From: John Burgeson (burgythree@hotmail.com)
Date: Sun Feb 16 2003 - 16:18:49 EST
Don W. wrote, in part: " 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."
Immediately on reading this I thought of the two maxims taught by the
Christian church:
1. Sex is a holy thing, so we don't speak of it in church.
2. Sex is a dirty thing, so save it for the one you love.
Ever since Augustine, it seems, Christians have been squeamish about
discussions of sexual issues. I think this is NOT a "good thing."
Don -- you are utting forth yet another model for understanding God. We are
all familiar with the standard models, "judge," "saviour," "king,"
"brother," "friend," "vengeful destroyer," etc. but less familiar with the
one you propose, "lover."
I look forward to the disclosure of your web site. I may or may not resonate
to it -- but I expect I may learn from it. Just as I don't resonate with
Whitehead and Griffin's panentheism model after studying it for two years --
but I did learn from that study and there are parts of their model that do
make sense in certain situations. And, in the end, that's all we can ever
ask of any model.
Burgy
www.burgy.50megs.com
>From: "Don Winterstein" <dfwinterstein@msn.com>
>To: "asa" <asa@calvin.edu>
>Subject: my new paradigm
>Date: Fri, 14 Feb 2003 01:44:16 -0800
>
>
>
>Iain Strachan wrote:
>
>
> >But I think what Don means (trying to goad him into divulging more of his
>secret theory ... :-) …
>
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>
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>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.
>
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>Don
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