It is good to be born like a child but usually not good to die as one. True consciousness of life has taught me that the maker is always higher than the made; so is the creator superior to his creation. It would never have occurred to man to imagine God in any other than human terms. The consciousness of God has truly forced humanity to think like one. There are no facts that can be given that can portray with any faithfulness the attributes of ALL That Is.
There have been parables, stories and myths of creation and of the beginning. All of these have been attempts to transmit knowledge in a simple term as possible. Often, answers have been given to questions that literally have no meaning outside of the physical system of reality. God therefore, is first of all a creator, not of one physical universe but of an infinite variety of probable existences, far more vast than those aspects of the physical universe with which our material scientists are familiar. As a result, he did not simply send a son (Christ) to live and die in one small planet (just for salvation of mankind) when he is part of all known and unknown ‘cosmic’ probabilities. This assertion however, does not negate the imperativeness of Christ mission on earth of which humanity has immensely benefited.
I am fully aware in relative terms that there was no beginning and there will certainly be no end. Still, we do have eschatological sciences and its propensities telling us of beginnings and endings, simply because with our distorted ideas of time, beginnings and endings seem to be inseparable, valid events. What exactly was the beginning and what began? The Johannine prologue will provide us with a good starting point, “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the world (logos) was God”. John 1:1. The writer takes off from where the first book of the Bible Genesis took off: In the beginning. But none of them tells us: In the beginning of what? We may assume they mean in the beginning of all reality, all time, all creation-But I doubt!
The logos was already there in the beginning, meaning he did not begin like us who began in time. He is the one who was, who is and who will be. Logos is a Greek word ordinarily meaning word, speech and utterance. Derivative of the Greek verb legein, logos essentially means any word uttered with meaning, with significance, a speech that conveys a message. In the gospel of John he personalizes it, in the sense that it takes up the image of a person who is spoken of, and in which speech action takes place. This is very relevant to the Genesis account of creation in which God spoke and things were made. A deeper hermeneutics of logos as presented by Martin Heidegger shows that logos in ancient Greece meant more than just word or utterance. Logos has the more expansive meaning of revealing, manifesting, unveiling and de-eveloping. Though, Martin Heidegger did not apply his analytic of logos to Jesus as written in the Holy Bible.
The Gospel of John identifies the Christian Logos, through which all things are made, as divine (theos) and further identifies Jesus Christ as the incarnate Logos. Early translators of the Greek New Testament such as Jerome (in the 4th century AD) were frustrated by the inadequacy of any single Latin word to convey the meaning of the word to convey the meaning of the word Logos as used to describe Jesus Christ in the Gospel of John.
The same Christ who is called conqueror announced to his apostles and to the enormous crowd thus, “Confidete, Ego vici Mundum” meaning “Be brave I have conquered the world” John 16:33. The next question is: which world? Is it the diabolical world, the ideologico-phisolophical world, real symbolic world, redeemed world, the anthropological world, the cosmos or astro-physical world, the psycho-noetical world, the Ethereal world, to mention but a few? In his great book called Theodicee, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz of Leipzig (Germany, 1646-1716) attempted to show that there is perfection in the handiwork of God’s creation. Though this theory which is based on divine excellence omnipotence and goodness was later opposed by some scholars. Leibniz posited that our world is the best possible world God could have created. I assume this is the world Christ claimed to have overcome. This attempt to justify God’s work in the goodness of creation was given the name cosmodicy.
Not too long and in 1775 the notorious earthquake of Lisbon occurred. It devastated the entire city and outcries were raised as to the veracity of the Leibnizian best world concept. Questions were raised, how could the best world be characterized by such enormous evil as a monstrous earthquake? In view of this, Voltaire of France was consequently forced to take up his pen against Leibniz. “God’s so called possible world contained in its bosom in-built mechanism of cyclical disasters, a reality that brings not honour but discredit to the architect of such a world”. Commenting on this same issue, the Jesuit theologian Georges De Schrijver concludes in summary that the earthquake in Lisbon is the pure negation of Leibniz’s optimistic construct which is totally unrealistic. And the philosopher Voltaire concludes, “One day all things will turn out for the best: that is our expectation. All things are o.k today: that is our illusion.
As against leibnizian cosmodicy, there arose anthropodicy fruit of Western enlightenment of the middle ages. This view took over the solution from God and from the world and consequently transferred it to man. Anthropo-logos: man can explain and account for the state of the universe, both good and bad. And indeed anthropodicy claims to have made man the king, the god and the creator and finisher, as well as the supreme enjoyer of the realities of creation. No need for God again. But this was just like cosmodicy, if not worse than, short lived. It gave way because the reality during and after this movement was that man is a major destroyer of the earth, the world and of fellow man.
It is obvious that God’s reaction to all these is that he is part of suffering too. Paul Fiddes puts it thus, “God chooses to suffer, but his desire and thirst is not for suffering itself; but for fellowship with his creation…we must say that he chooses that suffering should befall him, rather than making himself suffer”. Rationally and metaphysically speaking God cannot suffer. This is because he is Pure Spirit in classical language, Actus Purus (Pure Act). Yes God as God does not suffer; for there is neither lack nor need, nor imperfection that would bring him sufferings. On the other hand and a look at the creation story in Genesis indicate that God spent time in accordance with the principles of experiment-trial and error-(suffering) in the six day work of creation hence he rested on the seventh day.
The Genesis account of creation was not the beginning of man and of all things on earth. There may have been six or seven Adams before the Biblical Adam. Most of our prehistoric men (Homo Erectus) and Dinosaurs were destroyed. It was recorded in The Most Hidden History of Man that thirteen tribes in all of pre-historic man were demolished. The surviving tribes were the Pygmies, the Watusies and the Hindus. These tribes went behind waterfalls and in caves and caverns of the planet earth to survive.
