Bishop Robert Barron sat down for a conversation with Jordan Peterson and gave an extraordinary explanation of what it actually means to believe in God. Listen to this explanation...
There’s a saying I really like from Jonathan Pageau directed toward modern atheists… "I don’t believe in the god that you don’t believe in…" and I think this explanation from Bishop Barron speaks to that…
Modern Christians have dug ourselves into a hole because we have gotten so wrapped up in trying to prove God like God is a thing in the universe or a scientific fact… We’ve been trying to prove God exists like a table exists… and by doing so, by us trying to pull God into our physical reality and categorize God in human terms, we’ve diminished what God is and consequently made it fairly easy for modern people to say… yeah I don’t believe in that! If we can prune away the access and clarify what it means to believe in God not only will we revive our religious traditions but we’ll save people’s lives… People are desperate for God, and this is why this explanation from Bishop Barron is so important…
God is not a being within creation… God is not something that competes in physical time and space, meaning where God is, something else cannot be. The burning bush is a great example of this, it's on fire but not consumed. What we call God is the mind, intelligence of all creation… It's the source of created things like your created things start in your mind. God is not a being, God is being… God IS… Like you can't point to your mind and say here it is, yet it's always there... The spirit of life that runs through all living things, we look at every created thing and if we see properly, God is there, this is why in deep prayer, when we lose ourselves and our incessant ego, we experience connection with all things.
Christians need to remember that what we are talking here - this God - was embodied in Christ. The human being Jesus embodied God. The human flesh and image we see is not actually God - God is within it. This concept we call God became lower to become human… What made the man Jesus important was what he embodied. We try to describe what we are talking about in human terms yet what we are talking about is NOT human… We are made in the image and likeness of God not because of our physical bodies but because of our mind. We have a capacity to create, order, choose, and judge over worldly things like God has over all creation.
We've made God less believable because we've been trying to put God into a box or category of physical being. We've been trying to point to God in our physical universe and say look, there's God… That isn't it... and we need to stop doing that… The people of the world need God, not a dumbed down, shallow version of God that neither believers or atheist should believe in… We need to get back to and explore what is really God, and be better at communicating what we are talking about.
Opmerkingen