as mortality appears from the horizon as a grim reaper or high
plains host of death with the shining scimitar of time.
To
many the end of days for-themselves seems unfair when the opulent
world continues as if the decay and death of the individual was
nothing noteworthy-nothing more than a fall leaf drifting to Earth.
The temporal world however is an event process with the end of
anything inherent in the substance. Only spirit transcends the
temporal structure. World lines of space-time evolving like a
multi-dimensional spiral have an implicit end of energy shaping the
destiny of the final form. At each moment spirit transcends space and
time containing the Universe's quanta of energy as if it were a line
segment created to run from point alpha to point omega. The Lord
contains a Universe clump as if it was just a single atom. It is
spirit that matters and transcends mass that is locked-in-form
energy.
Though
human life is temporal the spirit is eternal. God transcends the
Universe and world that is contingent to his will. Even so the
objective social experience of history does seem to have a
pre-determined course to a certain extent. The saving grace of God
brought the sacrifice of the Son to renormalize the lost to a right
relationship with God. There does seem to be a course for humanity
and human development that will eventuate in the majority of humanity
being saved as Christians (ref. 'He Shall Have Dominion'). In short,
when humanity has gone as far as it can without more direct help from
God, the Lord will return to conclude human history in the temporal
world and create a new heaven and Earth without the problems of
space-time associated with phenomena of the 2nd
Law of Thermodynamics. Sin and death with Satan will be cast out and
the elect will have new and improved bodies of an eternal form. That
can only occur with the pure spirit of God in charge.
I
tend to be a skeptic regarding micro-prophetic interpretations of the
future course of history. Gentry described the Revelation in 'The
Beast of the Revelation' as events that preponderantly occurred in
the 6th
and 7th
decades A.D. I believe that is regarded as partial preterism.
Chialistic interpetations of the Revelation that are pre-mill and
even dispensational may entail a human wish to predict history as of
they were the national weather service. The Magi of Cyrus
were astrologers who also foretold events based upon the stars. Roman
Emperors sacrificed animals on the plain of Mars before war. I
believe that Octavian-Augustus sacrificed 80,000 animals if I
remember reading Livy, Suetonius and Plutarch accurately. They would
take out the entrails and examine them for signs and portents of the
future. Individuals would question the Delphic oracle that would
reply with somewhat enigmatic answers.
Today
Americans seek to learn of their own future health through scientific
D.N.A. analysis. At the other end of the spectrum
there are those whom regard all things as uncertain because of
quantum uncertainty developed theoretically by Werner Heisenberg.
There may be an element of certainty and uncertainty if everything
materially existing. Some physicists say that the entire physical
cosmos could run in a reversed time direction theoretically; its just
that the odds of the atomic quanta doing so are slim-it would require
atomic behavior in concert, without a community organizer-to act
against the 2nd
law of thermodynamics concurrently and in a measured, concise way
that would make even the anthropic principle and fine structure
constant appear comparatively like random flukes of chance.
A
part of the human interest in end-times schedules is entirely
rational. Originally perhaps it coincided with efforts to understand
the physical world. Obviously though the human need to understand
politics and the program of the tyrant ruling the nation involved
specialized insider understanding and rumors too. Who could
accurately have predicted the behavior of the Emperor Nero? I think
the practice of inquiring into the end times of the world not only
arises as a cause of an acute lack of accurate scientific data, it
arises as well because of interest in the will of sentient beings or
Being ruling the cosmos.
Jesus
of course seemed to stress the kingdom
of God is within you view
of the world. Certainly for God the material world is a contingent
creation quite secondary to His Spirit. Humanity sees through a glass
darkly. At best political leaders are like Catherine the Great
viewing a Potemkin village, yet if the got out of their insider
alternative universe to take a look at what really is behind the
facade they would find very little to know. Physics of the natural
Universe regards a one-way mirror through which nothing of the other
side can be known. Quanta, fields, packets of energy accompanied by a
hypothetical appearance of virtual particles entangling to gather and
coalesce into an entangled state of being that comprises mass for a
Universe-a core of guts of a Universe that grows-like those guts the
pagan Emperor Augustus examined on the plain of Mars with his expert
priests giving analysis-are what science can provide as information
to the politician. Spirit perceives it all and provides a little
structural content to keep it reasonably remote from the dire
possibilities humanity can create for-itself having learned from
eating of the tree of knowledge.
So
if the general ability to reduce human social existence to a
deterministic course that may be read and understood by the
cognoscenti at least is a classical human desire for some, it is not
at all certain for me that the Lord wanted to stress such a way of
looking at the world. Instead it seems as if getting people to live
in as ethical and Christian way as possible was His purpose-and the
salvation of the elect that would even comprise a majority some day
is as reasonable of a means to that end as any of the better-case
scenarios for helping humanity grow up.
With
so much suffering in human history by so many billions of souls I
would not willing tie any sort of social catastrophe to an official
end-of-times schedule myself. God said that he would not again
destroy about all of humanity again to Noah after-the-flood yet He
didn't say that they couldn't go about accomplishing a verisimilitude
of that action themselves. The plagues of the 13th
and 14th
centuries in Europe wiped out 2/3rds of the population. Wars killing
tens of millions occurred in the 20th
century; there is a possibility that global warming will reduce
Earth's population to just 200 million within 200 years (ref. James
Lovelock's 'The Final Warning' and sea explorer Jacques Cousteau also
thought that humanity had about 200 years-even so, if human
population crashes down the road because of its own ineptitude at
managing its affairs that doesn't necessarily mean the end-of-days is
approaching. The population might recover quickly on or off-world and
a new population could arise the majority of whom could be Christian.
There is simply no certainty in correlating Biblical, eschatological
events with worldly political and social formations so far as I know.
There
is an event horizon ahead where artificial intelligence becomes
smarter than human intelligence and it may be that at such a time if
humanity becomes really obsolete and dehumanized beyond understanding
that the Lord will reappear to bail us out.
Ladd
says (quoted by Gentry in 'He Shall Have Dominion' page 52) ...
quote;
"We must recognize frankly that in all the verses cited thus far
it would seem that the eschatological Kingdom will be inaugurated by
a single complex event, consisting of the Day of the Lord, the coming
of the Son of Man, the resurrection of the dead, and the final
judgment. However, in the one book which is entirely devoted to this
subject, the Revelation of John, this time scheme is modified.... The
theology that is built on this passage is millennialism or
chiliasm.... This is the most natural interpretation of the [Rev. 20]
passage, and it is the view of the present author. One thing must be
granted: this is the only place in Scripture which teaches a
thousand-year reign of Christ.”-end
quote
When
I was a little kid age 7 or so somehow a strange kid and I got into a
fight at the end of a dock on a lake. Together we fell into the water
and under the surface were still locked in combat. If his older
brother hadn't pulled us out we would probably have drowned. The end
times of the Bible may arise in such a circumstance where humanity
has reached the end of its rope though the majority are Christian.
The Lord used agricultural analogies quit a lot, perhaps when the
harvest is optimally ripe then the 2nd
advent will commence.
The
Cultural Mandate
The
Cultural Mandate is an important concept in Gentry's
post-millennialism. The cultural mandate is something like an
equivalent weltanshauung to that of dispensationalism regarding how
God interacts with people in history. And where Christian are now in
history as far as what they ought to be doing and what they can
expect in the future. It is a kind of applied teleology with its
methods and purposes rather plain and drawn from Biblical exegesis.
I
will quote Gentry on select exegetical elements of the Cultural
Mandate expressed in the pre-Mosaic and early Mosaic years from pages
187-189...
quote;”
The various features of the Noahic Covenant are found in Genesis 6:
17-22 and 8:20-9: 17. In this covenant, we have a clear reaffirmation
of the Cultural Mandate, which is fundamental to the outworking of
God's eschatological purpose
through
man. l We also have a continuance of God's gracious
1.
Cf. the references to the birds, cattle, etc. (Gen. 6:20; 8: 17 with
Gen. 1:24, 25)
redemptive
relation as the ongoing basis of the Cultural Mandate, which is
likewise necessary to eschatology. This covenant is established with
God's people: the family of Noah, who alone escaped the deluge by the
grace of God.
Thus,
this should not be deemed solely a common-grace covenant, for it was
directly made with God's people (Noah's family), was established on
the basis of grace and redemptive sacrifice (Gen. 6:8; 8:20-22), and
is united with God's other redemptive covenants (cf. Hos. 2: 18 with
Gen. 6:20; 8: 17; 9:9ff).
The
Cultural Mandate, then, has an especial relevance to the function of
God's people in the world: the Noahic reaffirmation of the Mandate is
expressly made with God's people, the "you" of Genesis
9:1-12. On the basis of divine covenant, God's people are called to
the forefront of cultural leadership, with the religious aspects of
culture being primary.
In
the Noahic covenantal episode, we also witness the objectivity of
God's relationship with man: the world was judged in history for its
sin. The rainbow, which signifies God's covenant mercy, is
established with Noah and all that are with him, and their seed (Gen.
9:12).4 This indicates that the world will be protected from God's
curse through the instrumentality of the Church (the people of God).
This covenant is only made indirectly with unbelievers, who benefit
from God's protection only as they are not opposed to God's people.
Because of God's love for His people, He preserves the orderly
universe (Gen. 8:20-22). His enemies serve His people: common grace
(Gen. 9: lOb).
the
command to "be fruitful and multiply" (Gen. 9:1, 7 with
Gen. 1:28), and the dominion concept (d. Gen. 9:2 with Gen. 1:28). 2.
O. Palmer Robertson, The Christ of the Covenants (Phillipsburg, NJ:
Presbyterian & Reformed, 1980), p. 111. He refers to L. Dequeker,
"Noah and Israel. The Everlasting Divine Covenant with Mankind,"
Questions disputees d'Ancien Testament, Metlwde et Theologie
(Gembloux, 1974), p. 119. 3. James B. Jordan, "True Dominion,"
Biblical Horizons, Special Edition (Dec. 1990), p. 1. Cf. Robertson,
Christ of the Covenants, p. 111. 4. It seems that the rainbow did not
exist prior to this time. Apparently, the Flood was the first
instance of rain (and the rainbow): Genesis 2:5-6.
Thus
we see the objective corporate sanction of God against sin in the
Flood, which also serves as a type of Final Judgment (2 Pet. 3:4-6).
We also see God's judicial sanctions in history in His ordaining of
capital punishment (Gen. 9:6). God's objective judgment therefore
finds civil expression in the affairs of man.
His
grant of legitimate authority to the civil government to enforce
capital punishment is based on a religious principle, namely, the
image of God in man (Gen. 9:6), and is given to the world through the
Church (ire., Noah's family).5 God ordains civil sanctions as a means
for preserving the human race for His redemptive purposes (cf. Rom.
13:1-4; 1 Pet. 2:13-14).”-end
quote
I
wanted to note that 'the first instance of rain' mentioned above by
Gentry could have been an anomaly in a parched desert region. I spent
some time in Albuquerque when there hadn't been measurable rainfall
in a few years...who can say. I have written elsewhere of
difficulties associated with interpreting the book of Genesis.
Eschatology
and Evolution
Eschatology
to many means a prophetic vision of the end times of either the world
or its people. Alternatively it may refer to the end of a
civilization or even the Universe. Traditionally eschatology has been
regarded as something more of a religious field -although in the
early times of mankind before vast right-wing polysyllabic words
arose that could describe with a sociological objectivity human areas
of belief such as might be regarded as religious end times
eschatology could also be said to have included a unified field of
primitive religio-philosophic-physical speculations about the nature
of the experienced world-environment. Thus Ragnarök and Brahma along
with the plain of Tilmun were out there with Janus the Door goddess
and the vast turtle of labor carrying the world upon its back. At
least like Aristarchus the idea of a rotation of the Earth or land
was a primary element of the explanation.
Humanity
never developed a comprehensive explanation for the reason that the
Universe exists in natural philosophy nor did it find an exhaustive,
unimpeachable description of the physical boundaries. Instead it
learned that time is an implicit characteristic of matter that is
itself convertible to energy explaining rather nicely I suppose that
energy can present a time aspect when it becomes matter and loses it
inversely as it converts to energy. Cosmologists can speculate
perhaps if time was included in finite quantity at an initial
singularity with alpha and omega being equal or if energy existed at
singularity or mass and if it was a finite quantity and is so, why?
Why did an initial packet of energy or mass filling the singularity
cut off at a particular spot without having exhausted an initial
supply? Why didn't all of the possible virtual particles that might
exist find there way to the first singularity?
Christian
eschatology has three fundamental fields on the reformed side of
things. One is a premillennialist belief that John's Book of
Revelation described future events that mostly haven't yet happened.
That viewpoint has some logical difficulties. One is that for the
saved Jesus lives in a real sense in their spirit in some mysterious
way. That indwelling spirit is the being born again belief and is the
first resurrection post-mills believe. Logically it might be absent
from the pre-millennialist paradigm wherein Jesus won't appear until
the end time. There is something of a different criteria for the
kingdom of God existing in part right now on Earth too.
Post-millennialists
believe along the lines wherein Jesus said that the Kingdom of God is
within you, that the kingdom of God is drawing in new believers and
that the world will gradually increase the number of Christians until
the real end times that could be soon or way down the road even unto
the distant future (when the time of the gentiles is fulfilled).
Christians in the post-mill scenario are a dampening of the doom that
results from a pagan or atheistic world that is always seeking to
increase its power. Christians should eventually become a
majoritarian polity though evil still does exist in-the-world.
One
might regard the fact that it requires just a small minority of
Bolsheviks or terrorists to throw a wrench into social stability or
establishment even when the establishment is a corrupt or oppressive
minority itself; evil minorities are historically not uncommon ruling
political powers seeking to expropriate the private property and
economic independence empirically in order to establish networking
collectives dominated by oligarchy, plutonomy, aristocracy or
dictatorship. Annihilating marriage designed to protect the poor and
middle-class interests in order to theoretically reconfigure society
to a spineless white meat boneless product increasing profits for the
rich is a usual method for turning the clock back to the year zero
socially speaking so that the timer may begin all over again to the
drummer bought and paid for by the sponsors. When these sorts of
things happen believers may look for one coming in the clouds to
change the changlings back to a less politically antipathetic form.
End
times paradigms exist thus in many contexts. Some require active
human participation, others have a deterministic fatalism such that
it is all pre-determined clockwork ticking along like a wave of bombs
biding there time until explosion. Some are of a Universal and
physical kind-a third kind one might say, without a plain
end-somewhat silly for an end-times theory I will note.
Cosmologists
with humble and uncertain origins of the singularity that started the
big band or inflaton or collision of symbolic membranes such as
occurs in the 1812 Overture may consider the end of the Universe as a
very distant future event that would be the conclusion of the highly
organized energy at the start of the Universe that expanded losing
its organizational coherence in the time-process and ran down to a
cold and low energy state with matter perhaps as energy dispersed in
powerless isolation as basic elements. Whatever it is that make up
quarks-perhaps one-dimension brains-would be equally spaced away from
each other perhaps a few trillion miles and that could be said to be
an uncertain yet probable end time.
Except
that evolution as a process of degradation of organization materially
speaking could evolve not more complex forms on the way to the cold
dead end, it could evolve non-existence at any time too. There is no
guarantee that evolution could not move molecules or quarks to some
mysterious presently yet pre-determined configuration that poofs mass
and energy into coherence again with a return to the One singularity.
Coherence is sort of an odd word as physicists use it for cosmology
and quantum affairs. They regard mass as a kind of entanglement of
energy quanta in a field that decohered from the field to take the
form of mass (matter) as if it were a sacrificial lamb found by
Abraham in a bush to take the place of a son for a sacrifice, or
better-a cosmology theory to sacrifice.
I
am not very comfortable with the idea of energy quanta existing
decohered from a meta-Higgs field yet still going through the hoops
of a singularity and expansion as degrading organization with some
life formation from complex, expensive molecule on the way-it seems a
little like having two different theories in one that makes one or
the other so contingent that it is hard to be fashionably cool. If
one knows that a particular cosmology theory is something of a
joke-or at least a little Buddhist illusion resembling yet still
real, it is challenging to take it as seriously as if it were a ninja
turtle carrying the world on its back.
Energetic
particles of quanta have existing forces such as the strong force
that keeps quarks together. It is hard to imagine how they would
break down. In a Higgs and meta-Higgs field however all things are
possible for the imagination at least.
In
the end of the universe isolated quanta would still exist in a
meta-field and might be regarded as the final phase of decoherence
before returning unto the one true field of fields. Maybe only only
in complete end times isolation could an energetic quanta be so
relativistically dissociated from other particles that it could be
considered to be matter-as-energy for-itself. Energy however seems
like an event instead of a thing. Energy must be some sort of
intrusion through micro-entanglement into the space of nothingness
that humans regard as the Universe. So when it is really run down
that field fluctuation return generally produces nothing for
observers entangled in the field to observe nor any observers either.
It makes philosophical writers wonder what is happening on the other
side of the field that yielded the entangled state of energy that
seems to be the matter of this Universe,-or perhaps, what is
happening all the time 'up there' in the heaven beyond the quanta
entangled in a steady state form that seems to be this Universe?
The
answer to what a sponsoring field is like isn't that of a myriad
Universes. A myriad Universes could be produced simultaneously or in
an order and progressive profusion however that would be beside the
point in question such that one wonders if the field progenitor of
Universes with an abundance of energy sufficient to light up a
infinite number of Universe into being has much of a concern about
how much time it takes (just kidding)
There
are some controversies about all of the various forms and potentials
for end times scenarios synthetic and given by Revelation. There are
those who trust a particular theory and desire the extinction of any
sort of rival theory of course however with the all things must pass
thought in mind the astute interpreter of end times theories may find
that though some seem to have more merit than others none are
entirely comprehensive nor even necessarily mutually exclusive and
exhaustive as the very interpretive terms and literal values of rival
theories may be in error or inaccurately understood. That amazes one
considering how God could keep track of all of the various theories
of end-times for-Himself.
Jesus
Christ as the way to renormalize the spirit unto a form acceptable
with God transcends the time whorls and relativistic networks of
space-time and potential space-time that are circumstantial
formations of the physical cosmos. Reason overcomes evolution in a
sense always transcending and surpassing its deterministic parameters
in some senses yet remains within it as a product or quality of the
field-entanglement itself. Quantum uncertainty within the field and
within the mind of an individual may be enabling conditions that let
the soul or living identity of an individual in-the-field become
within the transcending kingdom-of-God even while remaining within
the steady state decoherence of the Universe-field quanta. When the
worldly existence of an individual or of the species will end is
difficult to know exactly yet be assured that there are a number of
elements working to bring that situation to exist if unintentionally
through economically fueled mass extinctions and global warming gas
emissions.
End
Times Elements
In
the beginning of Genesis some points especially interesting to me are
the time literal problem of Genesis and the famous six days of
creation issues. It seems that days to God were perhaps just a way of
differentiating important events of creation. I suppose one could
take the six days of creation as a minimalist outline. Certainly one
might not take it as six present Earth days.
For
example; God creates matter. Then God divides matter into various
configurations, then God creates living things such as plants, air
and sea life, perhaps mammals and mankind last. These are events such
as science might recognize. The six events are like movements in a
symphony God made. It seems a reasonable way to classify things given
from an omniscient source to mankind circa 2000 B.C.
One
notes that Hindu religion has a day and night for Brahma of between 4
and 8 billion years approximately. The prophet Jeremiah and his
scribe Baruch recorded God as saying that everyone knows Him-they
just forget who he is. That would be an example of what Sartre called
'false consciousness'.
There
are many ways to interpret the book of Genesis’ creation values and
I will consider a few keeping in mind that worshiping God with
salvation unto eternal life through the Son Jesus Christ is the
primary concern for Christians. For decades if not centuries there
have been those that have tried to oppose existence itself through
scientific study to the credibility of Christian values. The
spiritual is not the material and material researches could never
disprove the spiritual. The real world and Universe is not in
opposition to the spiritual, instead it is one realm where the
spiritual can occur through human experience.
The
Swiss theologian Karl Barth in Church Dogmatics, according to
Geoffrey Bromley’s survey of the work (An
Intro to the Theology of Karl Barth),
wrote that scripture hasn’t a cosmology. Scripture is about God’s
relation to man in the cosmos. Further, scripture refers to several
cosmologies but is loyal to none. There is a creation account of
course yet the purpose is to describe God’s relation to mankind,
how that relation has historically developed (beginning ex-temporally
I might add) and the covenant relationships.
Evidently
Barth seems to have thought that to become loyal to a particular
cosmology is to risk defection
from faith. The
reason for that is I suppose that the physical cosmos is from a
Christian perspective contingent being rather than primary or
ultimate. True though that is, it isn’t necessary to ignore the
mechanics of the contingent cosmos so long as one realizes that the
ultimate though untraceable source is God. One can meet many
scientific points satisfactorily regarding creation without building
one’s own creation theory from scripture keeping in mind that God’s
acts or interactions involving mankind phenomenally are what are
brought to light in scripture instead of a physical cosmology of the
Universe.
John
and the Revelation
It
is amazing to consider that so many have misinterpreted the book of
Revelation (of John the Disciple of Christ). Tim LaHaye, Hal Lindsey,
Pat Robertson of Virginia Beach, Muhammad of Mecca and innumerable
lunatics tattooed with the mark of the Beast (666) as well as
innumerable congregations full of saved evangelicals evidently got it
wrong. The analysis and interpretation of literature-historical;
prophetic literature, was probably not their strong suit. The first
resurrection was that of being spiritually born again in the faith;
most of the prophecies in the Revelation were fulfilled during the
violent, troubling times experienced by first century Christians
going through tribulation and persecution of the Roman Emperor Nero.
The
Bible is a beautiful book in the sense of a beautiful mathematics or
physics theory that has a wonderful structure. With the Revelation of
John correctly interpreted the New Testament gospel of the Lord
becomes more beautiful to in its marvelous fulfillment of prophecy
and reshaping foundation for the course of mankind. With the spirit
of the Acts of the Apostles John's Revelation provides and overview
and binding foundation for understanding the continuing work of the
Lord and Holy Spirit in human history beyond the sufferings,
persecutions, tribulation and destruction of the temple in the first
century. An age of the gentiles that would be fulfilled with the
evangelization of the peoples of the world. The good news of the Lord
could be carried to the people of the future-even unto the farthest
reaches of humanity down the road and even into space I would think.
Humanity and Christians in particular are not to cower under
toadstools waiting for the sky to fall and rapture to remove them
from impending Armageddon and the draconian power of the beast (that
in a sense inevitably coheres residually within any human collective
or government I suppose original sin being what it is).
Life
in the temporal realm isn't eternal. There are fundamentally three
ways of interpreting the Disciple John's book of the Revelation
regarding when the Lord Jesus Christ will return to conclude human
affairs and to judge the living quick and the dead that are popular
today. This field of Christian theology is incidentally named
eschatology.
Pre-mill,post-mill
or amill; regardless of your stand I believe a Christian is saved if
the Lord is their personal Savior. One should always be ready for the
return of the Lord in the Second Coming.
Catholics
are I believe generally amillenialists. They regard people that die
as going to heaven directly (or hell or purgatory perhaps). Not being
Roman Catholic I stipulate that I am not very well informed on the
issue. Evangelicals Protestants tend to be premillennialists
believing that the Revelation is a prophecy of events to come
preponderantly. Post-millennialism is another point of view with the
view that the Revelation largely described near term events that
occurred in the first century A.D.
It
does seem reasonable that John foresaw the future of the Jewish and
Roman world and how it would effect Christians within the decade he
was living in rather than just events about 2000 years distant. Nero
began his persecutions of Christians in 64 a.d. and Christians
(saints) went through a tribulation. Gentry goes over the evidence
for a first century interpretative paradigm for the Revelation in
detail.
If
post-millennialism is correct it doesn't mean Christianity is
obsolete-instead it confirms it's truth and prophetic accuracy. We
are living in the age of the Gentiles. Instead of expect a sudden
anti-Christ and Armageddon Christianity should grow and increase
human peace, prosperity and knowledge of the Lord (perhaps with a
priesthood of believers replacing the hierarchical priesthood). The
second coming and final judgment could take an indefinite time even
occurring after human settlement of Mars and distant galaxies, its
hard to say for sure.
Kenneth
Gentry's book 'The
Beast of Revelation'
identifies the Roman Emperor Nero as the particular beast referred to
in John's book of the Revelation. Besides Nero as the particular
person of the beast the Roman Empire is said to be the general
actualization of the beast. I think that Gentry's analysis is quite
convincing.
I'll
try to adumbrate points of view that are relevant to the issue of
Biblical eschatology and end times inspired by Gentry's analysis of
the Revelation.
The
Revelation may be viewed as a history book as well as a book of
prophecy. That fact has implications for how one interprets its
content. History books generally are written after the fact while
prophecies are written before. If one is a secularist it might be a
priori challenging to accept a date for the composition of the
revelation before the events described within it as prophecy. Instead
of an early date at or before the first year of Nero's reign e.g. 63
a.d. the option of accepting the credibility of the later date of 95
a.d. might be preferred with a certain neo-realistic bias.
It
is difficult to say what reason John could have had for composing the
events of the book of Revelation after the events described within
it, although one might offer the point of view such as
pre-millenialists have that the events described do not pertain to
the first century events at all, or perhaps have a dual-purpose
meaning of events then and in the future.
Some
have pointed out that the churches and Christians of the time might
have found John's prophecy somewhat superfluous if they did not
relate to the pressing issues of the time such as the Neronic
persecutions and martyrdoms of Christians by Nero or immanent dangers
to Jerusalem by the Roman Army. John might have found events of the
first century a kind of coincidental template for describing future
events-yet if so he would have needed to view the near-term events
prophetically as well as the distant future events in order to note
their similarities and congruence of format. Yet it might have been
the angels that provided the right coincidental data in order to make
John's Revelation insights of prophecy useful to Christians then and
now. Historians with an entirely secular viewpoint would dismiss that
possibility as irrelevant. I would imagine that it is easier for
Christian theologians to accept a Revelation prophetic paradigm that
was immediately relevant to first century Christians rather than a
later date that requires a more convoluted explanation. If John's
Revelation was written before the events that were rather near-term
with such accuracy it would be difficult not to accept the fact that
it was genuine prophecy rather than coincidence or dead-reckoning
political analysis of the highest quality and accuracy.
Political
predictions of future events of from one to 17 years distant
generally involving the highest levels of an imperial government and
the existence of the Jewish nation were just not easy in the first
century. Few think tanks had such access to the highest levels of the
Roman Government, or would have if such had existed. There were
additional accurate predictions regarding the success and growth rate
of the Christian faith would have been unlikely in the first century.
The Delphic Oracle did not provide such accuracy.
I
have enjoyed looking in to numerous points of cosmology and only
lately found Barth’s paradigm. Barth was an excellent theologian
and worthy successor to Calvin in topics such as predestination where
Barth point out that the Lord is pre-determined and human beings only
vicariously the elect through Jesus Christ. That is a sweet kind of
retro-causality worthy of John Wheeler’s retro-causality theory of
cosmology. Of course the Lord’s election by God (only God can
recognize God in-the-creation) hasn’t a physical causality that is
explicable by science. That is an acceptable example of the problem
of looking for physical cosmology in scripture-it isn’t about
physical cosmology.
Physical
cosmologists of academia seem to run comparable risk to in accepting
or rejecting string theory variations such as M and Emperor Theories
regarding tenure.
Barth
interprets Genesis stipulating that is has supernatural revelation
though human agents (prophets) instead of with just natural
philosophy as Newton or Einstein’s mechanics lead to, yet Barth’s
method is beyond the scope of this work. I share the belief that
scripture presents divine revelation and appreciate Barth’s
theological work much.
People
have over history developed numerous approaches toward proving or
disproving the existence of God in what came to be known as the
physical world-Universe. Barth probably would discount such efforts
as events occurring in the natural world-Universe whereas the sole
way of learning about God is through revelation from God as in
scripture. Arguments from design would seem to be founded in the
natural world. Perhaps the ontological argument has merit also as a
good-enough in the course of human intellectual history. Human
intellectual history wasn’t always where it is today; the
fundamental parameters of understanding existence differed more than
scientifically.
End
Times Implications
If
the end times are in a sense the beginning of the natural world's
transition for the then living to a new and better, more spiritual
way of being, the increase of ethics and faith to comprise a majority
of humanity requires something of a change toward an optimal use of
human, material, intellectual and spiritual resources indefinitely.
One might wonder how that can be accomplished in a world with tight
and sometimes repressive social hierarchies, organizational
brainwashing of the masses and occasional efforts by elites to reduce
humanity to a worm-like condition of just-existing.
Probably
innumerable ways of improving social existence can be found an
applied within and without social orders with a majority of
Christians to improve human prospects in the long endurance event
life as penultimate existence. There is no necessary abnegation of
social responsibility for the state of the world because of
anticipation of immanent apocalypse. In a real sense for political
leaders at least the apocalypse is within them rather than the
kingdom of God and intellectual comprehension of how to invent
maximum social liberty and ecospheric health.
‘Abraham-The
First Historical Biography’ by David Rosenberg
Christians
today are the heirs of Abraham, yet so were the children of ancient
Israel. The end of days arrived for ancient national Israel in 70
A.D. yet they were taken captive before and had experienced
diaspora. The world continued on. It was the spiritual presence of
God that increased
Reading
this fine book published in 2006 is a kind of journey through mind
and of space and time as Rod Serling might have said. One returns to
a kind of aboriginal dreamtime
of the foundation of civilization catching glimpses of the people of
Ur in the year 3300 B.C.E., then learns more about the life and
history of that civilization and its people unto the time of Abraham
in 1800 B.C. A crucible driving Abraham to a break with his cultural
past bringing him to make that momentous journey out of Sumer to the
land of Canaan is brought to life with Rosenberg’s word portraits
of the Patriarch’s world.
The
author points out that after leaving Ur, Abraham was ‘houseless
until his death’; not such bad company for today’s homeless to be
in. The meek it is said, shall inherit the Earth.
God
is a creative being, one who makes things exist. Sin on the contrary
is nihilistic activity, making things not exist and abnegating
individual integrity for-self and for-others. Sin is destruction of
creation-the production of broken forms.
A
logic of sustaining beings and allowing things to exist in this
universe or in any possible form of universe, rather than to not
exist, is plain enough and good. The meek are more compatible with
creative eternal life than are those reinforcing continua of nihilism
and eternal death.
Abraham
we learn was obedient to God. Abraham’s conformal behavior was
compatible to the principle of life and existence over death and
non-being. The founding patriarch of three faiths was simultaneously
bold yet meek. Abraham was of course faithful to The One (who is
three).
There
are not too many biographically descriptive references to Abraham in
the Bible that one might easily get much data describing the life at
Ur of the founder of what today is thought of as the Jewish religion.
Rosenberg-who provides his own translations from Hebrew carefully
considers Biblical material and tries to create a reconstruction of
the culture and time of Sumer and the home town of Abraham-the city
of Ur, drawing upon ancient material and sources such as large
numbers of cuneiform clay tablets of the Sumerian civilization that
were excavated in the 20th century and now.
Rosenberg
mentions a Sumerian epic story-history called ‘The
World Order’ that
probably was known a thousand years later at the late 11th century
B.C.E. court of King Solomon. It is apropos that President G.H.W.
Bush’s term ‘The New World Order’ was coined in the era of the
first U.S. war with Iraq. Not so much changes after 5000 years in
politics-at least where fossil fuels are concerned.
Scholarly
translations and compilations of that ancient data from Sumerian
libraries and elsewhere have increasingly shed light on the culture
of ancient Sumer unto Abraham’s day.
David
Rosenberg is a poet and biblical scholar. He is also a co-author
of ‘The
J Book’. That interesting work is an exposition of the J (Jehovah?)
writer of the earliest parts of the book of Genesis. Scriptural
criticism supposes that there were four primary scribes, writers and
or redactors of the first five books of the Bible that have reached
us today beginning with the J writer most likely of Solomon’s
court; and surprising to some, possibly a female writer. The
treatment of Sarah’s response to news of her planned pregnancy
(planned by God) seems to have a more feminine touch than a male
writer of the time might have had-yet if it was originally a
scribbled note by Abraham himself-who can say? His relationship with
Sarah and other highlights of the journey could have been saved as an
outline-diary of meaningful events. Such jottings of one of the best
writers of Sumer making his own exodus out of decay may have made it
down through history and much retelling to J at King Solomon’s
court.
-note;Abraham
is said to have wandered with his father Terah toward the City of
Haran up the rivers toward Damascus or Megiddo on his way to Shalem
(Jerusalem) where lived King Melchisedek and his Jebusites. It makes
more sense that an ancient traveler would follow along the water-way
for drinking refreshment than that he would have turned southwest
toward the Arabian deserts. I have elsewhere in this article
mentioned Abraham as wandering around the Arabian Peninsula that
after reading Rosenberg's book I would tend to agree that it would be
an improbable route of travel.
Shimon
Gibson in writing about his excavation of the cave of John the
Baptist a couple of miles from his home town also made the point that
early Christians were much less sexist than later ecclesiastical
structures and traditions that developed in reflecting perhaps the
pervasively male hierarchical social establishment of the era. The
early Christian ideas of social priorities have themselves been
eclipsed a little by the secular social hegemony over Christian
organizations.
Abraham
may have trained his own scribe to keep the cuneiform writing alive
on his journey out of Ur. John Smith brought his own scribe to write
down his actions exploring Chesapeake Bay. Perhaps the ‘disciple
Jesus loved’ was a reference by one of John’s school of writers
at Ephesus to their founder. Some of the more important writers of
history had others complete their works under supervision-Julius
Caesar for instance in his history of ‘The Civil War’ and wars in
Libya and Alexandria.
The
additional possibility exists that Sarah too learned to write
cuneiform, and became one of the world’s first secretaries, added
personal points of view to her husband’s recollections.
The
topic of Abraham writing cuneiform leads me to wonder if a synthesis
of cuneiform and hieroglyphic literacy traditions by Moses upon
leaving Egypt led him to create an alphabet to write down Jewish
speech about 1500 B.C.E. during the Exodus. I believe the Hebrew
symbol yod is from the cuneiform numbering system. It would be
interesting to have a map of archaeological locations of cuneiform
writing outside of Mesopotamia. An alphabet representing sounds may
have been simpler for Moses to construct than a synthesis of two less
phonetically based writing systems. Were the Ten Commandments the
first alphabetically based legal code?
osenberg
builds with scholarly learning, poetic inference and creative insight
an exegesis of J’s construction of Genesis from earlier sources
including a hypothetical X writer in King Melchizedek court. We
discover that Abraham was likely to have been a Sumerian writer
himself who left Sumer at a time when the New Babylonian rulers were
repressing the religious and culture creative license of Sumer that
had already existed more than a thousand years. Abraham was called to
venture away and found a new religious civilization or culture, and
his heir would be named Israel.
Rosenberg’s
book on Abraham is fine reading. One learns philosophically new
ideas-perhaps worth being called a religious ontology, that might be
quite different from the usual assumptions about the religious
culture of ancient Ur. For some, the idea of treating Abraham as a
real man albeit in a reconstructed and good spirited, best effort
historical scenario could be a little bit faith-shaking initially.
How could Abraham emerge from an evolving cultural religious paradigm
and quite reasonably have a personal God flowing rather naturally
from the culture and history of the time? Shouldn’t Abraham have
simply been thwacked on the head by a finger of God and provided with
divine insights while he was just minding his own business even
though secularists already would be developing hagiographical details
about the saintly, deserving soul?
Philosophically
speaking, the development of a history outline of the religious
culture of Sumer is brilliantly informative. There are other
approaches to interpreting ancient civilizations and the foundations
of some religious practices obviously, and some things are left out
perhaps from this books such as one might expect existed in ancient
culture such as human sacrifice, yet the book accomplishes rather
convincingly presenting the picture of Abraham & ancient Sumeria
while explaining mankind's theoretical and practical relationship
to the divine and unknown in the ancient context. One knows that much
is left out and much is poetically liberated from nothingness with
creative speculation, yet that is the brilliance of the work in
finding so much in the scant and occluded historical record.
Religious
ontologies may exist simultaneously with mundane, familiar
weltanschauung, Sartre’s existential personal world experience
coheres within the phenomenality of social dialectical reason and the
cultural environment. Mankind and his civilizations exist within an
apparent universe emerged or selected from all-possible-universes put
up in some way fine tuned to support life.
From
an unknowable perturbative vacuum with quantum uncertainty perhaps a
void and space-time plus energy emerge. No one knows if a quantum
uncertainty field before all universes really exists or why even one
virtual particular particle would ever become a temporarily real
thing or where it could appear or why, before anything
materially was. One would think that all things existing become the
past, presenting a form of paradox for-itself even if one regards a
temporal linear series of events mechanically and as
self-explanatory.
The
Sumerians had their own way of examining the juxtaposition of the
supernatural and unknown with the natural and known-the Babylonians
repressed that artistic and intellectual liberty with the dogmatism
of the cult of Marduk and Abraham with his sculptor father Terah set
out over the Arabian Peninsula to change the future history of
mankind.
Sodom
and Gomorrah were said to be located near the confluence of the Dead
Sea and the Jordan River. Perhaps the mud brick towns were new and
located on opposite bank of the Jordan. Over historical time it might
have occurred to someone to dam the Jordan and one such dam broke
sending a raging wave to sweep the perverse townsmen and their bricks
before a river wave down to return to the elements in the Dead Sea.
Looking
back into ancient history is a good thing for scholars. Culturally
though societies may stagnate in the past or forget its lessons
dooming themselves to repeat its errors. When Abraham’s nephew Lot
was ordered to flee the city of Sodom before its destruction he and
his family were told not to look back.
Leaving
a corrupt civilization is what Abraham did when departing Ur that had
fallen into economic and spiritual stagnation. Lot’s wife had to
stop and look back across salt collection and drying ponds outside
Sodom and was perhaps splashed and covered over with quick drying
salt-slurry when some kind of collection retaining wall collapsed or
a splattering thing struck down the city.
There
are several messages in the story-a true story that one may take
concerning the need for social and cultural reformation, the need to
not have contempt for God and/or about the phenomenality of existence
in a phenomenal Universe.
Perhaps
we should not have smug politicians ignoring global heating,
ecospheric depletion and economic corruption because they own stock
in Exxon-Mobil or have investments in China. When capitalism is
corrupted such that it puts a price on people and what they are worth
to delete the economic methods assaults democracy and becomes a tool
of financial democide. Corrupt political parties ping-ponging an
economic ball with hypocritical moral paddles over an oily
atmospheric and biospheric decay have too much of the Sodomites about
them to be reformers and escape the enveloping return unto inanimate
being without free will in-itself.
I
recommend reading Rosenberg’s book ‘Abraham’. It is a serious
effort to reconstruct more about ancient writers and what they
thought of life. Some people believed that God could have evolved the
world if he choose, yet philosophically it’s easy to understand
that God also would have complete foreknowledge of all quantum
variables at any level so far as he like. People have free will yet
God’s will entirely determines how things are-even quantum
mechanics has similar paradoxes on the nature of matter and of
getting information about it.
The
Heisenberg uncertainty principle is also a kind of quantum
displacement principle as all things determined are yet grounded in
the infinite and unfounded expect for the phenomenal-perhaps
inclusive of the human mind and of human experience. Abraham might
have emerged from a culture supporting the religious concepts that
emerged and in part formed elements of the religious paradigm of
Judaism, Islam and Christianity-yet so what, would God not human
beings to develop a religious or spiritual capability bringing them
to recognize His true self the Universe phenomenalized?
There
are still Sumerian ethnic peoples-Amorites living in Iraq. Those we
might regard today as Jews were just another Semitic people many of
whom had moved to Sumer though some lived in Canaan. The ideas of
Sumer continue with us including some of the religious paradigms in
some regards. Abraham in leaving Sumer became the first Jew, it is
said; a religious way of relating to the transcendent.
It
is good for Christian faith that the principals in our own first
century a.d. drama of reality were all real people, Jesus Christ was
a real man too, for whom the witnessed experiences of the Apostles,
disciples and countless others of the miracles of Jesus were given,
transcending the foundations of experience and history to become a
reliable ontology for-itself…the best a human being may have.
Dual
Booting a Natural Universe
God
created creatures called humans. In this paradigm the creatures learn
through divine revelation that God is real and concerned about them.
That is humanity has received sufficient communication to assemble in
the Bible. What about God’s point of view of things? We don’t
often consider that (as if we could) yet we might act a little as if
we did in order to understand our own situation as human beings a
little better.
God
is. God is the great I am. God is God. God is being. Creating
creatures or anything sentient with its own Universe is like dual
booting an operating system that isn’t aware that it exists within
a larger OS. God can set aside a partitioned area of the omnipotent
hard drive and create a Universe or Multi-verse within it containing
people, animals, matter and energy with its own protocols of order.
It has death in it-nothingness delimiting the temporal boundaries of
the creatures. Like an operating system that won’t be maintained
forever-like Windows XP unfortunately-humanity in the partitioned
Universe just won’t be maintained in their contingent being beyond
a certain, finite date.
Within
the partitioned area of the hard drive the existence of the partition
cannot be known. Only revelation arriving from God transcending the
partition can inform the creatures of the true nature of their
existence. Though mankind as fallen, temporal being subject to
evolutionary thermodynamic entropy has implicit facts, obedience to
the revealed will of God frees humanity from that bondage to sin. Sin
is fundamental disobedience to the will of God.
Sin
is itself an aspect of nothingness. Being and nothingness is the
veritable dichotomy of good and evil. Evil and sin is the
brinksmanship in disobedience unto nothingess.
Philosophically
speaking God is the unmoved mover Being all things. He is Lord of
everything. Nothing is a mysterious element that permits free will to
make errors; errors, falsehoods and intentions leading to nothingess.
Containing disobedient free will within the temporal Universe is a
brilliant way of adapting the altered spiritual condition of the beta
version humans Adam and Eve to a Universal environment commensurate
with their change. It has strife and challenge. Yet God still cares
about His creatures and the Son appeared as man himself in order to
give humanity a way to return to a normative, obedient relation with
God. Jesus Christ is God as is the Holy Spirit. The trinity cohere
within one another for-us.
The
Universal operating system has physical cosmology of great interest
with the pursuit of knowledge of that system developed in natural
philosophy. God is however, live, eternal and creations and
everything else are contingent aspects of His own Being. God is all
Being yet not all sentient beings are God. In a comparable way-all of
the data and programs in an operating system of a contingent
operating system were created by the meta-operating system programmer
and are in a sense ‘his’ too, however not all of the individual
lines of code in the contingent Universe OS are the operating system.
Anyone who has looked at the files on Windows knows that not al files
including program files can be said to be the Windows operating
system.
Perhaps
I didn’t make that last point very clear. Here is another point of
difference yet, Windows isn’t the hardware comprising the computer
whereas the operating system for the contingent Universe in it’s
partitioned area comprises that Universe’s hardware.
The
steady state Universe of entangled quantum mass and energy is
regarded by some as information or bits of data with locations
running in accord with thermodynamic physical laws of causality. The
OS is the hardware flowing from an original boundary condition at the
point of origin-Big Bang, Inflaton, Membrane or Dimension collisions
whatever. That Universe exists as a partitioned area-one cannot
locate evidence of the metaphysics of the realm beyond the partition
because God exists beyond, spiritually. Only through the word of God
and in particular the Lord Jesus Christ can one return to freedom
with obedience to the will of God. God forgives the sin of the fallen
creatures of the temporal partition if they accept the Son as their
Lord.
Jesus
Christ made the atoning sacrifice on the cross. He showed that God
recognizes the fallen human condition and condemns it even in His Son
yet because Jesus Christ was resurrected God showed that there is a
way through and away from that temporal human condition leading to
death and unto the right eternal relationship with the Creator
transcending the temporal Universe and sin. God does not condemn God.
In other words God didn’t condemn Jesus Christ-only the temporal
physical form of mankind existing in the partitioned Universe OS.
People have the ability to overcome their programmed D.N.A. and have
faith in the Lord and His sacrifice providing a way unto the right
relationship with God and eternal life in heaven (the operating
system beyond the partition where God is the evident administrator).
For
most of my life I learned science and religion concurrently. While a
youth I learned of Watson and Crick's research, The Silent World of
Jacques Cousteau, the Gemini program and all the scientific
discoveries news could report via television, the Encyclopedia
Britannica and other sources, yet I attended Sunday school and
learned of God.
Albert
Einstein passed away the year of my birth, and his Theory of
Relativity was a live social topic even in science fiction films in
the early 1960s. Over the decades I was able to read the Bible and
develop a better faith in and understanding of Jesus Christ.
The
philosophy of logic and even existential philosophy used as a device
to regard human thought as phenomenal-though the temporality of life
was noted even by King Solomon- reinforces for me skepticism in the
value of any judgments of mankind except for those that express faith
in God. Life is temporal and phenomenal on a stage itself of
uncertain meaning. The recently confirmed Higgs boson supports the
concept of a field with phenomenal appearance of particles in it. The
true nature and deeper explanation for the source of any field or
field of fields seems to be without a satisfactory explanation other
than that God wills to be.
I
believe that most of humanity are generally going in the same
direction and have the same goals. They live within a space-time
stream of experience and jostle one another politically and socially
in order to obtain what they want-even if it is the power of clumping
several thousand or millions of people together with them in their
journey downstream for whatever reason. The logic of the flow-to
maximize the general environment and to accomplish the best
individual maximization of potential with the least amount of
friction and chaos may seem a reasonable way for the individuals
moving through to proceed yet seldom is that the prevailing political
philosophy in theory or application.
The
tangled bank of confusion that was Darwin's idea about evolution
becomes a political modus vivendi for political governance of the
global banking system while so many have trouble understanding that
God does not share the limit of knowledge that humanity has at any
given moment in history. This book of essays comparing and
contrasting interdisciplinary vectors to cosmology is a
non-specialized expression of my interests in history, Christianity
and scientific cosmological theory.
'Church'
phonetically arose from the old and Middle English word 'cirice or
circe' that meant (the) Lord's, and that is from the word meaning
'Lords' in Greek- κυριακον.
It
is written that the word 'church' in many or most translations into
English from the Bible refer to the word in the Bible 'ecclesia' (in
Greek -κκλησία').
The
concept of a church or the church of Jesus Christ means simply that
the believers have a true relationship to the absolute Truth
in-itself, for-himself Jesus Christ. The faithful are the Lord's
having been saved from the temporal conditions of original and
subsequent sin.
Jesus
Christ as Truth of an absolute sort is also being referred to with
the word 'Truth' meaning an abbreviation of sorts, such that it
simplifies saying that Jesus Christ is also God and Author of
Everything including the Universe and so forth. If one does believe
that then the relationship to Truth is far more important than the
relationship to others who are not of faith and who are not saved. It
is something comparable to it being more valuable to be on a lifeboat
on a sinking ship than in the gambling lounge of the doomed vessel
playing cards for penny points yet the stakes are ultimate. The
church in the world is still basically a dysfunctional Temple
Priesthood in little fiefdoms such as crucified our Lord. People
cannot let go of the worldly power and security, and even want
political power still.
Reading
'New Theories of Everything' I encountered some ideas about the Weak
Anthropic Principal,
which seem to be a nearly necessary element of contemporary cosmology
theories if they are to have accuracy.
Life
in a given Universe such as supports our carbon based being could not
exist without a certain amount of time to exist outside of lethal
radiation, and with enough time for generations of stars to have
cycled through to produce such elements that later go in to building
living things. Space needs to expand far enough, at least ten billion
light years across for these conditions to exist, and the stars do
burn out in 100 billion years. That time interval may seem like a
lot, yet it really isn't in the infinite possibilities of things.
In
archeology I prefer rather disciplined material of a non-polemical
nature. I believe that God designed the Universe and that Jesus is
God. That is consistent with a Plotinian cosmology generally, and the
New Testament in particular, depending upon the values one gives to
some of the time and space literals of Genesis.
I
think it is difficult to date certain archaeological pieces and
confirm their credibility outside of an original excavation site or
in a carefully preserved 'chain of evidence'. Then one has the
difficult matter of interpreting any written material on it. Faith in
substantially supported and verified Biblical data is worthwhile. An
interesting point about the gospel is that it has anticipated some of
the scientific method criteria of providing two or three or more
independent points of view of the same phenomena-in this case the
life of Jesus Christ as the Son of God provided by the author of the
Q source and Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
The
Universe is rather complex, and physical reductionism is a definite
desire of many physicists who wish to explain the order and form of
the observable Universe upon the basis of extrapolating what the
'smallest' parts of the Universe do, where they came from and so on.
The assumption of such theories combining math and observation is
that the laws of the universe, if laws can be said to exist, can be
known, are a production of the smallest particles themselves (that is
the smallest parts of atoms, quarks, strings, membranes and so forth
bring their own legal codes with them) and can be traced back to an
initial origin because the laws haven't changed regarding the
behavior of the smallest particles and hence the past of the
particles or loops can be calculated with a sufficiently capable
computer. Christians generally just have faith in God's creation of
the Universe because of the Word of God expressed through the Bible.
The
information that can be put into any given volume of space is thought
to be limited to the surface area of the volume. This evidently is
because concentrating information in some mass area, as information
at the most dense levels would produce so much gravity eventually
that a black hole would form and no information would escape its
'event horizon' or surface volume. That concept is predicated upon
the principal that any given area of space-time invariably must have
a gravitational field, and perhaps that space-time itself has a
gravitational field even though it may or may not be of zero-mass
itself.
In
a given volume of space-time without a gravitational field barring
other repulsive forces such as might create a hyper-inflating field
for itself at super-luminal speeds an infinite amount of information
may be stored, perhaps. An infinite amount of information in an
infinitely small space does seem imponderable yet that's the way the
cookie crumbles.
The
space-time of the Universe may allow space-time to slip into the
scuppers of extra-dimensions deleting certain amount of time from the
universe, perhaps that's a cause for the accelerating speed of
expansion of the space-time of the Universe today. It is possible
that gravity may exist in more than the four dimensions of
space-time, and it may have an alternate dimensional time-field
associated with alternate dimensional gravitational fields in the
space of other dimensions than those of the standard known Universe.
The relationship of space-time in Universe1 to sub prime Universe1
values without apparent possibility of interaction as a traversable
field lends a time 'mortgage' to extra-dimensional borrowers
(dimensions) that may or may not return in space-time at
'book-marked' locations in the Universe in what would inevitably be
'the past'.
The
Uncertainty principle acting upon space-time in extra dimensions
would want an information 'data bank' of information of an infinite
and predetermined rate of all possible yet selected values such that
the right of return of elements of space-time would not conflict with
existing standard dimensional manifestations of space-time.
Information in dimensional constructs should be traversable faster
than light by information unrestricted by gravitational field values.
Reason
is a cognitive elaboration of inward dialog evolved from existential
processing of sense data in motion and temperature. Form and
substance are interpreted by the mind and it is with the development
of an artist's perspective that the mind expands its awareness of
external yet implicit relations in nature some of which become
modeled by mathematical ideas such as non-Euclidean Riemannian
geometry. Reason and logic are synonymous and were formally developed
by Aristotle and Frege amongst others.
Symbolic
logic and set theory reinforced philosophical notions about theory of
knowledge and its relationship to reality. Though reality is
perceived in cosmology through a fuzzy frosted glass of
incompleteness phenomenally, reasoning people still try to get their
feet on the bottom of the ocean of eternity that encompasses the
Universe. If cosmology theory has 'solid ground' to stand on the
faithless feel better while those of faith have a relativity faith
based on God as Jesus Christ that neutralizes the need for a material
framework for the Universe besides God. That relativity theory about
cosmology for Christians serves well in tolerance today for the
ambiguous plethora of cosmology theories available today; Christians
may find one theory interesting for the time being yet not 'sign off
on it' and thus be ready to adjust to the next set of cosmological
physics theories issued in the following week.
Faith
is essential about belief that the Universe has an Author named God.
Reason supports faith in adducing proofs of the miraculous nature of
the Universe, of which so little can be known with certainty beyond
those articles of faith provided by God through the Bible.
The
Universe is believed to have been 'spoken' into existence from
nothing by God/Jesus Christ. Quantum cosmology entails the
possibility that quantum tunneling let the Universe appear instantly
from nothing, literally. Contemporary cosmology offers dozens of
supervening possibilities regarding the creation of the Universe even
beyond Big Bang Theory.
The
Protoevangelium-first
occurrence of the idea of redemption from the fall is said to occur
in the garden itself with the mention of the bruising of the head of
the serpent. The good news and covenant relationships grow
simultaneous with the experience of mankind.
Faith
in God for Christians and the correlation of references in scripture
to the creation of the Universe with ongoing cosmological
investigations by scientists allows simple classifications of
parallel, complementary and/or independent isn't simply a matter of
overcoming Wittgenstein's linguistic paradoxes in the indeterminacy
of translation created by historically separate semantics, it is a
matter of comprehending that God hasn't defined His works entirely
within ontological terminology of created, contingent Universe
concepts that science has understood in part; instead nominal yet
important historical descriptions in as transcendent language as
possible for humans according to His purposes set analogies of
creation out in the book of Genesis. The amazing thing is that they
aren't inconsistent with probable courses of cosmological etiologies
understood today as simultaneous possibilities amidst possibilities.
Humanity sees through a glass darkly and faith is required of the
rest.
The
neo-Platonist philosopher Plotinus developed Plato's ideas about
philosophical realism to an extant that understanding of what lies
beyond the material and evident Universe could be understood.
Physicists researching quantum cosmology pursue the same goals in
understanding what can create the Universe from nothing, if time
exists apart from space dimensions and predates the creation of the
Universe or if space-time was created together from nothing without
any sort of surrounding time.
Philosophers
and Christian theologians have researched the subjects of
cosmological interests for millenia while physicists and
mathematicians were simultaneously measuring and calculating apparent
dimensions of the cosmos. New forms of math developed by scientists
or mathematicians provided the idea that space-time is warped and of
a non-smooth topology without certain boundaries while time is
warped. From that point of view God's creation of the Universe in six
days or six time periods seems practical.
The
age of the beginning of life on Earth made by multiplying the life
span's of the antediluvians with the value of one day to God equals a
thousand years to man approximates the age of the actual biological
evolution of multi-cellular life on Earth. If one thing about the
physics of the Universe can be certain it is that uncertainty is an
intrinsic aspect of it.
While
God is absolute and unbound by definitions from a secular perspective
no more than quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle of
mechanics is, with super-positioning of knowledge and super-string
information being equally possible for God and the universal unified
field entailing the energy-mass of the Universe and space-time human
reasoning upon the basis of faith about the nature of the Universe
can provide interesting insights in the 'what it is' of the Universe
such as it has done for individuals such as Augustine and Newton in
prior generations.
Augustine
wrote, "Then
assuredly the world was made, not in time, but simultaneously with
time."
The unification conceptually of space-time by Einstein is a sort of
proof of that principal perhaps. Christians can always reason about
the nature of the Universe, and all the works of God referred to in
the Bible and look for contemporary correlations of interpreted
points of epistemology and metaphysics.
The
Universe grew from the smallest seed to provide shelter for all
manner of living things, yet ossification of Christian worship forms
and church structure set in as soon as the Apostles were gone. Martin
Luther wrote, “All Christians are priests, and all priests are
Christians. Worthy of anathema is any assertion that a priest is
anything else than a Christian." After the crucifixion of Jesus
by the Temple priesthood and the destruction of the Temple later
another human cultural tradition of hierarchical priesthoods grew to
resume the authority structure of a few upper class leaders instead
of the egalitarian priesthood of believers as Jesus seemed to want to
move to in reformation of the way people relate to God. Will
Christians ever generally develop the faith even for that simple
step?
The
Church today could use a priesthood of believers organizational and
design leader. Martin Luther believed that all Christians were to be
priests in distinction to hierarchical priesthoods that continue an
exclusive elitist politick.
A
priesthood of believers would be something like groups of twelve with
peer status sharing their weekly Sunday meeting roles in majority
speaker, minority speaker, weekly reports and song leader. With this
sort of fundamental organization with perhaps three ranks of novice,
regular and elder status the Church would have just one high priest
(Jesus Christ) and a priesthood of believers sharing in evangelical
and missions work and so forth.
Many
church needs should be supported by these dedicated groups, and
perhaps Churches would be full with 144 members. I prefer they meet
in monolithic domes sitting about round tables.
With
such a squad structure churches should hopefully be able to be more
supportive of medical and other group needs with contracts to
Christian services to provide things the group cannot. The
composition of each group should be as balanced as possible
occupationally speaking.
This
is a radical change to the way things are now done-Protestant
Churches are set up like little franchise Catholic Churches
supporting a hierarchical priesthood. Jesus ended the hierarchical
temple priesthood form with his death and resurrection.
A
2nd reformation would be useful.
A
priesthood of believers could be evolved from existing church
structures to make a more egalitarian and Biblically correct for of
Christian organization better able to evangelize and express the will
of God so far as I understand the New Testament.
The
old testament has a temple worship form something similar to other
priestly hierarchies of other faiths...paradoxically Muslims have an
imam that isn't actually a priest but is instead just a group leader
of merit.
A
priesthood of believers is described somewhat in the book of Hebrews
by the apostle Paul, and of course Jesus said that Christians would
be as servants rather than as those placing themselves first.
Of
course regular Christian priesthoods have served to bring the message
of the gospel over the millenia, however in this populist era all
should be more equal and serve equal roles as servants able to serve
other Christians first and then others as is useful or consistent
with Biblical doctrine.
Here
is a brief organizational structure example...
Christians
in a church would be organized in groups of 12. Maybe a useful Church
would have 12 groups of 12. Each worship day one elder would have a
15 minute time to talk or sermonize, a few hymns could be sung, and
everyone else in the group could have five minutes to talk or not.
Alternate weeks would have a new elder selected to sermonize.
Perhaps
it would be better to have half of the 11 non-sermonizers talk for 10
minutes each instead of for 5 minutes. Each would be expected to
share some learning from the Bible and perhaps to discuss individual
work assignments.
Tithing
could continue yet no one would be paid. The money would be invested
in insurance for group associates and physical maint. Each member
would have their own outside job, yet each group would so far as
possible provide fairly free services to other members when and how
useful.
In
the priesthood of believers all would be trained to be front-line
working Christians trained to speak in small groups, evangelize
outside when possible, and be a Christian educator. The only position
women would not take, in order to be consistent with the Bible, would
be that of the 15-minute sermon leader, who would also lead the
responsive group reading. Since he doesn't get paid, and the position
changes no one should care, and the members should have plenty of
other meaningful work to do.
New
Christians could be brought into a new member group, or shifted into
groups without twelve people and so forth. This is just an idea that
I believe would help to establish more Christians in presently
non-Christian areas that would bring more Christians out of backseat
roles and into the forefront of actual Biblically directed Christian
living and so forth.
-
Light
of the World
John
9: 4-5
4 I
must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night
cometh, when no man can work. 5 As
long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.
The
Anthropic Principle and Reversals of Anthropomorphism
There
may be a tendency for some humans in the modern era to attribute to
humanity characteristics of God in a way that is hubris and
unrealistic regarding stature of attainment and achievement. Such an
effort may account for the theory that Universes might be
artificially created by super-beings in parent Universes with very
high technology instead of by God. One hopes that human science might
be able to create universes for-themselves some day, yet the universe
is temporal and God is eternal. Salvation through Jesus Christ-the
light of the world, is what we aim for.
Theoretical
human production of universes is variant recursion of the first cause
principle. Some adherents of the theory of tech procreation of
Universes stipulate the likelihood that God may have created the very
first Universe. The parameters of creation still fall within the
simultaneity and absolute non-temporal time values of the Creator/God
it should be noted. All points in time are equidistant from the
eternity of a non-temporal deity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AnthropicPrinciple
This
universe/throne may be one of many mansions that God has created. In
the language of Arthur C. Clarke; God may have something very
wonderful in mind for the future of the saved.
Resurrection
Points
The
neo-Platonist philosopher Plotinus wrote about how The One might have
emanated the Universe. Actually the creation of the Universe is a
great mystery for finite minds. Cosmological physicists think about
the topic all the time and sometimes irreverently regarding the order
of Genesis from the Bible. We trust in God though for creating
Universes more than ourselves. Scientists regard its origin sometimes
as a substance that just naturally arose from nothing and/or without
cause in some cases finding mathematical logic to support a recycling
perpetual recurrent universe.
I
too wonder how the One might have created a Universe that arrives as
a great tree of life. The idea of the unmoved mover seems best; the
Creator of the Universe Himself has no cause as He always existed.
Without the mathematics that provides so many excellent sets,
infinite series, differential and integral fields to structure models
of Universe from, I am left to poetics and prose.
Jesus
mentioned in John 11 some interesting points when he set about
resurrecting his dead friend Lazarus. Let me point out what Jesus
said about the light not being in man.
The
friend of Jesus had died, and Jesus talked of the light not being in
man hence he stumbles in the dark. Jesus was addressing four or
five points simultaneously it appears. He was talking about the
problem of sin in mankind (people had sought to stone him) and
referring to those people as being in spiritual darkness who did not
see the light of the world (God) Jesus Christ, and he was also
referring to his dead friend Lazarus who had not life in himself any
more (a lack of quarks or strings configured to produce life),
furthermore, being dead, Lazarus could not negotiate in the world
beyond without resurrection. That was a hint of the spiritual world
to come in which actual spiritual resurrection occurs better than
physical resurrection such as would be done for Lazarus soon.
Apologetics
for Eschatology
With
several eschatological systems in the world derived from various
weltanshauung such as Science-atheist, Taoist, Buddhist, Hindu,
Muslim and so forth it is worth including brief commentary upon
elements of those systems. It is difficult to wriote today advocating
for a articular point of view such as Christian eschatology of a
post-millennial kind without an awareness that the general reader is
assaulted by innumerable contra-indicative messages that 'frame
up'
the gospel in order to create a certain bias against it. With that in
mind it is something of a pleasure to make a try at sufficient
erudition in interdiciplinary fields and comparative religion to
attempt to respond to some of the issues raised a priori.
It
might be adequate for a Christian to be somewhat indolent about
replying to cultured despisers of Christianity or to offer a
recognition to people of other faiths that one has considered
elements of there beliefs as well in order to point out how or why
they may have come to differ, and even try to provide a way to return
to the Lord for them so far as possible. Yet Christian activism
arises from the spirit of the Lord I would think with the enthusiasm
for the gospel that brings. Within a multi-cultural world Christian
writers ought to try to bring a multi-cultural approach to their
works so far as possible, though keeping in mind that there isn't
anything wrong implicitly in
people
being who they are.
Hindus
believe that Brahmin lives 311 trillion year, 30 billion years. The
material content of the Universe every 4 to 8 billion years is
recycled. Each of those ages or Kalpas is quartered into periods
called yugas. The present yuga is ruled over by the demon Kali
(instead of the goddess Kali) and is characterised by wickedness and
a decline in morality.
Thus
the Hindu religion shares a kind of eschatological pessimism with the
pre-millenialists. Since this yuga is the last of the cycle in the
Kalpa and ruled over by a demon it is not the tribulation period and
that of the anti-Christ.
Those
these Hindu had initially little in common with the Jewiish
tradition-plainly the Aryans may have had contact with Abraham at
some point, or at least religious influence when Abraham migrated
north to the future Israel.
The
Hindu religions originated with those of the Aryas from
Iran-Afghanistan maybe 1500 B.C.
In
100 B.C.E. a Hindu sage wrote; “Social
status depends not upon your accomplishments, but in the ownership of
property; wealth is now the source of virtue; passion and luxury are
the sole bonds between spouses; falsity and lying are the conditions
of success in life; sexuality is the sole source of human enjoyment;
religion, a superficial and empty ritual, is confused with
spirituality”—Vishnu
Purana (source wikipedia article on Hindu eschatology)
Plainly one may read that and consider
Thorsten Verblen's 'Theory of the Leisure Class' or consider the 1%
concentration of wealth and regard similarities in human nature
except that addiction to power and the material security are equally
important values.
It
is possible that Zoroaster was also influenced by the same religious
inspiration source-element as the Aryas and perhaps Abraham.
Evidently some Zoroastrians anticipate that one Saoshyant
will appear some day in a verisimilitude of a pre-mill idea of the
second coming of Christ. (source wikipedia). Buddhists have a concept
of a second Buddha that will end death and create bliss and etc.
according to one Buddhist eschatology article. From what I know about
the original Buddha that is a far cry from the ideal of nothingness
as nirvana that be taught. The 'second Buddha' is named; 'Maitreya'.
Germans had an entirely secular return of Barbarossa-yet I suppose
that every people has some ideal figure in cultural history whom
could restore a golden age. Scientist might view a clone of the late
Carl Sagan as a kind of atheist demi-urge that could bring an era of
scientific atheist behaviorism to human culture before populist doom
from resource consumption ends the good times for us all.
The
Lord however appeared unto Abraham and developed the Jews as the
people amidst whom the Lord would be born. The end of peoples and
the end of civilizations does not mean the end of spiritual increase.
It is notable that though Zoroastrianism in Iran was largely
annihilated by the arrival and purges of Islam, none of the
civilizations that developed spiritually in the same era circa
1500-1000 B.C.E. have ceased to exist. Individual human life
discontinues while the kingdom of God grows. In some senses the most
practical end time is that which occurs when one physical dies and
transitions to the spiritual realm of God.
Li
Hong was a Taoist mystic and messianic figure that Taoist thought
would arrive to reconcile heaven and Earth aright. A wikipedia
article on Taoist eschatology reports that the legends concerning Li
Hong started in the Han dynasty and continued until the 5th
century A.D. with several Taoist rebellions occurring periodically
until then under people named 'Li'. That of course hasn't anything to
do with Robert E. Lee the confederate general. Rebel leaders can have
the same morpheme surname and be unrelated.
It
is plain that some political and religious leaders sought to unify
and consolidate their powers t include rolling back the tides on
order like King Canute to just over heave and Earth like the
self-declaring gods known as Roman Emperors. Jesus notably and
exceptionally said to Pilate that his kingdom is not of this world.
Even
so it is interesting to consider the scientific viewpoint about the
Universe and how it changes (runs down in organization through
entropy). While scientists might consider a singularity of all of the
mass of the Universe as the most organized state of existence-when it
is smaller than the head of a pin they fail to consider that the
sublime spirit creating all need less size or dimension at all in
order to exist for-Himself.
Select
Scientific End Paradigmata
(Consider
that the end might be like a 'z' point on a line segment that appears
to reverse direction, polarity or become the point of a new rhythmic
beat of a new song.)
Stephen
Hawking postulated concepts to explain mechanics of black holes.
Recently a Dr. Mathur has postulated super-string-concepts in a black
hole mechanics paradigm. Being inexpert on the subject my
contemplation of the issues raised points that probably would be
insubstantial to the knowledgeable.
Super-string
theory and essentially M-Theory postulates ten dimensions. How can
gravity 'wrap up' the other non-standard four dimensions beyond the
event horizon into a black hole? Black holes were theorized with just
the standard four dimensions weren't they, at least initially?
It
does not seem reasonable that gravity, one
of the standard forces, should have an ability to attract other,
micro dimensions. The mechanics of inter-dimensional interactions
might more rightly account for the allocation of micro-dimensions.
How
would one biggest string account for all of the future deployments of
micro-dimensions and string/contents without a primary
pre-determinism? In reading of the works of Augustine, the
pseudo-Dionysus and certain other early philosopher-theologians in a
history by S.J. Coppleston I found many speculations about the early
conditions of the Universe seemed to have similarities with logical
points about the Universe.
Human
knowledge of time, matter and motion is imperfect and changing...it
does not apprehend the way of God "interminabilis
vitae tota simul et perfecto possessio".
In
the second century ad Christian theologians believed that the
Universe was created along with space-time from nothing. That is they
believed that the physical Universe was created by God where no
Universe had been before. Cosmologists since the big bang theory
originated have tended to have the same opinion, although pre-bang
explanations were left for scientists within a mist until recently.
In
recent years physicists have evolved new cosmological theories that
have attempted to unify Einstein’s relativistic Universe with
quantum mechanical explanations of matter. A standard model of
cosmology was developed that placed a big bang from a singularity
some 13.3 billion years before present. The math and physics to
explain the expansion of space-time to its vast size of 13.3 billion
light years was incomplete and left gaps in the theories.
The
four primary physical forces of the Universe and their origin from a
unified field at the singularity with one force were incomplete as
well. Brilliant physicists such as Stephen Hawking and others
examined and conjectured about theoretical and indirectly observable
astronomical objects such as black holes in order to fill in the gaps
of understanding.
A
ten-dimensional super-string or M Theory was created to explain many
of the inexplicable appearances of matter in the Universe and its
origin. The four observable dimensions of space-time in Einstein’s
paradigm and the convertible mass-energy it was comprised of were
postulated to be the surface elements of six micro-dimensions of
sub-Planck length extent filled not with particles but instead with
vibrating ‘strings’ that extruded into the four standard
dimensions seemingly as solid objects.
Some
physicists have described the behavior of quantum mechanical
particles as wavelets instead of as particles or waves. Strings that
vibrate at various harmonic frequencies that seem in the standard
four dimensions to be quarks and other sub-atomic particles naturally
also give rise to the question ‘what are strings made of’. For
that I have no answer. Perhaps the philosopher and co-inventor of the
Calculus; Leibniz had an answer with his theoretical monads that were
perhaps like bubble thoughts in the mind of God. I haven’t a better
explanation.
Recently,
interesting developments have occurred in the field of physics and
cosmology. A Bose-Einstein condensate was formed in a solid for the
first time. Subjected to a pressure of 900 G (I believe it was) very
near the temperature of absolute zero, the atoms in the solid seemed
to blend into one single wave. Another development was a paper by a
Dr. Mathur in Nuclear Physics B. I read of the report in another
periodical.
Dr.
Mathur has suggested modifications to and developments beyond Stephen
Hawking’s theoretical work about how Black Holes emit radiate
energy through virtual particles. Dr. Hawking's paradigm does not
explain how information going into a black hole might not result in
the loss of information, known, I believe as Shannon entropy.
Here
I’ll sketch my notions about Dr. Mathur’s paradigm about the
structure of black holes that he has made based upon super-string
theory. Gravity increasing as mass increases falling into the event
horizon of a black hole was though to break apart atoms and particles
with the information of their structure being thus lost violating a
principle of physics about its conservation.
If
a super-string model of matter is used the base state of the
particles might instead simply be strings that compile or are
deposited analogous to the way geological materials are deposited
over time, in an order that would preserve the information content or
structure of the particles that had been crunched or downsized.
Virtual
particles at the edge of the event horizon might still be outsourced
allowing matter to escape to the non-black hole space, though I could
not guess if that would be in some order regarding the strings inside
the hole. If so in theory one might be able to learn something from
the virtual particles outsourced about their origin. Inside the black
hole super-strings would form as a giant ball of string. Yet under
such intense pressure, what would become of the super-string mass
itself and its extra dimensions? Would they, like the Bose-Einstein
condensate in the solid recently produced in a laboratory, transform
themselves into one transverse wave of unknown dimensions? What would
delimit the space-time of the one super-string wave within a black
hole?
Dr.
Mathur’s theory about super-string behavior inside black holes
obviously has generated consideration about what an initial
singularity that might have given rise to a big bang and thence
inflated the Universe in rapid expansion increasing in space-time and
believed now to be accelerating at an increasing rate of speed would
be like if instead of having a mysterious enigma called a singularity
it was instead an extremely tightly bound ball of super-strings that
when expanded produced an orderly universe at the greatest observable
scale.
If
the ball of super-string is used neither black holes or the initial
cosmic singularity would need to have had a singularity at their core
where all matter and time is condensed beyond physical theoretical
modeling structures. The one wave at the core of a cosmic singularity
in which all potential structures would be produced and upon which
all life would surf in time is a novel concept for cosmologists and
others to consider.
Other
theories of a pre-big bang have been created that place other macro
dimensions turning corners or moving down funnels into channels that
emerge through a singularity. Yet other theories have posited a
recursive universe in which it inflates, then contracts to re-expand
something like a yo-yo Universe. The new theories in cosmology
present a cornucopia of ideas and tools for Christians to consider
when correlating and comparing the Biblical book of Genesis and its
remarks about creation with what is known and theorized about the
natural Universe.
Several
of the theories of recent cosmology seem to be constructed upon
premises that may never be directly concluded or verified because of
time and dimensionality conditions.
Christians
too have a wealth of experience and revelation upon which to
construct or believe premises that will not be conclusively answered
at least for some, until after their lives depart from the natural
Universe. The premises require faith that the conclusion in heaven
will be true. Scientific cosmologists base premises generally upon
structures that will produce testable conclusions in the natural
Universe, give or take a few dimensions.
Micro-dimensional
‘Scuppers’ and the Bottomless Pit
Not
being a physicist, my wording of these questions will have parameter
inconsistencies with standard physics contexts I should think-yet I
will write these several ideas anyway. Essentially I had an interest
in why it is that particles become increasingly heavy as they
approach the speed of light, and infinitely heavy at light speed thus
barring more acceleration. What is it that would be added to, for
instance, a hydrogen atom that was subject to an accelerating force?
Then
of course considering string and M-Theory artifacts that have
filtered down to the general public, I wondered if the criterion that
could provide answers to my question might not be a dimension
protocol that affected particles and waves.
Salvador
Dali painted an interesting conceptual picture named ‘The
Persistence of memory’ that had a scuppers as one might have found
in a British lifeboat at the bottom of a landscape over which was
draped upon a branch a melting down clock; memory perhaps would drain
off in time into the scuppers.
Are
the micro sub-Planck length theoretical dimensions posited in
M-Theory just artificial ‘scuppers’ that contain particles too
small to be measured in the standard four dimensions? Are the smaller
dimensions simply artificial concepts developed to explain a
difficult concept such as Einstein used to explain how gravity worked
upon all objects or particles (except anti-gravity) within a
gravitational field equally when he compared the effects to ‘curved’
space-time?
Of
course there is ‘real’ substance to the smaller dimensions in
that larger particles or possibly waves too cannot enter into them.
That is large particles and waves are not small particles and waves
and cannot ‘run’ with them anymore than a giant basketball player
could fit through the wing window of a Porsche. Very small sub-plank
length strings have a realm of ‘behavior’ so small that only they
can exist in that context.
Yet
why is it that particles accelerated to the speed of light become
infinitely heavy? Could it be compared to that Porsche that if
traveling a low speed or no speed parked in a lot won’t get traffic
tickets, but if it goes faster and faster it will be given tons of
traffic tickets becoming heavier? Is it that as a four-dimensional
realm particle travels at faster toward the speed of light it’s
string base traveling the in the micro extra dimensions is collecting
more baggage or tickets at an accelerating pace that become infinite
toward the speed of light?
Or
is it that as it passes through more of the super-string
‘scuppers’/dimensions at a faster pace it’s grounding or base
becomes associated nearly simultaneously with more of the micro
dimensions and it becomes mass of ‘infinite weight’ comparable
perhaps to a magnetized object that increases it’s realm of contact
to an infinite field?
Could
the fact of mass be a phenomenal association of existent
four-dimensional waveforms with aspects of the micro-dimensions that
are ‘stickier’ than those of energy? Is energy and are photons
traveling at light speed and that have nearly no mass as waveforms or
string vibrations transparent to the micro-dimensional fields of
super-string theory because of phenomenal characteristics of
waveforms or particles accelerated into acting as waves in
space-time?
I
will leave off these questions here, with the comment that in part I
wondered about the infinite weight characteristic and interesting
points in common between black hole singularities with infinite
weight and mass and those of very small particles that acquire
infinite mass accelerated to the speed of light. Also, the beast that
ascends out of the bottomless pit that is mentioned in the Biblical
book of the Revelation is referred to somewhere perhaps in chapter 18
as that which was, and is not, yet is. That ‘bottomless pit’
could perhaps be a reference to the infinite curvature of space time
at a black hole, and it’s possibilities of time travel with the
paradoxes generated thereof. Black hole connections/wormholes to
birth or intersect other universes have been theorized.
Could
gravity intruding into the standard four dimensions yet mostly
iceberging below the surface as a characteristic of the
micro-dimensions then be a quality or aspect of the micro-dimensions
or particles themselves that seem to warp or fold space time most
directly?
The
way that quantum super-positioning acts to have particle/waves at all
probable worldlines or places in the Universe that are selected to
collapse when measured in the Heisenberg uncertainty context seems
another interesting aspect or phenomenality of the relationship of
space-time, gravity and waveforms to their configuration in the very
small realm of super-string waveforms and branes posited by
super-string and m-theory.
The
cumulative effects or phenomenal appearances of particle waves, mass
and probabilistic existence as well as travel of photons perhaps as
continuously sampled massless or nearly massless probability
phenomena arising in relation to sub-micro dimensional protocol
provides much food for thought-and of course the interesting notion
of the beast that could lurk one day in an infinite quantum gravity
pit or wormhole to another universes or time.
Micro Black Holes,
Particle Accelerators & EMG Mass Drivers
II
Timothy 4 "3For the time will come when men will not put up with
sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather
around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears
want to hear."
Since
the fiscal fiasco attempting to build a super-conducting
super-collider in Texas, physics gurus have had more time to develop
additional theories about quantum mechanics. A recent idea is the
possibility of creating short-lived micro-sized black holes with
existing particle accelerators in order to observe the effects they
have on other particles as they deteriorate.
It is an interesting notion of course.
Black holes are supposed to be the longest lasting large-scale and
presently recognizable features of the Universe in some distant
future of 1000 times a trillion trillion trillion years or so, until
they have leaked out all of their mass through radiation in the
Hawking process.
Page
114 of 'The Five Ages of the
Universe' mentioned the
point that there are three basic sorts of black holes; there are the
ones of modest size resulting from collapsed stars, there are the
ones at the center of galaxies that grow very large even to the size
of 4 AU (astronomical units), and there are very small ones of fewer
than a hundredth of a millimeter in size left that were theoretically
created along with much else in the earliest micro-seconds of the
Creation. It is that sort of Black Hole that some physicists hope to
create on Earth. Will they inadvertently preempt the apocalypse in
doing so?
Of
course scientists have assured that creating micro-black holes will
be entirely safe. It does seem that some factors that weren't
understood properly in quantum and string or M-Theory might give the
pit bulls of the quantum world an opportunity to bite and devour the
comparatively trivial mass of the Earth in a heartbeat as they revert
to form consistent with their character.
Some
of this exciting physical research might be better put off for a few
years until a more advanced manned space program permits the
construction of 'safe' research facilities. For the black hole
production and research facility I'd suggest the Martian moon Phobos
as a place to locate a super-conducting super-collider 20 years from
the present.
Why
Phobos? Because it's fairly small and if consumed loss of mass would
not immediately destroy the Earth nor perhaps Mars. Additionally
Phobos has very, very low gravity (one can easily hop around it in
miles long bounds) and is very cold. The low temperature of Phobos
would make the installation of low-temperature super-conducting lines
cheap. Phobos also has enough size to support a good-sized
accelerator with a modified configuration.
The
federal government really does need to invest in the development of
an Earth to high orbit mass driver in order to expedite space access
quantitatively. Electro-magnetic accelerators have been advocated for
decades, perhaps even a hundred years by forward thinking
philosophers of space travel.
Robert
Goddard, experimenting with rockets in Roswell New Mexico in the
1930's, had long before proposed federal funding for an
electro-magnetic subway from New York to Boston--I'm sure he had
ulterior motives of space-travel.
The
lunar landing and evacuation module was able to lift off from the
moon with such a small rocket propellant supply because lunar gravity
is just a sixth of the Earth's. The moon is a good location for
assembling future manned space missions with easy return to the
Earth. The primary obstruction and cost difficulty is the lack of a
high-quantity mass driver to boost modules from Earth to high orbit.
The federal government has built SDI 'rail guns' that proved the
feasibility; a mass driver need be larger and accelerate more slowly
over several miles. Overcoming the few seconds of atmospheric
friction can also be overcome-perhaps by a leading dummy module
taking the brunt of the heat.
One
should work for the future with faith.
These
very small black holes that might in principle be artificially
created have another theoretical use that is quite remarkable. ‘The
Five Ages of the Universe’ (page 180) mentioned the possibility of
using black holes as ‘sinkholes’ that erupt right out of out
Universe’s space-time continuum altogether and become another
universe in it’s initial phase that increases.
It
would perhaps be possible for physicists or clever computers to
design an ephemeral black hole packed with a design that would shape
the nature and the future of the new Universe that ultimately would
be ‘disconnected’ from our own. It is interesting that physics
professionals may imagine in theory Universes that could be the
product of intelligent design, yet so far as public discussions go,
they seem to be unable to grasp the idea that the present Universe
already is the product of intelligent design.
Many
of the cosmological operations theories seem to have parallels in the
Bible. Certainly theologians have been discussing ideas about
infinity and the characteristics of God, or the nature of God, for
millennia. The idea of infinity and eternity emerge in the history of
modern thought as theological subjects contemporarily with
philosophical researches. Even Democratis had the atomist idea more
than two millennia before scientists of the 19th
century did.
The
tremendous space-time alteration to mass-energy and space-time are
anticipated by some Biblical paradigms. A Red dwarf star approaching
the solar system one day to bring on some of the events of the
tribulation would be easy to associate with Bible prophecy.
Why Religion?
One
might ask what the etymology of religion is. The word religionem
was a Latin word meant to repeat or bind fast, perhaps to venerate.
Yet the word allegiance also is similar. A liege or liege lord had
feudal origins of France and England...again possibly through the
Latin and more ancient indo-European languages.
Why
would people have one religion? Well the answer would implicitly be
in the word. It would be to have one repeating resort to a particular
belief instead of to several.
Have
people always had religion, or perhaps been monotheistic instead of
being polytheistic? The answer is no. Paganism and idol worship was
rampant, pervasive and customary in times past. In parts of the world
people still believe in many deities.
Obviously
a certain amount of social inertia exists in worldly organizations
that draw people into participation through reasons beside
self-determination. Personal belief made from one's own experience
and thought, or call by the Spirit would perhaps be more meaningful
to citizens of democratic states than coerced religions or theocratic
directives.
In
ancient times, and in modern times in Afghanistan during the Taliban
regime, people were required, even unwillingly to adore the main
deity of a state religion as the government described it. The Aztecs
required human sacrifice in a pervasive pagan religion maintained by
the state, yet the paganism of that culture permitted many pagan
deities drawn in from other peoples to coexist with their own
pantheon of idols and demiurges in the pagan worldview.
The
Roman Empire before Constantine's conversion also had a state
religion at times that permitted the induction of appropriate pagan
statues/representations of pagan scientific paradigms into their
particular cult of veneration. An excellent lightening god, or ocean
god, sunset god or doorway god might become popular and elevated to a
high place.
I
was reading an historical fiction book of the Aztecs that noted that
the planet the planet Venus was known to the Aztecs Quetzalcoatl. It
is interesting if true.
Religions
are not simply interchangeable products and services such as
Americans and modern consumers might be familiar with in store
shelves. It isn't simply a matter of selecting the best product, or
assembly of products. The etymology, or origin of religions,
historically has real contexts that determine the nature of each.
Sure
it is implicit upon an individual to determine for himself what he
beliefs and regards as true. At least in a western civilization
context that was the point at least before broadcasters took up lying
as a natural right to increase political influence. Some would like
to decide for the public all the time what to believe.
Citizens
may have a re allegiance, or re liege ance to many forms of social
conduct from watching a favorite morning news show or following
commercial football to adoration of the Dow Jones Industrial reports
several times a day.
Many
Christians believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the way
unto eternal life with God, exclusively.
Even
so some would evaluate religion as if they were comparing products
from which they need only select the best value, if they think it has
value at all in the modern mass-marketed, mass-communicated world
order.
About Truth Theory
and Elements Regarding the Phenomenality of Life
I
am a believer that Jesus Christ is God and is the sole way to receive
meaningful eternal life. The world is a temporal place and the Spirit
must draw one into a right relationship while the day exists and
before eternal darkness falls. The question is momentous for one's
eternal destiny. One may err, form one's own definite ideas yet get
that undesirable verdict at the Day of Judgment.
There
are many philosophers that have written about life. One may spend
one's days in numerous ways that will lead nowhere. Some philosophy
purposefully supports an examination of what is yet does not seek to
provide eternal answers, nor metaphysical answers. One may become
somewhat adrift within worldviews or Weltanschauungs that are
literary, interesting and ultimately on the wrong road.
There
are many ways to form true opinions. One may choose what course of
learning one decides as opportunities support. Of course some
knowledge may be pre-destined or not. Some answers may be learned and
other perhaps given by grace.
It
is possible to accept the authority, expertise or experience of
someone else whom has investigated all of the religious and
philosophical subjects so far as possible within one lifetime, trust
their determination and be content with that or not for oneself.
Alternately one investigates all the aforementioned for oneself, and
perhaps reaches a different or the same conclusion. There are many
criteria for making decisions. Regardless of what I write I should
reasonably suppose a reader might not believe or act as I have
suggested with equal possibility as belief or agreement.
Paul
(the Apostle) was sent to Rome and executed after a few years in
captivity. He had written letters to Churches while in captivity and
before. Much of the New Testament is made up of Paul's letters. In
one letter he relates that Luke is with him. He asks a church to send
Mark along with some parchments and books. I believe Paul was asking
for writings about Jesus Christ and his life...the Old Testament
should have been available from any synagogue in Rome.
Mark
and Luke were two of the writers of the Gospel of Jesus Christ books.
Since they were all together that is perhaps where they correlated
their data and got the idea for writing their own accounts of the
"Gospel of Jesus Christ according to". Paul was probably
executed ten or twenty years after Jesus was crucified. The Churches
including those in Rome kept Paul’s writing.
Perhaps
the last living Apostle and writer of the Revelation was John. John's
Gospel book has a somewhat different style and theological technique.
A somewhat older individual wrote it. Since none of the books of the
New Testament mention the destruction of Jerusalem in ad 70 it is
reasonable to suppose they were completed before that time. Jesus
made the only mention of the destruction in ad 32 or 33 perhaps when
he predicted the event.
Peter's
books seem very much like what Peter would have written before he too
was crucified as the cornerstone of the Church. James the Brother of
Jesus wrote an interesting book. Because these people were 'famous'
or well-known Christians the expanding early church kept their works
and supported their authoring I should guess.
Because
John was imprisoned on the prison isle of Patmos by the Romans
perhaps for being a Christian evangelist upsetting local
establishment synagogues or pagans, he would have escaped the
destruction of Jerusalem (500,000 people were killed approximately)
and had the opportunity to write the last book included in the
standard bible canon.
The
New Testament is the four gospel books, Paul's letters, The Acts of
the Apostles, Peter, James and John's letters, a theological work
name 'Hebrews' written by probably by Paul, and the Revelation.
Everything likely was written before Christians were driven
underground by the Persecutions of Nero and other Roman Emperors,
followed by the destruction of the Jewish Temple and Jerusalem.
The
New Testament occurs in a continuum of Jewish history...read the
genealogy of Jesus.
Muhammedism
is a syncretism. Buddhism is a philosophy something like stoicism
developed in India by Sakyamuni. Taoism is a nice naturalist
philosophy of a pre-scientific/scientific nature...etc. There is one
God, yet the Mohammedans have erred in believing they can get to
eternal life without Jesus Christ's atoning substitution.
Though
they worship God they have the belief that they are fit to precede
directly, without remission of their sins, into his presence.
Jesus/God alone can enable mankind to escape the eternal penalty for
original and subsequent sin.
What
if political authorities erased the word referring to 'the end' or of
eschatology? Would end times still exist?
There
are theories of truth, such as disquotation
theory, correspondence
and coherence theory, yet I
prefer the idea that the Creator of the Universe; God/Jesus Christ,
is Truth.
I
should mention here, incidentally, that science has come up with a
quantum cosmology term named ‘decoherence’
that is used to denote a
concept regarding a quantum change from a perfect and unaffected
waveform environment to one that is collapsed and ‘decohered’. It
hasn’t the same sort of meaning as that of coherence theory in a
teleology context, unless one were to say that moral relativism
occurs in a social process of decoherence from the absolute laws of
God as expressed in the Holy Bible-in which case each use has a
structural yet not content similarity.
Truth
is the notion that something actually matches up with what it is
posited to be...words and objects correspond accurately.
The
Creator of the Universe can be the only ultimate Truth as the source
of what is.
Sartre
wrote about 'use-truth', or organizational definitions of what is
true that serve their own purposes/needs/values. The Soviet Union for
example, or Nazi Germany, would make lies into the truth because it
served their interests best. Dictatorships often utilize.
'True
lies'.
Human
beings with phenomena of mind do exist and interpret what they
experience. Self-awareness is why people aren't thoughtless inanimate
objects...or it’s at least the prime difference. Self-awareness is
the simultaneous sensing of the world/sight/feelings etc. and thought
processing of it, such as depth perception, motion etc. It is a live
phenomenon of a soul in existence within the Universe and physical
forces (designed by God I believe).
One
might say that existence is truth, and call mind self-awareness as
truth perhaps. Truth however is not all that is, unless one
associates it with God and the Universe singularly.
Truth
is subjective and conditional in regard to its purpose. Human beings
and thought may also have false ideas and opinions about the world or
perceptions they have...it is the nature of the phenomenon of
mind-processing that it does err and have inaccuracies in
interpreting sense data in order to determine what does exist and how
it works.
Acts
2: 32 “This Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we are all
witnesses.” Luke wrote this of Jesus after resurrection about the
apostles and their experiences of Him.
Misc.
Eschatology Considerations
As
one of the reasons given in support of a first century context for
interpreting the Revelation Gentry gives the information that the
futurist, dispensationalist way of interpreting the Revelation
creates a persistent Christian despair about the present accompanied
by a rationalization that this world is doomed and given over to the
deus a machina of wickedness under the dark powers of Evil and that
Christians can look forward to the rapture taking them out of the
society of despond.. Of course one does not require a Christian
eschatology that interprets the Revelation within a
dispensationalist, futurist paradigm in order to have a pessimistic
outlook on world events and life in general. In fact atheists
continuously cite the evil and wickedness in the world as reasons
against the existence of God. For many atheists any possible Universe
created by God must be as Sugar Mountain with barkers and colored
balloons but no sort of accidens (not to misuse that Aristotelian
term but the error works rather well in this context).
R.A.
Torrey was a dispensationalist and well-meaning Christian writer.
Gentry is another and thus it seems evident that it is possible to
have different ideas about what the book of Revelation means and when
it was written. I believe that the fact that there are consequences
to taking one of the two positions mentioned here are significant
though.
Gentry
thinks that Christians with a gloomy dispensationalist viewpoint
awaiting a skyhook from Jesus to extract them out of the turmoils and
persecutions of the world become socially indolent or disengaged from
social constructive actions to a certain extent. That is they fail to
live up to their potential and responsibilities as citizens of a
democracy making improvements to the world. One wonders what the
position of the Puritans was on dispensationalism and futurism versus
convenantalism and preterism?
Apparently
the realistic immanentalism of John's prophecies written to the
churches of the day (the seven churches and other Christians in the
Revelation was lost to those living past the time of the destruction
of the Temple at Jerusalem and slaughter by a Roman legion of as many
as half a million Jewish inhabitants of Jerusalem circa 70 a.d.. That
is by the second century the real context for interpretation of the
Revelation was lost preponderantly. Maybe Martin Luther's observation
that the Revelation 'had a lot of straw' (as in too much for making
good bricks) was a sort of accurate insight in regard to making the
Revelation a futurist book out of a prophecy largely intended, or
immediately purposed to warn and correct, exhort, comfort and explain
to very challenging Christians soon to undergo extreme persecutions
what their status was and what the outcome would be. Even so the
Revelation does not implicitly exclude within Gentry's paradigm a
dual-purpose futurist paradigm of inaugurated eschatology. There is
difficulty in making certain uncertain terms with uncertain contexts
of initial use.
Mohammedan
eschatology seems founded in a futurist sort of misunderstanding of
the Revelation. Mohammad's father had been keeper of the Spirit
House-Kaaba-at Mecca with its vast assembly representing pagan
religions. When he was made an orphan and cast out of the good graces
of the pagan shrine in time he developed a revolutionary syncretistic
monotheism to take back his heritage and of course make the Kaaba a
shrine for one God with Mohammad as his exclusive prophet. Mohammad
must have surveyed the available religious material as best as he
could from Jewish and Christian sources and with the help of his
older wife hashed out a revolutionary personal monotheism different
enough that it could not be construed as representing the oppressive
Byzantine Orthodox variety of Christianity that had dominated much of
the ancient world in the day as a theocratic device. For Mohammad the
Revelation was futurist and the Jews were Christ killers as they were
to many of those of the dark and middle ages in Europe. Thus in
Mohammedan eschatology Jesus will return to wreak vengeance upon the
Jews and Muslims will help in a Holy Jihad against Jews comprising
Armageddon. It is interesting how wrong interpretation of literature
can have lasting consequences.
Jesus
didn't hold a grudge against the Jews not only because he was himself
Jewish-although Bobby Fischer seemed to hate the Jews though his
mother was evidently a full bloodied tribal Jew. Jesus advocated
forgiveness-even seven times seventy times forgiveness and is an
improbable choice to portray as returning to wreak vengeance on the
Jews. At the last judgment in fact all that one needs to do to be
saved is to have had faith in Jesus as Lord and to accept his grace
and atonement for one's sin. Then a kind of default choice lets a de
facto self-judgment by the lost correct the lost with eternal
punishment. Since Jesus is the only way-the soul bridge to God and
eternal life with the Lord, any other course leaves one in the
wilderness of perdition and doom in any possible Universe-a tough
choice to make.
Gentry's
book seems to focus very much on the identity of the beast and
providing support for a first century interpretation of the
Revelation. That's fine yet it is a little limiting on vision for
what the Revelation is an means to post-temple era Christians.
Some
Christians have a natural antipathy toward a partial preterist
interpretation of the Revelation inasmuch as accepting its veracity
would tend to indicate that even though the prophecy was 100%
accurate more or less, its fulfillment means that a greater error
occurred in Christian teleology/prophecy such that though everything
else happened Jesus Christ didn't return and thus the prophecy of the
Lord were falsified. Such a logically unnecessary proposition depends
on interpreting John's writing in such a way that the meaning of the
return and 'coming in the clouds' have particular meaning-values too.
On the latter point Gentry provides evidence for supporting a meaning
of 'coming in the clouds' within a Biblical context as meaning a time
of social uncertainty when God intervenes to change things. I think
it likely that the use of modern definitions for ancient ideas have
sometimes made inaccuracy in understanding by Biblical interpreters
occur. Gentry points out there are five meanings of the Greek word he
or 'ge' used in the Revelation 80 times and two used prevalently
means 'land' interchangeably with 'Earth'. That has implications for
the interpretation of certain cosmological inferences and
construction of interpretive paradigms for cosmology by modern
expositors.
Even
so it is incumbent upon interpreters of the Revelation to sort
through and determine what elements of the book might have futurist
relevance post-Temple destruction and to the present and/or future.
Seemingly
the seven hills of Rome representing the generic rather than
particularization of the beast could represent worldly government in
general in a sort of City of God versus City of Man context. Humanity
seems to pursue a developed social abstraction of a generalized human
being as a kind of social goal. In the U.S.A. under the corrupting
sway of an anti-democracy elitist broadcast media owned by a
corporate plutocratic invisible empire the pragmatic ideal of a
brainwashed mass-man without anti-corporatist or individual private
interests seems to be the actualization in reduced form of the
political goal of Thomas Hobbes philosophical treatise on the ideal
(British) government of the absolute dictator personifying the will
of the people. I suppose the idea of Nero and Rome as the beast of
Revelation might be the first formal expression of that ideal evil
empire in writing, although some might regard Plato's Republic and
its triumvirate of philosopher-kings as a fascist precursor of the
Great Satan mirroring the condition of the abstract will of the
people that the people are in return conditioned to be (at the will
of the dictator. The late dictator Saddam Hussein was a more recent
example of the form as are/is the string of post-second world war
North Korean Communist dictators).
Karl
Barth in his 'History of Christian Thought' noted what the
philosopher Ortega y Gasset later described as 'the revolt of the
masses' against elite rule in Europe. Barth was applying the concept
to an earlier period of transition leading to the French Revolution
wherein the ordinary became rulers inverting the concept of elite
rule. Karl Marx of course envisioned the concept of the dictatorship
of the proletariat. In fact in modern America within the paradigm of
atheist led scientism with anti-Christian values and even creeping
purges of Christianity from the U.S.A. along with national economic
sovereignty the modern media is a mooning colony conditioner of mass
social identity toward the revolutionary transition of Hobbes' all in
one absolute dictator to one Satanic presence in all subjects rather
than citizens). It is believed I would think that off-market economic
interests have antipathetic potential toward the collective financial
networks of globalism in which all must play or be marginalized. The
house always wins in Las Vegas and the same situation prevails with
preferred networks of concentrated wealth and power.
If
John's Revelation was fulfilled entirely in it's day of the first
century with the Neronic persecutions and the following destruction
of the Temple it is important not to dismiss the book capriciously
from future meaning or lasting examples of human conduct and ways of
being that can be learned and avoided or corrected.
Just
as one ought to learn the ethics of the Lord it is worth drawing
additional inferences from the life and times of the Lord and
Apostles about things not to do such as stoning adulterers or
crucifying persons critical of government incompetence and the
corruption of politicians and other officials of interest.
Eschatology
is a term referring to the study of end times-that is the end of the
world and Universe. Many cultures have end times prophecies as a kind
of counterpoint to creation stories. Science of course views
everything through a jaundiced eye of causality reasoning from within
the field of being. With logical investigations and mathematical
calculations one may infer the cosmological history of the Universe
and project the future of the Universe and even its end. Of course
science does not inevitable have all the facts hence it may miss out
on significant elements for calculating. In 1999 it was discovered
that the expansion of the Universe is increasing and has done so for
about 7 billion years instead of slowing down under the influence of
gravity. One might wonder how renewed, accelerated spatial expansion
occurs in-itself and how that effects the parameters of Einstein’s
General Theory of Relativity.
I
believe that historians of eschatology paradigms of diverse cultures
have classified the form of thee end times. Science has had a big
rip-in which the Universe’s space-time is torn apart by too rapid
of expansion. Science has also had a big crunch wherein the gravity
of the Universe slows the expansion and draws it toward contraction
and an end times singularity. There are also cyclical theories of
science wherein space-time field membranes periodically collide,
bounce and end and start a new cycle of expansion and evolution until
it wears down its energy in thermodynamic exhaustion. That would be
something like a ball thrown into the air that goes higher and higher
until its energy is spent whereat it falls to Earth, hits a
trampoline with energy in the skin of the trampoline that adds energy
to the returning ball for a bounce of equal height again.
Hindu
eschatology has time periods called kalpas. After the equivalent of
(x) billion years have passed Brahma wraps up the Universe and
recycles it. Brahma is the Christian equivalent of God.
Ragnarok
and other Nordic myths are included in the field of eschatology. Yet
as Christians we are concerned with the eschatology paradigm of the
Bible. Scholars of Bible studies necessarily make a kind of limited
systematic theology by deciding what valid eschatology references in
the Bible are and how they should be correlated with references in
other books of the Bible. There are several ways of interpreting the
collected eschatology materials producing different ideas about when
or how the end times scenarios eventuate.
In
end-times paradigms the world may end in flames, or flood, disaster
of various kinds with signs and portents, predicted circumstances and
indications that the end times are on the way.
Jesus
Christ of course said,
Matthew
24-4 “And Jesus answered and said unto them, Take heed that no
man deceive you.
5 For
many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive
many.
6 And
ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not
troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the
end is not yet.
7 For
nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and
there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers
places.
8 All
these are the beginning of sorrows.
9 Then
shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall kill you: and ye
shall be hated of all nations for my name's sake.
10 And
then shall many be offended, and shall betray one another, and shall
hate one another.”
The
temporal exstasis, the rate and nature of the passage of time, in
eschatological scenarios tends to be linear with the arrow of time
moving forward irreversibly along one dimension or direction. Some
theorists believe that if space-time can be regarded as a composite
of dimension entailing membrances that moving along or through each
other producing the phenomena of time for observers. They may also
postulate that the complexity of matter interactions make
reversibility of time theoretically possible yet practically not so.
It goes witout saying that the entire space-time field would need to
reverse rather than just a portion of it, and that seems unlikely,
not that one would ever notice if it did.
At
any rate, I mentioned the foregoing as a lead-in to pointing out that
Jesus Christ seems to bring a different paradigm to space-time
eschatology without necessarily advancing neither a cyclical nor a
linear time paradigm for end times. Even though the New Testament
does provide something of more usual end-times information, it also
has a different temporal axis, one based in the of that
is for-itself outside of space-time existing as a transcending fact
beyond the linear order of causality.
Yet
of the causal order the Lord was not short of knowledge. He mentioned
at one time to his contemporaries prophecies concerning himself and ,
yet they failed to understand then. The destruction of Jerusalem
would be an apocalyptic event, yet not that of the entire world,
unless of course one interpreted the resurrection of the Lord as the
most important eschatological event-the end of temporal history as
the main place of meaning-with the new emphasis shifting to the
church and the kingdom of God-though the temporal line runs on for a
time or time and a half, a kalpa or a trillion years…like something
of a cul de sac.
Jesus
said;
Matthew
16-1 “The Pharisees also with the Sadducees came, and tempting
desired him that he would shew them a sign from heaven.
2 He
answered and said unto them, When it is evening, ye say, It will
be fair weather: for the sky is red.
3 And
in the morning, It will be foul weather to day: for the sky
is red and lowring. O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the
face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the
times?
4 A
wicked and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there
shall no sign be given unto it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas.
And he left them, and departed.”
One
then considers that Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 A.D.
Heaven may
have a different physics, a different field, or even a spiritual
foundation with fundamentally new structure of existence. From what
Jesus said here about marriage, it seems that temporal thermodynamics
might be absent from heaven.
Matthew-29 “Jesus
answered and said unto them, Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures,
nor the power of God.
30 For
in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage,
but are as the angels of God in heaven.
31 But
as touching the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read that which
was spoken unto you by God, saying,
32 I
am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob?
God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.”
Eschatology
has many Judeao-Christian and even Muslims interpretations. I will
briefly consider a few more..
Christian
eschatology is a large field concerned with learning when the second
coming of Christ and end of the present temporal world order will
occur. Some of the basic fields for interpreting the Revelation
and apocalyptic references comprising eschatological material are
Praeterism, Idealism, Historicism and Futurism. There also are fields
of study about a millennium of rule by the Lord on Earth. One finds a
comparable paradigm in the Muslim period ruled by Isa. The field
opinions about a millennium of rule by God/Jesus or Isa his rep are
called premillennialism, post-millennialism and amillennialism. Islam
doesn't seem to be post-mill at all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_eschatology#Amillennialism
There
is yet another context-ism about these time periods.
Dispensationalism has the idea that there are various ages or epochs
whereby God relates to humanity providing a different emphasis. This
age of the Gentiles might be regarded as one such era. I think this
idea is one paradigm abstract with some true elements. Yet one can
have a few true fence post located at right places and still make a
fence with the wrong shape. That is there might be more going on than
a simple dispensation paradigm might take notice of.
This
point of view is described by the wikipedia article as being mostly
an historical viewpoint. It seems something like Bultman might have
liked. It is the ministry and legacy of Jesus that was the
eschatological event and the corresponding worldly events have
already happened. It differs from futurism and futurist
dispensationalism with those ideas anticipating a coming anti-Christ,
Armageddon, rapture and so forth. Even so it is not so simple. What
Jesus said and his ministry wasn’t entirely or even primarily
worldly or grounded in space-time rather than the of .
Time is non-linear for the Lord.
Inaugurated
Eschatology was popularized by George Eldon Ladd-a prolific Christian
theologian. He has several books available on-line. It has some
elements of futurism while also has elements that were fulfilled
already with the appearance of the Lord. It seems a reasonable
approach.
http://www.amazon.com/Presence-Future-Eschatology-Biblical-Realism/dp/0802815316/ref=la_B001KITWUA_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1410646377&sr=1-3
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inaugurated_eschatology
This
web site has interesting real-time political concepts about end times
fragments in the . offered some Sinai land to the
Palestinian authority in the context of making a final settlement
with and that was rejected. Wars and rumors of wars
include , the Caliphate and the prospects for partitioning to
give the Sunni of Syria half of that nation so they can extricate
themselves from the civil war that evidently cannot end without
further.
Muslims
have an eschatological tradition somewhat similar to Jewish and
Christian though with less accurate content. The Bible was written by
many authors under the direction of God while the Quran was written,
it is said, by one man. Hence there isn’t as much detail or subtle
weaving of nuance and scripttural references and allusions developing
over more than a thousand years in the Quran. Even so the end times
are called Qiyamah. That is the Resurrection or the Final
Day. Muslims have a battle of Armageddon too. The point of view of
those events differs from Christian and Jewish paradigms.
Muslims
have some paradigms of apocalypse similar to those of John the author
of the Revelation. An anti-Allah appears named Masih
ad-Dajjal and the bad folks follow he who claims to be god
though he has just one eye while the good are led by the returning
Mahdi (Jews expect a mahdi to appear to establish the kingdom). The
Mahdi and Isa will beat down Masih ad-Dajjal and establish peace
on Earth.
After
Isa’s period of ruling the faithful placidly ends two evil tribes
descended from evil beings will start a battle to wipe out the
believers. The Ya'jooj and Ma'jooj tribes start a
general decline of morals. I believe these tribes are also known as
Gog and Magog. Instead of a rapture, a pleasant southern breeze
arrives to remove the faithful from the world, and all hell breaks
loose.
An
evil beast will come out of the ground (something like the beast in
the pit) and vanquish the faithful and the Quran will be forgotten.
People will fornicate in the street like donkeys before a black smoke
covers the world. The sun rises in the west and a trumpet sounds and
everything is wrapped up. The only things living are what Allah wills
to remain. Another trumpet sounds and everything is hunkie
dorrie-everyone is resurrected and a journey starts. The good go to
Janna and the faithless go to Jannanam (heaven and hell I suppose).
The
paradigm seems to reflect Jewish-Christian-pagan syncretism changing
the orientation to reflect Muhammad’s point of view.
Muhammad’s father was the keeper of the Kabba at Mecca before
he was orphaned. He probably had both testaments of the Bible. By the
7th century the New Testament had been translated into Gothic for
Germans. It was moving about the old world with priests liberally.
With the fall of Jerusalem and the Roman Empire the attack upon the
Eastern Roman Empire at Constantinople was getting started.
Mohammad's warrior religion was the unifying power for conquest of
North Africa, much of Asia and Europe. With the retreat of the
Byzantine Empire and start of the dark ages in Europe the game was
on. Before the invention of the Internet or even the telegraph
literacy was usual controlled by political powers rather tightly
especially regarding publishing prerogatives. Expressing end times
theories might have been difficult. Forecasting end times might have
antagonized those in power. The Lord is more understanding.
Jesus
Christ on eschatology.
From
the book of Matthew Chapter 24 (K.J.V.)
“1
And Jesus went out, and departed from the temple: and his disciples
came to him
for to shew him the buildings of the temple.
2
And Jesus said unto them, See ye not all these things? verily I say
unto you, There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that
shall not be thrown down.
3
¶ And as he sat upon the mount of Olives, the disciples came unto
him privately, saying, Tell us, when shall these things be? and what
shall
be
the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?
4
And Jesus answered and said unto them, Take heed that no man deceive
you.
5
For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall
deceive many.
6
And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not
troubled: for all these
things
must come to pass, but the end is not yet.
7
For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom:
and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in
divers places.
8
All these are
the beginning of sorrows.
9
Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall kill you:
and ye shall be hated of all nations for my name's sake.
10
And then shall many be offended, and shall betray one another, and
shall hate one another.
11
And many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many.
12
And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold.
13
But he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved.
14
And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for
a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come.
15
When ye therefore shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of
by Daniel the prophet, stand in the holy place, (whoso readeth, let
him understand:)
16
Then let them which be in Judaea flee into the mountains:
17
Let him which is on the housetop not come down to take any thing out
of his house:
18
Neither let him which is in the field return back to take his
clothes.
19
And woe unto them that are with child, and to them that give suck in
those days!
20
But pray ye that your flight be not in the winter, neither on the
sabbath day:
21
For then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the
beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be.
22
And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be
saved: but for the elect's sake those days shall be shortened.
23
Then if any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is
Christ, or there; believe it
not.
24
For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall
shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it
were
possible, they shall deceive the very elect.
25
Behold, I have told you before.
26
Wherefore if they shall say unto you, Behold, he is in the desert; go
not forth: behold, he
is
in the secret chambers; believe it
not.
27
For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto
the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.
28
For wheresoever the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered
together.
29
¶ Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be
darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall
fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken:
30
And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then
shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son
of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.
31
And he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and
they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one
end of heaven to the other.
32
Now learn a parable of the fig tree; When his branch is yet tender,
and putteth forth leaves, ye know that summer is
nigh:
33
So likewise ye, when ye shall see all these things, know that it is
near, even
at the doors.
34
Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these
things be fulfilled.
35
Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.
36
¶ But of that day and hour knoweth no man,
no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.
37
But as the days of Noe were,
so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.
38
For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and
drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe
entered into the ark,
39
And knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall
also the coming of the Son of man be.
40
Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other
left.
41
Two women
shall be
grinding at the mill; the one shall be taken, and the other left.
42
¶ Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come.
43
But know this, that if the goodman of the house had known in what
watch the thief would come, he would have watched, and would not have
suffered his house to be broken up.
44
Therefore be ye also ready: for in such an hour as ye think not the
Son of man cometh.
45
Who then is a faithful and wise servant, whom his lord hath made
ruler over his household, to give them meat in due season?
46
Blessed is
that servant, whom his lord when he cometh shall find so doing.
47
Verily I say unto you, That he shall make him ruler over all his
goods.
48
But and if that evil servant shall say in his heart, My lord delayeth
his coming;
49
And shall begin to smite his
fellowservants, and to eat and drink with the drunken;
50
The lord of that servant shall come in a day when he looketh not for
him,
and in an hour that he is not aware of,
51
And shall cut him asunder, and appoint him
his portion with the hypocrites: there shall be weeping and gnashing
of teeth.
CHAPTER
25
1
Then shall the kingdom of heaven be likened unto ten virgins, which
took their lamps, and went forth to meet the bridegroom.
2
And five of them were wise, and five were
foolish.
3
They that were
foolish took their lamps, and took no oil with them:
4
But the wise took oil in their vessels with their lamps.
5
While the bridegroom tarried, they all slumbered and slept.
6
And at midnight there was a cry made, Behold, the bridegroom cometh;
go ye out to meet him.
7
Then all those virgins arose, and trimmed their lamps.
8
And the foolish said unto the wise, Give us of your oil; for our
lamps are gone out.
9
But the wise answered, saying, Not
so;
lest there be not enough for us and you: but go ye rather to them
that sell, and buy for yourselves.
10
And while they went to buy, the bridegroom came; and they that were
ready went in with him to the marriage: and the door was shut.
11
Afterward came also the other virgins, saying, Lord, Lord, open to
us.
12
But he answered and said, Verily I say unto you, I know you not.
13
Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the
Son of man cometh.
14
¶ For the
kingdom of heaven is
as a man travelling into a far country, who
called his own servants, and delivered unto them his goods.
15
And unto one he gave five talents, to another two, and to another
one; to every man according to his several ability; and straightway
took his journey.
16
Then he that had received the five talents went and traded with the
same, and made them
other five talents.
17
And likewise he that had
received
two, he also gained other two.
18
But he that had received one went and digged in the earth, and hid
his lord's money.
19
After a long time the lord of those servants cometh, and reckoneth
with them.
20
And so he that had received five talents came and brought other five
talents, saying, Lord, thou deliveredst unto me five talents: behold,
I have gained beside them five talents more.
21
His lord said unto him, Well done, thou
good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things,
I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of
thy lord.
22
He also that had received two talents came and said, Lord, thou
deliveredst unto me two talents: behold, I have gained two other
talents beside them.
23
His lord said unto him, Well done, good and faithful servant; thou
hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over
many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.
24
Then he which had received the one talent came and said, Lord, I knew
thee that thou art an hard man, reaping where thou hast not sown, and
gathering where thou hast not strawed:
25
And I was afraid, and went and hid thy talent in the earth: lo, there
thou hast that
is
thine.
26
His lord answered and said unto him, Thou
wicked and slothful servant, thou knewest that I reap where I sowed
not, and gather where I have not strawed:
27
Thou oughtest therefore to have put my money to the exchangers, and
then
at my coming I should have received mine own with usury.
28
Take therefore the talent from him, and give it
unto him which hath ten talents.
29
For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have
abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that
which he hath.
30
And cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness: there shall
be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
31
¶ When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy
angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory:
32
And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate
them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his
sheep from the goats:
33
And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the
left.
34
Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed
of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the
foundation of the world:
35
For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave
me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:
36
Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in
prison, and ye came unto me.
37
Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee
an hungred, and fed thee?
or thirsty, and gave thee
drink?
38
When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee
in? or naked, and clothed thee?
39
Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?
40
And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you,
Inasmuch as ye have done it
unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it
unto me.
41
Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye
cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:
42
For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye
gave me no drink:
43
I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me
not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.
44
Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an
hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison,
and did not minister unto thee?
45
Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as
ye did it
not to one of the least of these, ye did it
not to me.
46
And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the
righteous into life eternal.”
Some
of the above references seemed applied within that generation and
other sayings are applicable in all human times.
