The Creation of Jesus (page 2)

TheWonderofYou

Jesus was what? A heavenly spirit-creature ( Pr. 8,22, Re 3,14: Jehovah himself produced me as the beginning of his way, the beginning of the creation by God). Jehovah did not use preexistent material.

Jehovah was what? A spirit creature and he doesn not need material energy. He is spirit and uses spirit to create.

This kind of divine spirit, the basis of gods creation, does not need any energy out from material universe to create heavenly persons. It was a creation process simply in "spiritual realm" where Jehovah exists and dwells. This also because it happened before the creation of the material universe.

And as the material universe was created by "active force" , spirit, ru'ach , which was moving over the surface of the waters, Ge,1,2 , this demonstrates how the heavenly spiritual realm and persons were also created by "active force" out of gods mouth.

So Jesus would be a spiritual "WHAT", a heavenly something, but not a material "WHAT". These are two separated spheres in which God is able to create creatures. here and there. When the word once got flesh and God turned Michael into Jesus the spiritual what got material what and this to an extent of 100%. The spiritual what changed to material what and back. A mixture of both is not possible. Either spirit person or man.

This would be my answer if I would be apologist of JW. I hope I didnt misinterpret any JW or intervene into personal agenda. I have no evidence except the watchtowers that taught me to think so.

One could however looking over this credo can also say that the pre-existing Jesus was never a "material" fact, but only a "spiritual" idea. Like a fantasy creature.An idea that evolved because Jesus was seen close to God, that they didnot see and difference any more between the material what and the spiritual what. A spiritual reality that must have existed ever alongside God. Their Jesus got then the middlesman between the spiritual realm and the visible world. The Jesus became Christ.

David_Jay

berrgerry,

If I remember my Watchtower theology correctly, Jehovah's Witnesses do not teach that God is "pure energy." They believe that God is limited to the space-time continuum, what in Christianity is called existence on the "temporal" plane. Jehovah's Witnesses believe in everlasting life but not "eternity" like Christianity or as we do in Judaism.

The Witnesses believe that God is a spirit, with a spirit mind that exists in a spirit body that dwells in a spirit place or location called "heaven." To them God is experiencing time move along with us.

In Judaism and Christianity God is not in the space-time continuum. In Christianity they call the plane "eternity" as compared to the "temporal." In Judaism we do not define God's existence but state that God is ineffable, yet agree God is also eternal. While Christianity tends to see God in more of a naive deity form than Judaism, both of us understand God as omnipresent since God is not bound by time or space. This means the past, present and future is present to God immediately, all at once, and has always been/is/will always be. This also means God is not bound by a body or lives in a "place" since God isn't inside the universe that God created.

Witnesses have no definitive theology on exactly how Jesus (Michael the Archangel) was created, but Trinitarians do have a formal creed regarding how God the Son was created. It differs markedly from Witness theology so significantly that there is no vocabulary in Witness religion to compare it with.

In the Nicene Creed, for one example, Jesus is described as being "begotten of the Father before all ages. Light from light, true God from true God, begotten [but] not made, consubstantial with the Father." This is one specific formula, the very specific wording of which can divide denominational lines.

Witnesses haven't formulas, but at the same time have wild theories that compose a somewhat ad hoc religious system, easily tossed out and replaced when a hole in a theory become too widely pronounced to ignore.

And while you are correct that Witnesses often say that God took some of himself to create Jesus, this is hard to prove from Scripture. The consensus of theologians both Christian and Jew is that the Bible teaches that God produced all creation from nothing. If Jesus is a creation, this teaching of the Witnesses is paradoxical. If Jesus is made from God, then the Nicene Creed is true, that Jesus is indeed "Light from Light, true God from true God."

berrygerry

Thanks David Jay

The consensus of theologians both Christian and Jew is that the Bible teaches that God produced all creation from nothing.

I can envision that type of thinking pre-Middle Age. Would there be any shift in that thinking since then?

berrygerry

If Jesus is a creation, this teaching of the Witnesses is paradoxical. If Jesus is made from God, then the Nicene Creed is true, that Jesus is indeed "Light from Light, true God from true God."

This is exactly my thinking. WT is teaching the same result as Trinitarians, but using different language or wording.

freeman

I'm not a physicist by training, but my old boss was an astrophysicist, some of my buddies are theoretical and experimental physicists and after countless discussions and a lot of reading on my own and directed by others, I believe I have pretty good grasp of the fundamentals. That said:

Holy Crap!

We started learning some time ago that the physical world that we all see and love is not all there is, not by a long shot. I myself was a staunch believer in the conservation of energy, but I had to adjust my strongly held beliefs a little when it was demonstrated to me that quantum mechanics not only allows but even requires a temporary violations of conservation of energy.

Things can and in fact do routinely pop in and out of existence, and no they don't necessarily have to originate from an equated amount of energy. E=MC squared is true for the most part, and also the reverse of this statement is true most of the time, but not always. In the world of the very very small, spooky things happen and there may be temporary violations to this principle. Try Goggling virtual particles sometime. Strange suckers that pop in and out of existence. Spooky and they like to sometimes violate at least temporally some basic fundamentals of physics.

JW's think they know about Jehovah, Jesus, and the Bible: They don't know jack!

A few scientists think they have a grip on how the universe works: They don't know jack!

The older I get, the more I realize I don't know and never did know jack!

Anyway that's my story and I'm sticking to it..

Freeman

Vanderhoven7

I think the story is that God created through Jesus....the same way that Jesus baptized disciples through His disciples.

1When therefore the Lord knew how the Pharisees had heard that Jesus made and baptized more disciples than John, 2(Though Jesus himself baptized not, but his disciples,) 3He left Judaea, and departed again into Galilee. John 4:1-3

David_Jay

berrygerry,

There is no change in this teaching, though the Christian view is more naive that the Jewish view.

The Christian view is that God is an actual deity, as in Zeus or Hermes. but Jews reject the concept of deities.

In Judaism, the universe is a result or effect of something. The universe had a Cause and that Cause is far greater than the concept of deities worshipped by Gentiles. Jews did borrow the language for deities to describe this Cause, but this Cause is ineffable.

Humanity can communicate, has feelings and emotional ties, so this Cause has these and far, far greater. Jews also tend to accept that this Cause employed the Big Bang and evolution to bring forth the cosmos as we know it.

Jews cannot say exactly how God made the material universe, but our tradition has taught that God was alone before anything existed and will be alone again as God once all is gone again. This doesn't exclude the possibility of an eternal afterlife for us, but God is so transcendent in Judaism that God can be spoke of in these terms.

David_Jay

By the way...

The teaching in Christianity has a name: ex nihilo. It's ecclesiastical Latin for "out of nothing."

There are some theological hypotheses pushing the envelope on this as of recent, but ex nihilo remains the general rule in Christian thought: God created the universe out of nothing, ex nihilo.

berrygerry

David Jay:

So, essentially somewhat akin to the Great Spirit of native Indians?

Who, then, gave the 10 commandments to Moses, and all the other "inspirations"?

Wonderment

freeman: "En archē ēn ho Lógos (the first part of John1:1) means that the word existed before all time." ... The Greek language is very precise, no ambiguity, no interpretation. It literately says the Word was already existing (Past tense ) before all time, no creation of the word or Jesus is even remotely possible, he always existed ... It doesn't matter what your belief system is, if your an Atheist, Agnostic a Baptist or Buddhist. They believe John 1:1 and the Greek is the Greek, En archē ēn ho Lógos means that the word always existed, period."

That´s a bold assertion. Can you provide any evidence that En archē ēn ho Lógos can only mean grammatically that the Logos was eternal? I ask because in Matt. 1:18 the Greek says: "Of the but Jesus Christ the origin thus was [Greek: en]." In this text "was" is associated with the birth of Jesus, not eternity. And the way archē is used in John 15:27 is obviously of limited duration meaning, as in Genesis 1:1 in the Septuagint, where ´the heaven and earth were made in the beginning.´

The Creation of Jesus

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