This is the second part of my comment on “God as the energy of LIFE”. Today, May 3, Tony has incorporated many of these points into “God as the energy of LIFE (II).
I feel that nobody in our generation has developed such a seemless synthesis of science, philosophy, and theology as Tony Equale. It behooves us to take advantage of Tony’s genius by commenting on him and gently moving him to go further and deeper into his extraordinary insights.
As I read for the fourth and fifth times, I realize that Tony has to be studied like a Scriptural text. For example, ” It was Philo’s triple syncretism- a Biblical ‘Yaweh’, and the ‘One’ of Plato grated onto ‘ho theos’ as the life-force of the universe- that his fellow disapora Jews like Paul and John embraced on their own. The fundamental and guiding imagery of the life-force was never lost. For Philo and his fellow Jews, ‘God’ was always the ‘energy’ that created, sustained, and enlivened the natural world.”
Where, in all of human writing is there such a synthesis of Greek philosophy, Hebrew Scripture, and early Christian theology and mysticism?
Did the great library of Alexandria contain any such synthesis as Tony’s? That library was burnt to the ground by the first Christian fundamentalists who were determined that they had ‘the last deposit of faith’ in their self-declared canon of scriptures, and ‘Apostolic tradition.’
Tony goes on to say: ” When John and Paul talked about Jesus’ cosmological significance as ‘divine’ it was his embodiment of the LIFE-force that they had in mind.of LIFE (II).
I feel that nobody in our generation has developed such a seemless synthesis of science, philosophy, and theology as Tony Equale. It behooves. It behooves us to take advantage of Tony’s genius by commenting on him and gently moving him to go further and deeper into his extraordinary insights.
As I read for the fourth and fifth times, I realize that Tony has to be studied like a Scriptural text. For example, ” It was Philo’s triple syncretism- a Biblical ‘Yaweh’, and the ‘One’ pf Plateo grated onto ‘ho theos’ as the life-force of the universe- that his fellow disapora Jews like Paul and John embraced on their own. The fundamental and guiding imagery of the life-force was never lost. For Philo and his fellow Jews, ‘God’ was always the ‘energy’ that created, sustained, and enlivened the natural world.”
Where, in all of human writing is there such a synthesis of Greek philosophy, Hebrew Scripture, and early Christian theology and mysticism?
Did the great library of Alexandria contain any such synthesis as Tony’s? That library was burnt to the ground by the first Christian fundamentalists who were determined that they had
‘the last deposit of faith’ in their self-declared canon of scriptures, and ‘Apostolic tradition.’
Tony goes on to say: ” When John and Paul talked about Jesus’ cosmological significance as ‘divine’, it was the embodiment of the LIFE-force that they had in mind. They took Jesus’ human behavior, relational charism, and spiritual attitudes and explained them in terms of that divinity. They said Jesus made ‘God’ visible because his words, deeds, death and ‘resurrection’ were the mirror image, the human expression of that LIFE-force.Jesus, they said was ‘God’, but it was Philo’s ‘God’ they meant. That’s why they used the names that they did: LIFE, Logos, source, beginning.They were all Philo’s. Later generations with an essentialist worldview converted their dynamic mysticism into a static metaphysics.”
Only Tony Equale has the depth and breadth of Scripture and philosophy to so clearly define how Jesus the Christ was perceived by his first followers. John and Paul were not essentialists like the Athanasians at Nicea. John and Paul could never say Jesus was ‘true God’ and ‘true man’, forget about ‘one substance with the Father.”For John and Paul, humanity was definitely not ‘divine’ but Jesus’ human life: how he lived it, what he said, the way he said it, how he defended his message and accepted death, that is what revealed the ‘God’ that no one knew.That is why Jesus is immortal, for as the Greeks taught, only ‘God’ was immortal.
Tony helps us see this ‘new’ Jesus as a wonderful Jewish peasant with an attitude (as Dominic Crossan calls Jesus)and he ‘became’ divine by acting in a divine way. He is not the Jesus of faith, Son of the Father, as most Christians have believed, but a Jesus of history, and philosophy, and science.
Tony Equale has proved this for us.
This is a follow-up on the April 23rd post called “ ‘God’ is the energy of LIFE.” I believe aspects of that post can be relevant to the difficulties that some people have with the rational option to see the universe as “benevolent.” The term “matter’s energy,” after all, is not very poetic. But it is the source of the existence of the conatus, which is the wellspring of our sense of the sacred. “Material energy” is a prosaic label for what drives our spectacular universe as well as our own sense of awe. It deserves to be recast by our religious poets in terms more evocative of its indestructability, its vast and lavish abundance, its selfless availability, its inexhaustible vitality and its evolutionary creativity that has always been self-transcending; material energy displays divine characteristics.
The April 23 post contends that in the first century of the common…
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