One major theological debates within Christianity is about"free will"vs.”predestination.”
—- In adishakti_sahaja_yoga@yahoogroups.com," jagbir
singh"
>
>"Christianity is so theologically fragmented and dogmatically divisive
> that it boggles the mind. There are literally hundreds of verses and
> more than 22,000 splintered sects to split hairs over an entire lifetime.”
>
Dear Jagbir and All,
One of the major theological debates within Christianity, is the one about"free
will"vs.”predestination.”
Advocates of 'Pre-destination' believe that certain people are pre-destined by
God to come to spiritual liberation and others are not. Alternatively...
advocates of"Free Will"believe that every human being has the opportunity to
turn to God at any time, and that God does not pre-destine this for them.
Logically speaking... God cannot"pre-destine"A person's choice in advance...
and then still claim to be giving that person their"free will"! However, God
has implemented reincarnation, so that people will re-'incarnate' lifetime after
lifetime, until they learn all the spiritual lessons, that finally lead to their
salvation or spiritual liberation. Then... at the end of a Cosmic Cycle... comes
the Time of Last Judgment and Resurrection. It is the Harvest Time.
At this Time, those who have learned their spiritual lessons... will graduate.
God takes them into His Granary, after separating the 'wheat' from the 'chaff'.
Those who have not yet learned their lessons after a whole Cosmic Cycle of
incarnating again and again... will have to go through a new Cosmic Cycle with
all its stages from 'cultivation' to 'planting' to 'harvest'. According to the
Mayans, the Cosmic Evolutionary Cycle is 26,000 years.
(https://adishakti.org/mayan_end_times_prophecy_12-21-2012.htm)
The Great Evolutionary Cycle is the"Great Grace of God"In bringing all people
into spiritual liberation. In it are the elements of both"free will and
pre-destination.” Yes... we are"pre-destined"through our"free will"to come
to our salvation; to our spiritual liberation. This all happens through
"re-incarnation.” One lifetime is not enough time to 'reap' what a person
'sows'. If a person 'sows the good seed'... they will 'reap the good harvest'.
If a person 'sows the bad seed'... they will 'reap the bad harvest'. It is the
'reincarnational law of life' that Shri Jesus and Shri Mataji have taught.
However Christians are taught to reject this spiritual law of reincarnation...
even though in reality and unbeknownst to them... they"Are"Actually
reincarnating. To deny the Doctrine of Reincarnation does not do away with the
fact of reincarnation. Just one of the defences Christians give for not
accepting the Doctrine of Reincarnation is:
"It can't be right because if people believe they have more than one lifetime to
live, then they will continue to sin, and then the death of Jesus on the cross
will have been in vain.”
Most Christians do not even know the real reason why they don't believe in
reincarnation. i will tell them the real reason. The real reason is that it was
scrapped at the Council of Nicea, because the priesthood did not like it. The
reason the priesthood did not like it was because"reincarnation"gave the
people too much spiritual liberty. It suited the priests for the people to be
subject to them. They instilled into the people that they only have one life to
live to 'get it right'... and if they did not 'get it right' that then they
would be subject to eternal damnation. That gave them a lot of power over the
people. Shri Mataji has taught that this is a devilish thing that the priesthood
have exercised over the people.
So... the real reason why most Christians reject reincarnation... is because the
Christian Priesthood wanted them to. Therefore, i can only re-iterate that: "I
also think all the problems between followers is because of incomplete and
immature knowledge of human about religions and God. But no one can know .....
unless someone comes down from heaven and marks the right road. And the
incarnation of the Shakti/Spirit/Ruh has come down from heaven with the Divine
Message to mark the right road for all humanity.”
violet
Christian Reincarnation
The Council of Nicea
In June 325 the council opened and continued for two months, with Constantine
attending. The bishops modified an existing creed to fit their purposes. The
creed, with some changes made at a later fourth century council, is still given
today in many churches. The Nicene Creed, as it came to be called, takes
elaborate care by repeating several redundancies to identify the Son with the
Father rather than with the creation:
"We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of all things visible and
invisible; and in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the only-begotten of
his Father, of the substance of the Father, God of God, Light of Light, very God
of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father. By
whom all things were made ... Who ... was incarnate and was made human...”
Only two bishops, along with Arius, refused to sign the creed. Constantine
banished them from the empire, while the other bishops went on to celebrate
their unity in a great feast at the imperial palace.
The creed is much more than an affirmation of Jesus' divinity. It is also an
affirmation of our separation from God and Christ. It takes great pains to
describe Jesus as God in order to deny that he is part of God's creation. He is
"begotten, not made," therefore totally separate from us, the created beings.
As scholar George Leonard Prestige writes, the Nicene Creed's description of
Jesus tells us"that the Son of God bears no resemblance to the ... creatures.”
The description of Jesus as the only Son of God is carried forward in the
Apostles' Creed, which is used in many Protestant churches today. It reads: "I
believe in God, the Father Almighty... I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son,
our Lord.”But even that language - calling Jesus God's only Son - denies that
we can ever attain the sonship that Jesus did.
Christians may be interested to know that many scholars analyzing the Bible now
believe that Jesus never claimed to be the only Son of God. This was a later
development based on a misinterpretation of the gospel of John.
There is further evidence to suggest that Jesus believed all people could
achieve the goal of becoming Sons of God. But the churches, by retaining these
creeds, remain in bondage to Constantine and his three hundred bishops.
Some of the bishops who attended the council were uncomfortable with the
council's definition of the Son and thought they might have gone too far. But
the emperor, in a letter sent to the bishops who were not in attendance at
Nicea, required that they accept"This truly Divine injunction.”
Constantine said that since the council's decision had been"determined in the
holy assemblies of the bishops," the Church officials must regard it as
"Indicative of the Divine will.”
The Roman god Constantine had spoken. Clearly, he had concluded that the
orthodox position was more conducive to a strong and unified Church than the
Arian position and that it therefore must be upheld.
Constantine also took the opportunity to inaugurate the first systematic
government persecution of dissident Christians. He issued an edict against
"heretics," calling them"haters and enemies of truth and life, in league with
destruction.”
Even though he had begun his reign with an edict of religious toleration, he now
forbade the heretics (mostly Arians) to assemble in any public or private place,
including private homes, and ordered that they be deprived of"every gathering
point for [their] superstitious meetings," including"All the houses of prayer.”
These were to be given to the orthodox Church.
There heretical teachers were forced to flee, and many of their students were
coerced back into the orthodox fold. The emperor also ordered a search for
their books, which were to be confiscated and destroyed. Hiding the works of
Arius carried a severe penalty - the death sentence.
Nicea, nevertheless, marked the beginning of the end of the concepts of both
preexistence, reincarnation, and salvation through union with God in Christian
doctrine. It took another two hundred years for the ideas to be expunged.
But Constantine had given the Church the tools with which to do it when he
molded Christianity in his own image and made Jesus the only Son of God. From
now on, the Church would become representative of a capricious and autocratic
God - a God who was not unlike Constantine and other Roman emperors.
Tertullian, a stanch anti-Origenian and a father of the Church, had this to say
about those who believed in reincarnation and not the resurrection of the dead:
"What a panorama of spectacle on that day (the Resurrection)! What sight should
I turn to first to laugh and applaud? ... Wise philosophers, blushing before
their students as they burn together, the followers to whom they taught that the
world is no concern of God's, whom they assured that either they had no souls at
all or that what souls they had would never return to their former bodies? ....
These are things of greater delight, I believe, than a circus, both kinds of
theater, and any stadium.”Tertullian was a great influence in having so-called
"heretics"put to death.
http://reluctant-messenger.com/origen6.html
Christian Reincarnation
The Long Forgotten Doctrine
Does it make any ultimate difference in the religious life whether or not one
believes in reincarnation? I believe there are much greater priorities in a
spiritual life than whether one does or does not accept a particular theological
tenet. Those who are still irresolute on the question of reincarnation, or
indeed those who are emphatically resolute in one direction or another, possess
no special advantage before God. The only possible advantage that the
reincarnationist may claim over those who are unresolved or opposed is that he
has a reasonable and consistent theory to account for the prenatal and
postmortem life of the soul as well as an explanation for the apparent
absurdities in the dispensation of divine justice.
http://reluctant-messenger.com/origen.html
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