The Experience of Christ

[awareness]

Good post Igzy ....

Originally Posted by Igzy

Reason (logic) and experience are the only tools we have to discern reality. We have experiences, we analyze them and we draw conclusions. Then we repeat. This is true at all levels, from the mundane to the sublime.

So true ... and we have the awareness reading these words as a "tool" to discern reality. Reason and logic are extremities of that/this.

You can re-run the experiment, but Descartes already did it. He tried to reduce knowledge down to the basics of what he could confirm, and he came up with I think (an experience) therefore I am (a logical conclusion). You might disagree with him,. . .

Yes. So a rock doesn't think and therefore it isn't?

but my point is that the basis of his conception of reality was built on two things: experience and logic. So if you are going to mistrust both, you don't have anything left to go on.

Isn't that when faith kicks in?

In my experience any time we try to come up with foolproof technique for being a Christian it always ends up making us look like fools.

True that ... this post an exception.

It isn't that God isn't solid, it's that he's always nudging us toward genuine reliance on him by taking away our substitutes.

That's what got me where I'm at today. God has pulled all the rugs of substitution out from under me. That's been a type of experiencing Christ to me.

You cannot produce the fruit being a good Christian without a relationship with God, which is by definition experiential and spiritual.

Where does Gal 5:22 say that? It doesn't say there's no other way to have or gain any of those fruits.

Emerson wrote that "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."

Yet Waldo consistently, according to his "English Traits," believed in "whiteness," or the superiority of the white English Saxon.

Yet he might have something to add to our discussion of experiencing Christ:

Emerson had come to accept the idea that the highest, most trustworthy knowledge consists of intuitive graspings, moments of direct perception, free mental acts of cognition and recognition, a series of mental activities that, as he now realized, could be summed up in the word reason. Customarily he used visual imagery for these acts of knowing, calling them insights, perceptions or visions.
- "Emerson: The Mind on Fire" by Robert D. Richardson Jr.

And I think we need to cut OBW some slack. Sure he's a thick thinker but all in all he's a pretty great guy ... as far as I've seen.

[Cal]

Originally Posted by awareness

Good post Igzy ....

Yes. So a rock doesn't think and therefore it isn't?

Questions of being are the privilege and curse only of self-conscious beings. Rocks are spared this.

Isn't that when faith kicks in?

Faith to me is an extension of reason and experience. Eventually we all believe what those two have led us to. Since God is a logical conclusion gathered from the experience of existence, failing to have faith in him is a fatal denial of reality (according to our Christian faith anyway).

Where does Gal 5:22 say that? It doesn't say there's no other way to have or gain any of those fruits.

It just says they are of the Spirit. Presumably you can't get them without getting the Spirit, however He's gotten. What are you going to do, get bootlegged copies?

[awareness]

Originally Posted by Igzy

It just says they are of the Spirit. Presumably you can't get them without getting the Spirit, however He's gotten. What are you going to do, get bootlegged copies?

Glad you said presumably. I've know non-believers with those fruits. Not that they had all of them. Then again believers don't seem to have all of them either.