Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 7, 2025
It has been the fate of every great religious teacher to have his memory enveloped in a haze of posthumous myths. Even the Gospel history was embellished with marvellous apocryphal legends of the childhood of Christ. Buddhism very soon began to be overgrown with a truly Indian luxuriance of fables, miracles, and pre-existent histories extending through five hundred past transmigrations.
It seems tolerably clear that the Fourth Gospel was not written by an eye-witness, and that it implies not a knowledge of the historic Jesus so much as an acquaintance with the subapostolic Church. It is apparently an attempt to rewrite the story of Jesus in the interests of a "pre-existent" Christology, and of a high form of sacramental teaching.
'In other words you lead yourself inevitably to a God manifest in nature not as a powerful being that is a theme absolutely without interest to me but as possessed in himself of the original pre-existent beauty, the counterpart of which in us we call art, and who has fashioned us so that we must fall down and worship the image of himself which he has set up. 'That's good, Charley.
Hence Maimonides insists on creation ex nihilo, though he admits that the Platonic view of a pre-existent matter may be reconciled with the Torah. Gersonides, who adopted the doctrine of an eternal matter, finds it necessary to say by way of introduction to his treatment of miracles that they do not prove creation ex nihilo.
One was to regard Jesus as a man who had been inspired by the Holy Spirit, and had himself been taken up into the sphere of divinity after his death, so that he, as well as the spirit which had been in him, was now divine. This form of thought is generally known as Adoptionism. The other way was to think of Jesus as a pre-existent divine being who had become human.
To a scientific man, let it be admitted, it was nothing short of maddening to be told that the successful working of his instrument, to the manufacture of which he had given eight years of toil and study, depended upon some pre-existent sympathy between the operators of its divided halves.
What is the bearing of Romans on the Christology of the Church at Rome? Not, that is to say, what is its evidence as to the thought of Paul, but how are certain phrases in it likely to have been interpreted? The most important passage is Romans i. 1-4: "Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, a called apostle, separated to God's gospel which He had promised beforehand by His prophets in Holy Scriptures concerning His Son, who became of the seed of David according to the flesh, who was appointed Son of God miraculously according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord." What is this likely to have meant to those who read it in Greek without any knowledge of a "Pre-existent" Christology? I think that they would have been impressed by the parallelisms in the sentence: kat
"This is," says Burke in his magnificent language, "that great immutable pre-existent law, prior to our devices, and prior to all our sensations, antecedent to our very existence, by which we are knit and connected in the eternal frame of the universe, out of which we cannot stir."
These sprang up after Gautama's death, and their growth extended through many centuries many centuries even of the Christian era. The legends divide the life of the Buddha into three periods: 1. That of his pre-existent states. 2. That part of his life which extended from his birth to his enlightenment under the Bo-tree. 3. The forty-five years of his Buddhaship.
They are inextricably involved in critical questions which have as yet received less attention than the synoptic problem. This is especially true of the later epistles. In them, as distinct from the earlier epistles, we have a cosmical Christology which regards Christ as a pre-existent divine person who became a human being.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking