From a doctrinal perspective I understand who Jesus is and how He relates to my life. It’s actually quite simple. ”Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and bear a Son, and they shall call His name Immanuel, which is translated, God with us.” (Matt. 1:23) “I am the way the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me. If you had known Me, you would have known My Father also; and from now on you know Him and have seen Him…He who has seen Me has seen the Father.” (John 14) Jesus Christ is God with us. God Himself – the Jehovah of the Old Testament – chose to be born into this world as Jesus Christ. Why? In part so that He could become more visible to us:
“The one God who is invisible came into the world and assumed a Human, not only that He might redeem people, but also that He might become visible, that thereby conjunction with people might become possible.” (Swedenborg – True Christian Religion 486)
Intellectaully I get this. And I would love to hear any thoughts or questions that people have about how God became more visible by taking on a Human in this world. You can listen to a sermon I gave recently on this that at least introduces the topic – http://www.newchurchaudio.org/event/20205.html
But what’s puzzling me at this point is how we actually experience the visible God in our day to day life? I know that God became more visible by choosing to be born into this world, but I don’t always feel that the one God of heaven and earth is visibly present in my own life. Do you? So the question I would like to pose is this: How do you experience the presence of the visible God (the Lord Jesus Christ) in your life?
To get the conversation going I’ll start with one thought. I think that if we want to experience God as being more visible in our lives we need to approach Him in His Word. The Writings for the New Church talk a lot about how important it is to approach the Lord in His Word. It’s in His Word that we can learn about the life He lived and think more clearly about His Divine qualities. So if I want to see and feel the presence of a visible God in my life I cannot just gaze up at a star filled sky. Instead I need to focus my time, mind, heart, and attention on His Word. There’s something about His Word and reading it daily that is vital to seeing God as visible in my life.
What else? Why is it so important to you that we have a visible God and how do you experience Him visibly in your life?
Have you ever thought of God as someone you seek to be close friends with? My sister says you can tell when you are good friends with someone because you start to get a sense of what they would think of a given situation even if they aren’t there.
Other churches think of Jesus as a role-model, in some ways. Role models provide the next step beyond rote application of the law. The benefit and disadvantage of the law is that it is relatively context free. Regardless of how much one might try to rationalize and justify contrary behavior, what the law says still applies. However, there are some situations that are just too ambiguous to understand how the law applies directly, particularly if one only understands the law on a literal level.
Through coming in physical form and facing temptation, suffering, death, etc, Jesus provides us with an exemple of how the law looks in a wide range of ambiguous contexts. If we get to know him and his attitudes in these contexts, we then have a better idea of how the law applies in the ambiguous situations with which we are chronically faced. This next step helps people deal with the pervasive ambiguity that exists in most situations.
Often, this role-modeling will not make sense to someone who does not understand the relationship, attitude or character of the person one identifies as a role-model. For instance, a champion runner identified his younger brother as a role-model, even though his younger brother was severely handicapped and had struggled a great deal even to learn how to walk. One has to know something about the attitude of his brother towards challenges and towards life to understand why the Olympic runner would find his younger brother’s example inspiring.
Thanks for these thoughts Mari. I really like that thought that you know what a good friend would think of a situation even if they weren’t there. To me this means that knowing and approaching a visibile God in part allows us to more easily make the right choices in life. If God is visible it is easier to know what He WOULD do in any given situation, and thus what I SHOULD do.
I also really like your idea about how a visible God allows us to see more clearly how to apply what can be an ambiguous law: “Do not think that I came to destroy the Law of the Prophets. I did not come to destroy but to fulfill.” (Matt. 5:17) It strikes me that in the most general sense, His visible life and qualities show us that the law is to be applied from love – Love God and your neighbor and, “On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.” (Matt. 22:40)
Thanks again for the thoughts.
For me, having a visible God mostly means that when I pray, I feel that I’m praying to someone. Not an ethereal energy presence, not a remote creator who started things up and walked away, but a person. Also not an unpredictable, threatening, incomprehensible Old Testament-style god, but someone who is simultaneously the all-powerful creator and the approachable Jesus – in short, the Divine Human.
In a way that ties in with your thought about the Word, since that’s where we see Him as the Divine Human.
The other thing is, we shouldn’t bee too literal in using the word “visible”. I don’t know what Latin word Swedenborg used or how best to translate it, but the key concept seems to be more “comprehensible” or “visualizable”. So long as we have a mental image of the Lord as Human, a sense of His personality, a feeling that we know Him, maybe it doesn’t matter too much how literally visual it is.
Thanks for your thoughts Tom. I especially appreciated your comments about prayer. It reminded me that at “Jacob’s Creek” (A family church camp) the topic one year was, prayer. My presentation was on the Lord’s prayer in Matthew 6. One thing that struck me most was a teaching that the Lord’s prayer was given specifically to help bring our attention to the Divine Human and thus the visible God. Here’s one passage I found and I’d be glad to send you more if you want them:
“But let us return to the Lord’s Prayer, where it says, ‘Our Father who art in the heavens; hallowed be Thy Name; Thy kingdom come.’ By these words you who are present understand the Father in His Divine alone but I understand the Father in His Human. Moreover, this Human is the name of the Father; for the Lord said, ‘Father, glorify Thy name,’ that is, Thy Human; and when this is done the kingdom of God comes. And the reason why this Prayer was commanded for the present time is evident, namely, that through His Human an approach may be had to God the Father. The Lord also said, ‘No man cometh unto the Father but by Me;’ and in the Prophet, ‘Unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given, and His name is God, Mighty, Father of Eternity;’ and elsewhere, ‘Thou, Jehovah, art our Father, our Redeemer, from everlasting is Thy name;’ besides many other places where the Lord our Savior is called Jehovah. This is the true explanation of the words of that Prayer.” (Swedenborg – True Christian Religion 112)
When you love somebody it is very difficult to describe him/her visually when you are not in their presence. What you visualize is their qualities. Not how they look physically. That’s what I think is meant by a visual God. The more we get to know Him the more we learn about his qualities not his physical appearance.
What a great statement! Thanks Inga. It reminds me of an elderly gentleman I once met whose wife had passed away many years earlier. I remember him saying that if he tried, he had a lot of trouble picturing what she physically looked liked anymore. It was just as you say. He loved her very much, loved here various qualities, but the physcial body and appearance that she once had was not the thing that make her “visible” in his heart and mind.
Now on another note I will have to talk to you someday about accounts where Swedenborg talks about the disciples recognizing the Lord in the spiritual world. I’ve always been curious about this because it does indicate some sort of physical visability. However, the point that was being make was simply that the visible God that all worship in heaven is the same who walked this earth. Thanks again for the comment.
Where can I find mention of the disciples recognizing the Lord in the spiritual world? I’d be interested in reading them. In any case, I think I would recognize a loved one when I see him. However, it’s the qualities of that person that really are ‘visual’ to me.
I’ve posted one of the passages I know of below. And by the way, I do very much agree with what you’re saying. It’s simply a curiousity to me that there are passages like this one where people seem to all recognize the Lord even in some sort of physical way. But perhaps we could read a passage like this, more in the light that you are suggesting – That they all recognized His form, only because they all recognize His Divine qualities. At any rate, I find it absolutely fasinating and very powerful that in this passage people from throughout the universe recognized the Lord as their only God.
“There were certain spirits who knew from heaven, that on a time a promise was made to the spirits of the earth Mercury, that they should see the Lord; wherefore they were asked by the spirits about me whether they recollected that promise. They said that they did recollect it; but that they did not know whether it had been promised in such a way as to be beyond doubt. Whilst they were thus discoursing together, the sun of heaven then appeared to them….On seeing the sun, they said that this was not the Lord God, because they did not see a face. Meanwhile the spirits discoursed with each other, but I did not hear what they said. But suddenly, the sun again appeared, and in the midst of it the Lord, encompassed with a solar circle: on seeing this the spirits of Mercury humbled themselves profoundly and subsided. Then also the Lord, from that sun, appeared to the spirits of this earth, who, when they were men, saw Him in the world; and they all, one after another, and thus many in order, confessed that it was the Lord Himself. This confession they made before all the company. Then also the Lord, out of the sun, appeared to the spirits of the planet Jupiter, who declared aloud that it was He Himself whom they had seen on their earth when the God of the universe appeared to them.” (Swedenborg – Earths in the Universe 40)
Matthew – thanks for the thought provoking post. I like Tom’s comment on the meaning of the word “visible”. I was thinking about this too, since I don’t have a good visualization of the Lord and was wondering if this is a barrier to spiritual growth. What I realized is I don’t see the Lord, but at times I do feel the Lord in my heart. That may not be “visible” but it is personal and I think that counts.
On that note, I am finishing up a new book by Paul Proese, called America’s Four Gods. A fascinating profile of how American’s view God and how the views correspond to other facets of life. The views of God divide along the lines “how judgmental is God” and “how engaged is God in the world”. The result is four types of God-views: Authoritative (engaged – judgmental) – 31% of Americans; Benevolent (engaged – nonjudgemental) – 24%; Critical (non engaged – judgmental) – 16%; and Distant (non engaged – nonjudgemental) – 24%. Amazingly, only 5% of Americans consider themselves as Atheists who do not believe in God.
I would place the New Church squarely in the Benevolent camp – the Lord is fully engaged, but also fully loving. While there is “judgement” involved, it is a judgement we make through our choices.