Wednesday, April 3, 2013

The Perfect Must Be One

With the questionable nature of time addressed, and the possibility of novelty, we now have an interesting situation in which God, while being perfect, has an affinity for us imperfect conscious beings. Another function to address is consciousness as complexity- oddly enough we provide both novelty and order. Our own bodies are much more ordered and complex than a similar amount of living cells arranged haphazardly on the forest floor. And then, a similar amount of dead stuff is even less ordered. Entropy is boring to an ever-present God.
Now, I want to introduce the concept that the perfect must be one. We cannot have, for instance, three perfect beings that are not one, because then there would be some sort of weirdness- what if one was more perfect than the other? The perfection must be the essence- indeed in some ways it must surpass being as a defining characteristic.
All that is in the created world exists, so it is important to understand there is something above and beyond mere existence that defines the uncreated. Herein lies the mystery of the Trinity.
Here we have three divine persons in one being, and the revealed action of these divine beings is that of the perfect sacrificing itself for the imperfect. The incarnation of Christ, His sacrifice, resurrection, and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit amongst the people are actions of the perfect providing a way for the imperfect to become perfect.
Indeed, we are presented with the seemingly laughable exhortations to be perfect and to be one.
So, from the perfect to the imperfect, there is a straightforward sense of moving toward us. God will be all in all. But for the individual human, the road to perfection is non-linear. Perfection seems all the farther away as we try and the asymptote seems daunting. We know that we will be like Him, but it is unclear that this journey has any endpoint.

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