A Quote by Rodney Stark
The Christian image of God is that of a rational being who believes in human progress.
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The Christian image of God is that of a rational being who believes in human progress, more fully revealing himself as humans gain the capacity to better understand.
When we unravel the theological tomes of the ages, the makeup of God becomes quite clear. God is a human being without human limitations who is read into the heavens. We disguised this process by suggesting that the reason God was so much like a human being was that the human beings were in fact created in God's image. However, we now recognize that if was the other way around. The God of theism came into being as a human creation. As such, this God, too, was mortal and is now dying.
There is no dichotomy between man and God's image. Whoever tortures a human being, whoever abuses a human being, whoever outrages a human being, abuses God's image.
No human being...is ever conceived outside God's will or ever conceived apart from God's image. Life is a gift from God created in His own image.
Don't neglect your critical faculties. Remember that God is a rational God, who has made us in His own image. God invites and expects us to explore His double revelation, in nature and Scripture, with the minds He has given us, and to go on in the development of a Christian mind to apply His marvellous revealed truth to every aspect of the modern and post-modern world.
By putting the gift of yearning for God into every human being's heart, God at the same time draws all people made in God's image to God's self and into their own true selves.
There must be much more going on behind the scenes. The pivotal question is this: What is behind the deep-seated hatred that these atheists nurse against religion and against God? Let's face it, there is only one force that hates God's creation more than anything else - and that is Satan. Satan knows that God exists but wants no part of Him. It is Satan's ultimate goal to demolish all Christian elements in society and to damage the human image that was made in God's image. Could Satan be the real instigator of this aggressive form of atheism?
As Mike Bickle said to me, there is a spiritual battle going on in the world, and he believes that in America marriage between a man and a woman will become illegal. He believes there will be a war. He believes it'll begin in schools and the Christian kids will rise up and slay the non-Christian kids. This was an on-camera interview!
Unless one is a religious fundamentalist and believes that man was created in the image and likeness of God, it is foolish to believe that human beings are exempt from biological classification and the laws of evolution that apply to all other life forms.
Is a Christian- one who communicates daily with the Creator- to divorce himself from the things God created and intended man to have, and which demonstrate the fact that man has been made in the image of God? In other words, are we who have been made in the image of our creator to be less creative than those who do not know the Creator? The Christian should have more vividly expressed creativity in his daily life.
Everyone who believes in God must have His revelation in his spirit, or else what he believes is not God but mere human wisdom, ideals or words. Such faith cannot endure the test.
Consequently, Christian meditation is entirely trinitarian and at the same time entirely human. In order to find God, no one need reject being human personally or socially, but in order to find God all must see the world and themselves in the Holy Spirit as they are in God's sight.
As image and apprehension are in organic unity, so, for a Christian, are human body and human soul.
Humans alone are created as rational beings in the image of God, capable of a relationship with God and given by him the capacity to understand the universe in which they live.
Theology necessitates an image of God as a conscious, rational, supernatural being of unlimited power and scope who cares about humans and imposes moral codes and responsibilities upon them, thereby generating serious intellectual questions such as: 'Why does God allow us to sin?' 'Does the Sixth Commandment prohibit war?'
Creating the human race in His own image and continually keeping it in being, God inscribed in the humanity of man and woman the vocation... of love and communion. Love is therefore the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being.
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