Sentences with phrase «divine experience of the world»

What happens in the world «makes a difference» to God in that those events influence the quality of the divine experience of the world.

Not exact matches

Ford speaks, it is true, of a divine «temporal freedom,» but this freedom wholly derives from the divine nontemporal decision and thus amounts only to the temporal emergence of a nontemporal freedom: «God's temporal freedom is exercised in his integrative and propositional activity, where he fits to each actual world that gradation of pure possibilities best suited to contribute to the maximum intensity and harmony of his consequent physical experience» (IPQ 13:376; my emphasis).

Yet through all these diversities of phrasing — whether faith was thought of as a power - releasing confidence in God, or as selfcommitment to Christ that brought the divine Spirit into indwelling control of one's life, or as the power by which we apprehend the eternal and invisible even while living in the world of sense, or as the climactic vision of Christ as the Son of God which crowns our surrender to his attractiveness, or as assured conviction concerning great truths that underlie and constitute the gospel — always the enlargement and enrichment of faith was opening new meanings in the experience of fellowship with God and was influencing deeply both the idea and the practice of prayer.

But since the divine perfection involved having all possible value already actualized in the divine experience, God had no need of the world for the perfection of the divine life.

The death of God in Christ is an inevitable consequence of the movement of God into the world, of Spirit into flesh, and the actualization of the death of God in the totality of experience is a decisive sign of the continuing and forward movement of the divine process, as it continues to negate its particular and given expressions, by moving ever more fully into the depths of the profane.

By treating these two facets of God's nature in isolation Wieman loses the Whiteheadian vision of a dynamic God who is intimately related to the world, who is capable of sharing in the experience of the world and responding to that experience by adjusting the divine role in each new entity's self - creation appropriately to the new situation.

If the young Blake delighted in greeting Satan as a redemptive figure, and an older Blake was overwhelmed and almost crushed by a realization of the deeper consequences of the divine identity of Satan, the regenerate Blake was finally able to name Satan as Jesus, thereby unveiling the redemptive goal of the fallen world of experience.

Although we have focused on Jesus» divine status, for many people their experience of him as Saviour is more significant The World Council of Churches in its basis, which has already been mentioned, says it is a «fellowship of Churches which accept our Lord Jesus Christ as God and Saviour».

However much we recognize a profound ontological difference between elements of the world, including a fundamental difference between ourselves, many philosophers of religion want to say that God knows and empathizes with human experience in a way similar to divine relativity for several reasons: omniscience, a resolution to theodicy, and ontological unity.

The Christian will affirm that at any given moment the natural world as a whole is gathered into the experience of a single ongoing Life, a divine Self, who feels the whole, «declaring it good,» or at least potentially so, both in its particulars and in its complex unity.

It suggests that the whole of nature is part of the divine self; it shows how the exploitation of nature impoverishes the very richness of divine experience; it encourages a respect for the intrinsic value of individual organisms; and, in saying that God loves the world as a self loves a body, it suggests that embodiedness itself is a good to be cherished rather than an evil to be avoided (McFague, 74).

This understanding of God's relationship to the world has been enormously influential in contemporary philosophy of religion, especially since the publication in 1948 of The Divine Relativity from which the above quotation was taken.2 Although the consistency of divine relativity with the understanding of simultaneity in modem physics is a recognized point of contention, the question I wish to ask is whether the theory of divine relativity is metaphysically possible.3 How could it be possible for God to know and feel the different experiences of radically distinct subjects with equal vividness all at the same time?

God possesses not just our limited experiences of joy; but has a divine bliss, a real and existing joy independent of the world.

On the other hand, finding a unitary principle for the manifold of discreet entities, which includes human experience, is made problematic by a denial of divine relativity because the relative nature of God did at least that unify the world into an ordered and organic whole.

How could the divine mind, asked McCabe, bereft of any experience of contingency, sustain an intimate relationship with the contingent world?

God has a world, the beauty of experiencing which contributes to the divine life.

Another example was alluded to before: the fact that our world seems to have taken shape over a period of many billions of years, rather than having been created in essentially its present form a few thousand years ago, provides evidence against the view that the creation of our world required omnipotent coercive power; this fact is much more consistent with the view that the divine creative power is solely the power of persuasion, the kind of power we can experience working in our own lives.

Also the World is one as unified within the divine experience, while God becomes many in respecting and preserving the manyness of the World.

For example, talk of coming down from heaven may have been appropriate in a world that conceived the divine habitations as almost literally «above»; it will also be appropriate as a useful metaphorical way of describing the presence among us of that which (again in a symbolic sense) is higher than human experience as such.

That not many others walk with him on this ridge is suggested by the fact that Karl Heim and Melville Channing - Pearce make use of Buber's thought to point to the unqualified transcendence of God, while J. B. Coates writes, «I find the experience of Buber's «I - Thou» world a convincing demonstration of divine immanence»!

The whole world is the field of divine operation; so is human experience and human history.

Thus God's particular experiences of the world are spatio - temporally localized with respect to their objective data, but they are trans - spatio - temporally unified within the eternity of the one divine concrescence.

Whitehead's divine, enduring actuality is recurrently revising his ongoing experience of the world in response to the demand for personal, vital, concrete integrity.

Like any Whiteheadian actuality, the divine actuality prehensively objectifies the concrete entities of the world and gathers them into its own concrete, immediate experience.

If for every situation God nontemporally has its valuation, then it must also be true that God already has available the means of synthesizing that past world within the divine experience.

Beginning with the experience of Paul, the Christian view of this world which came to theological expression in the Reformers and which has now been revived with great power in the contemporary Protestant theology, has always shown a certain distrust of identifying human efforts toward the good with the divine work of redemption on the ground that the good as man knows it and seeks it is really of a different order from the good revealed in Christ.

The fall of Adam and Eve, the covenants with Israel and its deliverance from bondage, its falling away and punishment through new sufferings, the speaking of the divine word through the prophets, the birth of Christ in human flesh, the life and death of Jesus, the experience of the resurrection, and the history of the Church, the expectation of the final events and the established reign of God in love and peace — all this is the Biblical understanding of what God has done, is doing, and will continue to do for the judgment and redemption of the world.

For process theism, the world ultimately has its significance because of the way in which it enriches the divine experience.

The enhancement of the divine life in its consequent aspect has opened up new possibilities of relationship with the creation and has also provided new material through which God may act upon creative potentiality, thus bringing to pass that emergence of novelty which is so genuine an element in our experience and (as our observation informs us) of the world at large.

To the extent that God exercises such power, creaturely freedom is restricted, the reality of the world is diminished, and the divine experience is impoverished.

In turn, every experience of the divine power in worship and empirical event sends us back to the weakness and defeat and suffering of a world still awaiting its participation in.

An alternative formulation is that the world as a unity is explainable only by the divinely inclusive love that binds the many into a single cosmic structure; and, therefore, the world of secular experience is nonsense if God does not exist.79 Similarly, one neoclassical version of the traditional teleological argument would be that the fact that the world has any order at all is only to be explained by an eternal divine Orderer, because apart from God it is impossible to understand why chaos and anarchy are not unlimited and supreme.80

The world can speak only about its experience and wisdom and limits and interpretation of the divine.

Because of the intrinsic unity of the divine experience, all the finite actualities of the world must be felt together in their measure of harmony and discord.

The character of the world is influenced by God, but it is not determined by him, and the world in its turn contributes novelty and richness to the divine experience.»

Such experiences were commonly interpreted as evidence of divine disfavor, of being cut off from healthy relationship to others and the world, as reasons to hang one's head or to seek refuge from the living God.

The process - relational model of God as the most extensive exemplification of primordial creativity, with every worldly occasion in its own process of becoming; the process - relational concept of God as the principle of order channeling the world's becoming toward ever richer and more harmonious experience (the primordial nature); and the process - relational concept of God's preservation of every worldly occasion in God's own everlasting becoming (the consequent nature), with each such occasion evaluated and positioned for its greatest possible contribution to the divine life — these perspectives on divine reality which process - relational thought claims to find exemplified in the very nature of things are separately and together congruent with and supportive of the biblical images and events which describe the «already» in inaugurated eschatology.»

God, so understood, is not only the chief causative principle, although He is not by any means the only such principle (since there is freedom of decision throughout the world - order); He is also the supreme affective reality, because what happens in the world, by precisely such free decision and its results, makes a difference to and (if we may put it so) contributes to the divine principle in providing further opportunities for advance as well as in enriching the experience of the divine itself or himself.

Such «religious intuitions» are the «somewhat exceptional elements of our conscious experience» that Whitehead seeks to elucidate as evidence for God's consequent experience of the world.9 Only a living person experiencing a whole series of divine aims, sensitive to the way in which these shift, grow, and develop in response to our changing circumstances can become aware of their source as dynamic and personal, meeting our needs and concerns.10 Jesus, full of the Spirit, knew God personally in this intimate way, until these aims were taken from him in the hour of his deepest need, when he experienced being forsaken by God on the cross.

The only basis upon which knowledge of that divine nature may be founded is the order of the experienced world.

The second argument, which is advanced by all of the previously mentioned critics, is similar to the first, but it concerns God's fulfillment of the divine experience rather than God's fulfillment of the world.

The divine Eros draws the world to greater richness of experience as each individual entity responds to possibilities for itself.

Something happens to the life of God as God saves the world in the divine experience.

God's experience of the world is Whitehead's doctrine of the consequent nature of God — the divine Passion.

The divine experience, therefore, perfectly reflects the net balance of happiness over suffering in the world.

As the occasions of the world - process (including those of our own experience) appropriate the power of a divine ordering principle and ground of novelty at the primary pole of perception, they are not forced into a deterministic response to God's influence.

Von Rad (1972) has rightly summed up the situation as he says, «the experiences of the world were for Israel always divine experiences as well, and the experiences of God were for her experiences of the World» xxworld were for Israel always divine experiences as well, and the experiences of God were for her experiences of the World» xxWorld» xxviii.

For if in all the good realities of the world of nature, of history, and of human experience, the divine Word expresses himself, the whole of it may be regarded as preparation for Christ: it is a praeparatio evangelica.

The New Testament proclaims that no matter how evil the sin, God stands ready to receive the sinner and to forgive the sin, He stands ready to receive into his own being all the evil of the world to bring about its transformation, and this experience of evil is the divine suffering epitomized by the crucifixion.

Unfold the layers of the divine science of yoga in the world yoga capital, Rishikesh, India and, lead towards a life - transforming experience.