From: Don Winterstein (dfwinterstein@msn.com)
Date: Fri Feb 14 2003 - 04:44:16 EST
Iain Strachan wrote:
>But I think what Don means (trying to goad him into divulging more of his secret theory ... :-) …
I’ve been leading people on long enough, and you’ve just given me the entrée or rationale I need to proceed. A big problem for me is that I regard my new paradigm more as revelation from God—that is, as the result of an actual instance of God’s punctuating the equilibrium—than as mere theory. But regarding it as revelation puts tremendous pressure on me to try to eliminate unnecessary offense in the way I present it. To think of the new paradigm as mere personal opinion or theory takes the pressure off, because anyone can then dismiss it as my weird idea, and I won’t need to hold myself to such high standards. So present it as mere theory I will, and perhaps I’ll learn something useful from feedback. To a considerable degree it is my conclusions from revelation rather than the revelation itself, anyway.
My new paradigm is extremely simple in essence, but it has far-reaching implications. Because of its novelty it can also be difficult to describe. In a nutshell, God is fundamentally a sexual person, one whose fundamental goals involve his engaging in sexual relations. All three persons of the Trinity are sexual, but they are so in different ways. For this discussion I focus on the Holy Spirit.
The Spirit, of course, has nothing like physical genitals, so the definition of sexuality needs to be broadened to make it apply to spirits. Briefly, sexuality is defined spiritually in terms of interaction between two persons, where a submissive person (considered female) submits herself to a dominant person (in this case God) to be redefined in him. Although God has no genitals, he has spiritual counterparts of genitals, and both he and his lover(s) in their spiritual intercourse experience something akin to human sexual pleasure.
The paradigm introduced by Jesus had God as loving father. The new paradigm has God as loving husband. Both paradigms in reality have always been in effect, but for historical reasons different paradigms come to the surface and dominate at different times. A third paradigm dominated in the period from Abraham to Jesus.
Scriptural support: Everyone is familiar with New Testament descriptions of Jesus as bridegroom with the Church as bride. The usual interpretation—when the marriage is taken as more than just metaphor—is that the marriage is to be consummated in the hereafter, at the second coming of Christ, not in the present age. In the Old Testament, several prophets speak of God’s two wives, the kingdoms of Judah and Israel. Hosea and Jeremiah pursue this line of thought at some length in their early chapters. Ezekiel in chapters 16 and 23 elaborates with vivid imagery. Many OT statements refer to idolatry as sexual interaction with false gods, so one might infer that worship of the true God is sexual interaction with him. I suspect that most Bible interpreters take all these marriages strictly as metaphor. I have compelling reasons to take them literally.
Jesus from the perspective of the new paradigm presents an image of God to his wives as one who is worthy of their love. God thus wins wives through the attractive witness of Jesus. I say wives, because it’s much easier to think of God as having many wives than as having just one. Each different Christian denomination, perhaps, is a separate wife; and in some cases Christians of one nation or period of history might be a wife distinct from Christians of another nation or period. In the hereafter Jesus is to have one wife, the whole Christian Church as a single entity. But God in the present age has many wives. The concept of wife for God is fluid and we don’t need to bother defining it precisely. The underlying idea is that God sometimes sees groups of people collectively, as a wife, in the same way that the Church is seen as the bride of Christ.
This brief sketch probably raises far more questions than it answers. I wrote a book that addresses many of the details and put it on my Web site. But some of the things I say there will cause unnecessary offense, so I want to cleanse the site before divulging the URL. However, no matter how “clean” I make it, the things I’ll leave in will cause more than enough offense.
So what relevance does this paradigm have to science? I can’t predict how others will respond, but to me it gives profound relief particularly on questions pertaining to origins and the problem of evil.
The fundamentals once again are extremely simple and intuitive. The following three paragraphs come from my Web site:
Sexuality of God explains his mode of creation. God’s goal involves finding a person whom he can love sexually. One does not have sex with one’s children. That would be perverse. From the kind of creation described in Genesis, God gets only children. That is, a dominating father figure like the God of Genesis, who brings the world into existence by speaking a word, does not create persons suitable for marital relations but only children who are forever dominated by their creator.
Persons whom God can love sexually must somehow come into existence independently of him. When a man takes a wife, he does not choose a daughter, sister or other close relative, but someone who has grown up independently of himself. Therefore, to satisfy his need for a lover, God’s creative activity must be so subtle that the persons he creates must seem to come into existence on their own, independently of him. This is why species appear to scientists to have originated haphazardly and not by design. Those of us who believe in God know that he somehow guided the processes to give him the lovers he needs, but his touch has been so subtle that we can think of ourselves as having come into existence independently of him.
A consequence of God’s sexuality is thus that the old problem of evil disappears. Question: How can an all-powerful and good God allow this or that terrible thing to happen? Answer: God wants a lover more than he wants a child. The world in many ways functions as if independent of him. His control nevertheless remains sufficient to yield his desired outcome.
An associated concept is that the creation is not God’s toy or idle diversion but is an undertaking that is integrally tied in with his own meaning. He gives himself fully to it and eventually will identify with it.
As I said, I have no idea how others will respond, but these concepts put me completely at ease with such things as the great age of the world, the “haphazardness conundrum” and the problem of evil. With God as loving husband, all such conceptual difficulties disappear, and I can be comfortable with God and with the world as science has revealed it. Science in fact has helped humans become the kind of independent beings that God seeks for a wife.
How I came into these views is a long story, but I can say they derive immediately from experience of God I had over an extended period more than 40 years ago. On my Web site I call this experience “my revelation.” The views have benefited also from different kinds of spiritual experiences since that time. I emphasize that the views I express are not the same as "my revelation" but derive from it. They are conclusions I have drawn from contemplating my revelation all these decades. As such they are no doubt flawed, but they're the best I've been able to do with what I have. My Web site presents superficial descriptions of some of these experiences of God, so readers eventually will be able to judge to a limited degree for themselves whether my conclusions have any merit.
As an ex-scientist I cringe at the idea of presenting information publicly that comes from experiences that others cannot access and verify, but I’m consoled by the thought that all of God’s prophets had to do exactly that.
Don
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