Forgotten God – Part 2: What is science?

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In a broad sense, science is a process that attempts to find truths that is, produce true knowledge. Not all knowledge is true. We may say we know something, and later find out that we were wrong, thus finding that our knowledge wasn’t true. We shall return to this dilemma below.

On one hand science is based on the subjective measures and interpretations of reality made by individual scientists, and on the other hand it aims for intersubjectivity, or situation where several researches would be convinced about the same propositions, preferably coming to these conclusions independently of each other.

Inherently science is a self-correcting process. At times it may be amiss for centuries, but since it fundamentally aims to describe the reality, it tends to return to the point sooner or later.

This description of science can be applied on any discipline attempting to describe the reality. While sciences are often classified by their field of study, in a general level there’s no distinction between these disciplines other than their field. For instance we cannot say that the natural sciences are inherently different from the humanities. They methods may vary somewhat, but that’s mostly because different subjects require different methods. However this definition does not cover applied sciences like technology, medicine or pedagogy. Methodologically, when a scientific discovery (like the model of blood circulation) is made within one of these disciplines, it would be better classified under some pure science (like biology), while these disciplines should be considered to deal only with the methods and applications of these theories in an applied science, like medicine.

The division between sciences and humanities is roughly the division between subjects that lie in the physical realm and subjects that lie within the social realm. Sometimes there may even be overlap, like in the studies of neurology and psychology. Different nature of subjects means different methodologies. In this respect sciences can be categorized in experimental and observational sciences. Many natural sciences are experimental, as the scientist can control the experiments made, whereas many social sciences are observational as controlling the circumstances may be more difficult. However, the division is not clear cut. For example experiments have been made in psychology, while experimental astronomy has yet to take off.

Forgotten God – Part 1: Introduction

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This is the first part of an essay supposed to serve as an introduction to theology. My main point will be to argue that proper theology – talk about God – may be a scientific discipline (though obviously not always is). Topics covered include a look into the nature of science and methods of theological observation.

The etymology of the very word “theology” is a Greek word meaning “god-talk” or “talk about god” or “study of god”. In the same sense “biology” is literally translated “study of life” and sociology is “study of society”. Thus from this etymological point of view one would expect theology to be a science in a similar way as these natural and human sciences – or any other sciences for that matter – are, and that its object would be God.

The problem with theology as a science today seems to be that where it’s theology, it’s not scientific, and where it’s scientific it’s not theology. The former is a shame, the latter is a sin. The reason seems to be that when the scientific method is applied to theology, people largely ignore any theological observation. It seems that this false idea of revelation has been so indoctrinated to the scientifically inclined theologians that on one hand many fear to call it science in the first place and on the other hand rarely even try to apply scientific method to it.

But it can be done. All one needs to do is to abandon one unfounded assumption for one observed to be correct and start working methodologically from there.
And it has been done. Any theology is based on the right idea of revelation strives for a right to be called proper theology. And any attempt to approach such observations with a scientific method deserves to be called proper scientific theology.
However, often when we look at the theology today, we find that in the focus are religious phenomena, rather than God. Human, human believes, actions and practices have become the center of theology, and God has been reduced to be a backdrop, sometimes even an insignificant concept with no real part in the affairs of the world.

Has it always been like this? Has the word theology always been off the mark, and the study of theology always been a study of man? I think not. Certainly man has always played an important role in theology, since we are only human and it is most natural for us to talk about everything we see from our point of view. In addition, we understand God to be far too great for us to understand, so we may be intimidated to even make any statements about Him.

This leads us to a more modern reason some people take human to be the focus of a study they take for theology. In the spirit of enlightenment they argue that we cannot make experiments or reliable observations of God and therefore He can’t really be the object of our study. For all we know God might not even exist. What we can study is the human behavior connected to what is historically known as the Christian faith, and that we can talk about. This caricature of theology may state that Church history is a history of what men have done, dogmatics is a study of what people have thought about God, exegesis is a critical analysis of the Scriptures and Christian ethics are considerations of what people should do to respect other people.

But in the history we have examples of different kind of theology. The most obvious are the Scriptures themselves. Then there are the different creeds and confessions. Prayers are generally very God-centered. There are also many theological jewels in all Christian traditions, be they Catholic, Protestant or Eastern Orthodox – or many others, for that matter. Of course, we all have our faults as well, especially in many practices. But there is much great theology in the true sense of the word, though often we are too preoccupied with our differences to see the riches on the other side of a fence. The bottom line is, that if we look at the history and the present among those who believe in Christ, there is a great wealth of theology whose first foremost interest is God and His rich relationship with the creation.

Why then does it seem the modern theological mainstream essentially claims that theology is a humanistic science, to whom God is only marginally relevant? I believe much of it has to do with that proverbial fox, who couldn’t reach grapes and proclaimed them sour. Their sound argument is, that to talk about something in a scientific way one should know what he is talking about. And since they don’t know God, they cannot talk about Him, and instead choose to talk about something else, something that would seem a justified topic under the brand of theology. In addition they claim that for a discipline to be justified as science, everyone ought to be able to study it and, that since they don’t know God, any contrary claims should not be taken scientifically seriously. Hence, theology as a science cannot really be a study of God, but rather something they can study.

The nature of scientific development has allowed the paradigm to shift in a way that true study of God is no longer only for a minority, but often considered inherently unscientific. Therefore the title of this essay, Forgotten God, does not mean that God Himself would be forgotten by all people, but rather that when knowing Him was once the starting point of theological study, this knowledge is now often denied, thereby meaning that God has been forgotten by the scientific community.

However, I maintain that this view is false, and theology as a study of God is a justified scientific discipline. Some may say that theology is not a science, since it does not deal with physical reality. This claim is akin to saying that linguistics is not a science, because it does not deal with physical reality. They deal with a different questions, but with reality non-the-less. Since God is real, the ultimate goal of theology is to describe the reality, which is the same goal as any other science. Some claim that theology cannot be science, since it is founded on revelation rather than observation, but revelation can be considered a source of observation. So, where theological claims can be observationally tested and methodological standards of science upheld, there is no reason to claim that it is not science.

Because God has made Himself known, we can know God, and therefore talk about God knowing what we talk about. In the following parts of this essay I shall make some remarks about characteristics of science and scientific method, and especially about what what knowledge is. Further I will point out some characteristics of this science and make a case why theology as a study of God can and should be considered a science.

Book review: The Grand Design

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Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow have written a must-read -book for anyone interested in the philosophical questions of cosmogony, or the origins of the universe. By implication anyone interested in the theology of creation should take a good look at it.

This book is in many ways a sequel to Hawking’s classic The Brief History of Time. The most important difference is that The Grand Design is both less technical and more philosophical than The Brief History of Time. On the upside it makes it readily accessible to a wider audience, but on the flipside the focus has shifted from topics they truly master towards issues where their expertise is less than impressive. This is an unfortunate combination, as the work may end up in hands of people, who don’t have the necessary expertise to assess the strengths and weaknesses of their argument.

Famously Hawking claims he has made an argument against the existence of God. Incidentally he hasn’t. Yet to understand what Christians really say about God, it is useful to understand the argument he makes, and why that does not say anything about the existence of God.

Theoretical Foundation

I confess that I share some of the high hopes of the authors and most scientists. First and foremost that there is a (more or less) single, elegant theory that explains pretty much everything in the existence. Reading the book one might forget, that we are not even near. Let’s recap what we don’t have:

  • A clean quantum level theory of electromagnetism. QED and by extension the electroweak theory are not clean. We can do the renormalization calculations, but we don’t know why. This is not entirely unlike the situation with the ether in 1905: Einstein’s major breakthrough in that area was not coming up with new euations, but giving an explanation why certain known equations already known to work, work.
  • Quantum theory of gravitation. In fact, we hardly have a decent theory of gravitation. In recent years the General Relativity Theory has been patched with less than elegant ways and it is generally considered to be in a severe crisis.
  • “Theory of everything”, which combines the two above with QCD, (an accepted theory we do have and actively work on).
  • String theory. Despite the name, this is not yet a “theory” (or accepted scientific model), but only a hypothesis. It’s under heavy work and experimentation right now, and the odds are that it will be accepted as a model sooner or later.
  • M-theory. This is more or less handwavium and based on speculation – at best speculating on the above theories.

Nevertheless, I share their optimism that we will find such theories. Especially the M-theory seems tempting. I admit I would like it – or some even more elegant theory to describe the uni(/multi)verse accurately. If only I knew that the M-theory was correct, it would rank fairly high on my  ”Praise the LORD for…” -list. But as it is, I don’t dare to praise Him for what He might not have done.

Dilemma of Philosophy

As stated, unlike the Brief History of Time, this book is first and foremost philosophical. Ironically on the first page they write: “Traditionally these questions are dealt with philosophy, but philosophy is dead.” This statement is very telling of their own understanding of their very own subject matter. It also explains why the presented argument is at times weak. For example they pretty much take granted that the laws of physics really are immutable always and everywhere. They also dismiss the inexplicable fact that we are able to describe the universe in mathematical terms in the first place.

However they do have a point. They are just saying that many contemporary philosophers don’t know enough physics to talk about things related to it – like metaphysics. This is often true. However, when they claim that this stand has now been taken by scientists, they essentially fall into the same trap: scientists rarely know enough about metaphysics to say anything about it. The truth is of course that scientists and philosophers have often been the same people, Leibniz and Newton being great examples of this. But one should know both sides when talking about a matter that spans over the sides.

Ironically The Grand Design is a proof that some scientists understand too little philosophy to write about it. The authors are mostly writing philosophy backed by science, but aren’t clear when they move on pure speculation. Further their argument is at times blurred. The title of the book is The Grand Design, yet they seem to try to prove that there is no design, merely order- until in the acknowledgment they state that the universe has a design (but are quiet about its possible designer). They seem to be on some kind of odyssey to prove that God does not exist, but while surrounded with facts, the argument is rather rhetorical than actually based on those facts. For instance, they present a very naïve history of science with an agenda concerning its relationship with religion. Agenda that does not stand historical analysis. All in all, while they do good job in presenting their hard knowledge about scientific theories and their implications, they are blatantly ignorant about the questions of philosophy and religion and fail to compile an argument meaningful even to refute.

The Famous Argument

In simple terms, their argument against the existence of God goes as follows: M-theory allows a vast number of universes, each with different fine-tuning “laws”, to emerge without any external cause. One of them is ours, and obviously habitable. Ergo, God is not needed to create the universe.

This argument is philosophically motivated. The universe seems to be fine-tuned in many ways to allow us to be here in the first place. One might be tempted to use this fine-tuning as an argument that it had to be done by God, therefore God does exist. To such people the book says: No, you don’t need God to do the fine-tuning. So their argument doesn’t actually refute the existence of God, but a fundamentally flawed attempt to prove the existence of God. Which I, as a Christian theist, am thankful of.

To me, creating just a universe big enough to support human life seems a little is not that awesome. After all, He has created the infinity as well. Surely He could do more, something great and elegant. To have just one universe fine-tuned just for us? That’s not too elegant. Why not have it fine-tuned for us as an obvious and incidental by-product of something great and elegant? Wait… the M-theory would be a great candidate just for that…

On a more serious note, the Grand Design argument against God fails on two sides. One one hand, it does not state what kind of “god” are they talking about. It’s not mentioned even in the glossary. Based on their treatment of the topic, it is however clear that they are not talking about the I-AM the Judeo-Christian tradition is aware of. And since God with a capital G is a word commonly used to address Him, I can only conclude that out of their ignorance of facts they have simply misspelled the word.

On the other hand they do make an honest attempt to give a final kick against the “god of gaps”, a supernatural element added to explain things the science still has to figure out. Many have likened GOG and God, though they have nothing – and everything – to do with each other. The problem with GOG is that as science advances, it  and pushes him further. The Grand Design pushes GOG out of yet another gap – fine-tuning – and the authors seem to believe that this is the last one. But in reality the GOG just falls into the next gap: Why is there the M-theory rather than something else? (Won’t these gaps never end?)

A Word about God

Just like the authors never really defined what kind of deity they were actually after, I should state here briefly what is God like and why His existence remains unchallenged by The Grand Design.

To begin with, His name is I-AM. He does not need proof or even evidence to exist, that He can do without any help. Further, he created everything – and assuming M-theory exists, that is part of His creation. Claim that universe came out spontaneously, makes sense – that is a way He may have done it. But He Himself did not come about in any way. Universe may have borrowed its existence from unstability, but I-AM exists with no need for such provisions. When we talk about God, it is this self-existing transcendent creator we are talking about.

But there’s more. I said that He has everything to do with god of gaps. While GOG is our naive idea “god did it”, God actually did do it. He not only made the laws of nature, but he actively upholds them. Should He stop, the laws would not break down, but the Creation would seem to exist. We are here only because He, who is, wants it that way.

So it is clear that God is not just some deistic creator who kicked the universe into motion and went for coffee, but actively involved with the creation. Since He is the active Creator of everything, He is free to deviate from the laws He has made whenever He wishes for. This would be a definition of a miracle. But He has done more than mere Creation and miracles: He entered into the creation Himself.

This is a thing that sets Christianity clearly apart from other religions. Creator, who belongs to another ontological category than everything else we know, became one of us, into same ontological level as we are. It’s not just about intervening the laws of nature, it is about intervening the nature itself. The rest, as they say, is the history of salvation.

His primary concern is not if people believe He exists or not. He wants our intimacy with Him. When He gets that from someone, that person will of course positively know He exists. On the other hand, if someone does not have Spirit of God living in him, it makes little difference if that person believes He exists.

Therefore we should not waste time trying to prove God exists. He is fully capable of doing that Himself. In fact, if we do that we might end up thinking about God the way He is not, and thus our intimacy would suffer. The proper order is to seek first God, and let Him prove Himself.

There’s no reason to assume, that study of nature would prove the existence of God. Actually, one can argue the opposite. While we can expect that the nature will not disprove His existence – so far so good – we should also expect that it will not lead us to God. He does not want science to be a way to Him. He wants to be Himself the way to Him. That is intimacy.

Conclusion

Read the book. It’s well written and you’ll have fun – one way or another. If you are interested in physics, read the Brief History of Time first. This adds to that. If you are not into physics, just read the Grand Design. If you don’t believe in God, don’t expect to get a silver bullet to prove your point. If you do believe in God, it might relief you from some of the wrong reasons to believe in His existence though, which is a good thing.

Nothing is more dangerous than one good idea. For this reason it’s often more useful to read books by people who disagree with you. Hawking and Mlodinow have several ideas worth getting to know, some of which are good. Read the book. Who knows, you might learn something, or at least get something to think about …and that is a good thing for any man.

So I have finally began….

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I added a new page today: Table of contents.

This is the book I have been wanting to write for 15 years now. I’m finally starting to suspect that I might actually have some idea on what I’m talking about… Well, basically it’s a description of so called “Christian” faith. Though I’ve come to the conclusion that the Church has widely adopted some ideas and practices that are seen as “Christian” while actually being quite radical from the point of view I’m surveying. For instance the idea that salvation is based on our believing in the existence of a “good” God and has mainly to do with the afterlife is borderline apostate, to say the least. There are others as well.

So far there’s just a short sketch on texts I’m planning to write. I have some dozens of pages of notes in a notebook and few texts I wrote few years back, but it turned out I wasn’t quite ready yet then. Better luck this time :)

One problem with those old texts was that I started re-rewriting  texts I was already rewriting, which resulted in awful gibberish, as I was saying the same thing over and over again is slightly different ways. The problem with inspiration :) This time I’m trying to get over it in several methods:

  1. Allow multiple versions. I’m planning to paste new texts here as articles and change the pages as I’m writing the text. That way I can both save the cake and eat it too: If I want something back, I can rip it from the blog post :)
  2. Plan  ahead. I’ve learnds. Having a pretty good idea what will be included and where helps discipline the text.
  3. Keep writing. If you are reading this, let me know. That would encourage me :)

The Book – God Incarnate

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This project is not dead! :)

I’ve been working on a “book” or something with the intention to to describe the Christian faith. Lately I haven’t done much, but I just dug into my archives to find what I have written so far.

Basically the plan consists of five essays looking at the topic from various points of view. The first one looks the issue from the theory of knowledge point of view: what is knowledge, the revelationary nature of Christian knowledge and how it is possible to make science out of that. Today much of the academic theology assumes that we cannot obtain direct knowledge and thus cannot make science out of that . Thus much of the theology revolves around how people have reflected God rather than God Himself. For example exegetics is study of the word of God, and focuses on what people have found – or thought – about that. Likewise the church history is study of churchy people during the history and dogmatics has degenerated into study of what people have said about God.

But it is possible to obtain direct knowledge about God, and even in such a fashion that we could make science out of that. The core idea behind that is that while all such knowledge is revelationary and personal, when given to several people, it is interpersonal. While interpersonal is not objective, there in fact is no such thing as objective and all science is really based on interpersonal knowledge.

The other four parts deal with ontology – Inside and outside looks at creation explaining two wills of God, trinity, dual nature of Christ, our sonhood in Christ; ethics – law as descriptive rather than normative role, judgement etc;  VBrief history of salvation – focusing on the “mechanics” of salvation from a historical point of view; and last and most horrifying, Christian living. I really dread writing that one…

Anyway, here’s a snippet from the relatively simple first part, discussing God incarnate. I found I could not write coherently much beyond this point, since I had so much to say that I started writing it over and over again saying same things again and again…

These two words incorporate the heart of revelation. In a very deep and real sense Christ is the God’s self-revelation. Not only in history, but also personally to Christians. Our being in Christ goes hand in hand with Christ being in us, or Christ being revealed into us. We shall look at this in more detail in the next essay, here we shall start by considering the Scripture.

The Scripture is in many ways special revelation of God. First of all, it is fixed or canonized. I shall refer to it as “Scripture” or “Bible” interchangeably, referring to both old and new testaments, and avoid grounding any argument on the deuterocanonical texts. All of the Bible was written by people who were very close to the things they write about. Second, it is universally accepted Christianity is somehow defined by the Bible, and there is little sense to talk about Christianity without reference to the Bible. Third, it is commonly accepted that the Bible is in some sense God’s revelation.

From this starting point I shall consider the two possible sources of theological knowledge, divine and human, and point out that the human source often tends to err in one of two ways related to the phrase “God incarnate.” Of course any knowledge about God that is of human origin, is likely to be wrong and proper theology can only be based on divine revelation. But let’s first take a look at some common mistakes as a background to Christian orthodoxy.

In the extreme this is misunderstood in Nestorianism, which states that Christ the human was not God, and in Monophysitism, which states that as Christ the God was not human. Both of these deny incarnation, in one way or another. But similar mistakes can be identified elsewhere, giving the human component more weight than than the divine, as in the extreme conditional election of Arminianism, which states that man’s free will has its say in salvation, or conversely in the deterministic unconditional election, which states that only the eternal will of God has its say. Both of these take very unilateral view, choosing their paradigm and discourse to be exclusive of the other, and both missing the point from one side or another. But we shall return to this later.

With respect to the Bible these two misconceptions are, that the Scripture is either divinely inspired, and human component is an illusion, or it is essentially a human product, with maybe some divine inspiration involved. In the extreme the first view may hold that the Scripture is dictated to the letter and we should not interpret it, but take it “literally”. Milder forms of this are setting the bible to be an authority over us, or referring to particular versions or interpretations of bible. In the other extreme is saying that the bible is merely human thoughts about God, at best our understanding of it is our subjective interpretation and therefore it can in no sense be considered a reliable source of information about God.

While both of these views have their strong points, they both have their weaknesses as well. First of all, neither of them is revealed by God, and thus they are essentially human invention, and not proper theology. Liberal theology is outright admittance of blindness, traditionalism is claiming that God is a liar, but Pharisees are blind while thinking they see. Sokeita sokeiden taluttajia. The blind they guide know they are blind, and are therefore less guilty, but those who believe to see while blind are truly blind, blind to their own blindness.

When we consider theology, there is only one thinkable ultimate authority, and that is God. First of all, we cannot know anything about Him without His self-revelation, so He is the only possible source of real theological information. Second, it follows that anything we think about God we can only measure against His self-revelation. So when we find inconsistencies in our theology, our options are to consider whether God is an unreliable source of knowledge about Himself, or have we misunderstood something. As God assures us in His revelation that He is reliable and our experience tells us that to err is human, I take it safe to assume that God is true, and any misunderstanding is due to our own fallibility.

I believe there are two fundamental reasons for theological schism: On the surface differences in paradigm and the resulting discourses, this may be a strong is apparent disagreement but often boils down to differences in point of interest. On the foundation is the difference in authority, the two views may resemble each other a lot, but one is founded on God’s revelation, the other on sinful religious thought.

…. Some thoughts….

Overappreciation of the Scripture is the same idolatry, same sin as Pharisees, their yeast. We see the scripture, but that prevents us seeing Christ, God’s living word abiding in us. Overspiritualization is a relative to this, separating us from the everyday reality and responsibility.

Body, Kingdom and Church

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The diktuon.info -site has lots of material about the Kingdom of God, but the Kingdom itself is left quite vague. I had thought that it would be somewhat clear to the people interested, but apparently there us some confusion about the topic. Therefore I’m at the moment writing a page about the issue, and I wanted to share for comments some thoughts that I’m planning to include on the page.

There are three closely related idioms we should understand in this context: the Body of Christ, the Kingdom of God and the Church. The key idea is that these three are essentially three angles to the same thing: they all refer to the same people, but take different approaches. In the following I try to clarify how I understand these concepts and their relationship.

Body of Christ

The (mystical) Body of Christ is about being. First, there is the precondition to be in the Body in the first place. Per definition we could say that whoever is connected in Christ by being in Christ and by Christ being in him belongs to His Body. Even though this in itself is deeply connected with baptism, it has very little to do with water or churches as such. Rather the baptism we are talking about here is the act of Holy Spirit where He immerses us into the death and resurrection of Christ. From this it does not necessarily follow that the person in question would be part of any church, neither nominally nor in practise.

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But this is just the beginning. We need to abide in Christ, by letting His word abide in us. From this it follows that we carry His kind of fruit, not by our own efforts, but by staying attached to Him and letting Him do His work in us. But more about this in the Kingdom -part.

Another aspect about the Body is that in it we are united with the Son of God, becoming His children ourselves.

A very important part of the Body of Christ is that bible equates the man’s body and his wife. Eve was made out of Adam’s body when Adam was in deep sleep, and similarly every relationship between man and wife reflects the relationship between Christ and His body, which was created in His death and resurrection, and to which we are joined in our baptism.

Kingdom of God

Some othe possible translations to the word kingdom are “kingship”, “reign” and “queen”. Especially Matthew makes a connection between kingdom and queen. If we think of that word in the light of what was said about the body of Christ, we see the strong connection between these two. Like the body of Christ, the Kingdom is essentially corporate body of people spanning over all places and times.

Public DomainOn the other hand kingdom of God is the domain of His reign. Whoever obeys Him belongs to the Kingdom to the extent of his obedience. It is important to understand that He does not expect us to obey Him in all His will at once. He often gives us just one thing at the time, and if we are obedient in that then we have been completely obedient. And He may give us something new.

The precondition for obeying his will is that Christ lives in us. For we in ourselves are incapable of doing anything but sinning – even when we try to follow His will our attempts rise from our sinful nature. The only way we can act obediently is by Christ – who is obedient – acting through us. Therefore true obedience is surrendering, letting the Holy Spirit work in us and through us.

When the Holy Spirit works in us, He actually makes more space for Christ to live in us, and room for Christ to act through us. All we need and can do to it is to not step on the way. When Christ gains room in our hearts and minds, we become a more integral part of His body and He truly becomes our king. As He gets to govern us, He will cause His fruit to grow in and from our lives. And this is how the will of God is obeyed.

The Kingdom of God is a very dynamic concept. It is not just about entering it, but living in it. Both of these have to do with metanoia, change of mind. Kingdom is about God changing us into the likeness of His Son, by letting His Son have more room in our lives.

Church

With the word “Church” we can refer to one of three possible things: the universal church, the local church or the administrative church. The universal church is simply the corporate body of all members

of the Body of Christ anywhere and at anytime. The local church is group of people who consider themselves a gathering of Christians and a local church. A very important aspect of this type of church is that it is a community where people participate and know each other. The administrative church is a collection of people considered by someone to form a church.

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The Greek word for Church is ekklesia, an assembly of people. In the Body idiom the focus is completely in Christ, and Kingdom is very centered the the ruler, in this idiom the focus is in the people. This means that it is the most tang

ible of these three concepts. On the other hand it means also, that it is at least theoretically possible that the people gather together even without their King.

It is also possible that in this assembly there are people who are not really subjects to the King, and therefore do not really belong to the Body of Christ. This leads to the problem that the Churc can be defined in two ways: the internal understanding states that only those people who both belong to the body of Christ and are obediant to their King belong to that assembly, and the rest are just bystanders. External underdstanding states that everyone who can be seen as a member of the same crowd belongs to the assembly. In practise it is humanly impossible to differentiate between these two, simply because we have so few reliable measures as of who belongs to the Body or is obedient to the King.

For example, the universal church above is per definitio understood internally, while the administrative church is understood externally. The local churches may or may not be subgroups of the universal church and may or may not be administrative churches.

An important aspect of the humancentricity in this idiom is that the local churches are autonomous. They are free to arganize their administration independent of others. There are, however, some things God wants to be present in this organisation. Traditionally this autonomy has meant hierarchial organisation into various denominations. While this method has its advantages, it has also its disadvantages, one of which is that the very thing that was meant to create unity has become a source of division.

Second coming

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All these three idioms have a very important thing in common: they are all incomplete now, but will become complete at the second coming of Christ.

As for the Body, we have already been born to it and thus belong to it already. But despite the fact that we are already dead in Christ, we still need to face the end of our physical lives. There are still branches in the tree that need to be cut down because the bear no fruit, but when He returns, there will be no barren brances. We are alredy God’s children, but not yet His children in Glory.

Since we still live in the flesh, there’s still sin living in us and we cannot be completely obedient. But when He comes, He will fill us completely and there will be no more temptations, but we only want to be obedient.

In the church there are still people, who are not obedient, but when He comes, one will be taken and one will be left. He will clean and purify His bride for the wedding, cleaning all sin away from her.

When he comes, all things will change. What we refer to as heaven, is in other words the Kingdom of God completed. And through our choises to be obedient today, He will purify His bride and we are preparing the way for Him to return.

Final thoughts

So why have I chosen the Kingdom to be the carrying element of this project? If these three are essentially about the same thing, it would seem more natural to talk about the very essence of the thing, the Body, or about the most tangible aspect, the Church. However, Body of Christ is a somewhat abstact concept, and quite static – as opposed to dynamic. It is the vital core of the paradigm, and the base of everything that happens. However, it in itself, but it does not call us into the action. And while the Body of Christ describes well the nature of our relationship with God, it says very little of what this means in practise. Here’s where the idioms about the Kingdom and the Church come into play. The concept of Church has similar problem of stagnation. In addition it carries the danger of confusing the term understoon externally and internally and has much other potential sources of confusion.

Ultimately I chose Kingdom for this project because it calls us into change, metanoia. It says that something needs to happen – and often change – both in our individual lives as our Christian communities. But this is just the nature of Kingdom. Ultimately the purpose of Kingdom is to reflect the active component of the same corporate body of people, and therefore building the Kingdom is building the Body of Christ and both the universal and local churches.

Of course all this means that I’ll need to do dome refining in the other material on the site, to make it reflect this organisation even more clearly. In particular, I intend to create a strong parallelism between

  • Body of Christ and authenticity (the essence of sancitifcation)
  • Church and unity (the visible community)
  • Kingdom and obedience (the action of sanctification)

Any thoughts about this?

Back to life…

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Ok, I feel better now :-) For the past few weeks I’ve been most of the time too tired to get moving. Now I’ve figured out two things:

  1. I shouldn’t go to bed too early. My natural rhythm is from aroud 1am to 9 or 10am. If I go to bed earlier, I simply will not fall asleep and if I get out of the bed earlier, I will not be rested. (BTW. I have a remarkable wife.)
  2. Strong ice tea rocks. We figured out, that in order to get going in the morning I need something cold and caffeinated (like light cola). Experiments with ice tea have been wonderful. (My beloved again. It’s handy to have a lark around.)

As a result I’ve finally been able to touch the Diktuon document again. Touch would be a proper word. I’ve got some feedback, but just reading it has been somewhat overwhelming. Feedback has been difficult to read too. Not because there would be something negative of overly critical, but simply because simply reading the text seems to knock me out. As if there was some power of the Holy Spirit in it :-)

Anyway, I have actually been able to read some of it again and look at the feedback. More input is welcome anytime. The texts can be read at the Diktuon.info -site.

PS, I expect to get a monitor today :-)

Project Diktuon – Draft 4

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:-) Now we are talking. After some constructive feedback,  I think I’m finally getting a grasp of what I want to say on this page. I’ve recently been working on a pretty much complete overhaul of the text in these pages and tried to compile it in a single document format. This would be the introduction chapter.

Project Diktuon is an effort to strengthen the network of mature Christians wanting to build the Kingdom of God in Europe.

Diktuon is the Greek word for net. It is used e.g. in Matthews 13:47-48 (NIV):

Once again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was let down into the lake and caught all kinds of fish. When it was full, the fishermen pulled it up on the shore.

The fish in this parable stand for people. The net pulls the fish closer to to God and closer to each other. And this is what Project Diktuon is about:

  1. Seek God’s people and bring them together.
  2. Create a critical density of these people.
  3. See what happens.

Critical density is different from the critical mass. It doesn’t have to be very much. It is having enough of high-quality material in a sufficiently small space. In this case it is having critically many critically high-quality Christians who are critically tightly connected to each other.

So Diktuon is essentially a social network of certain kind of people. While the network in itself is a totality, it can only be grasped from its knots, or nodes: the individual people. Thus, building the network is essentially building these relationships. Therefore Diktuon is about individual people being in contact with individual people, and Project Diktuon about strenghtening these existing relationships and building new ones.

I believe that when we earnestly seek God and His will and come together, He will let His creativity and power flow through us in countless ways. And I want to be advancing that. That’s what Project Diktuon is all about. And that’s why I created this site, Diktuon.net. Diktuon.net is an Internet platform to provide tools for unity, communication and co-operation for people, who are committed to build the Kingdom of God in Europe.

As I see it, three basic elements are needed for this. First, the people themselves. Second, the means for the people to communicate. Third, common values and policies to define who exactly should be involved and how to get along.

N.B. This site  is at very early stages. Any kind of feedback is warmly welcome. Please use the blog.

People

Project Diktuon is about building unity and community of Christians. As Christians we are bound to Christ. And in Christ we are bound to one another. Yet we might not even know about each other. There may be people with similar issues on their hearts, who live fairly close by, but of whom we know nothing about. This is what Project Diktuon tries to address – strengthen our unity and improve our chances to meet one another in real life.

So who exactly should be involved? I don’t care if you are great or small. All I’m interested in is your heart and mind. Actually, I expect that most of you are plain nobodies, just like I am. On the other hand, much of what I’m about the say will be rejected by many who rightfully consider themselves Christians. I bless them too. May God guide their paths to walk on His ways.

What does a “mature Christian” mean? I’m not going to give a definition. At best I could try to describe, but even then I would probably miss it. Instead I have written some texts about beliefs and values I believe mature Christians would identify with. If you find that what I have said here reflects your heart and mind, you likely are the kind of person I’m looking for, and you should expect to find similar people.

On the other hand, Project Diktuon is not for everyone. If you find you cannot accept or commit to some of those, then this is probably not for you. Here are some more specific indicators that Project Diktuon might not be for you:

  1. You don’t believe Jesus Christ has died and resurrected, you are baptised in Him, your sins are atoned in His death and you are living a new life in His resurrection.
  2. You don’t live in Europe or are not interested in building the Kingdom of God in Europe.
  3. You are not ready to face your fellow Christians as fellow human beings, but insist on sticking to some role on either side.
  4. Your own denomination, nationality or race is so dear to you, that it prevents you from unity with other Christians.
  5. You do not want to do the will of God or want to do something that is against His will.
  6. You want to argue or have the last word.

While the values of authenticity, unity and obedience are something Project Diktuon tries to cultivate in its participants and I don’t think anyone is perfect in every aspect of them, they nevertheless are something that should define the network to begin with. We should not start from the scratch in any of the issues above.

Finally, I don’t expect to know many of you. In fact, initially very few of you. I expect that you know some each other. And that you know some like-hearted and -minded people from outside the community. And that you will bring them in to the community. And you will create new connections with other members. Creating a denser network.