Divine Humanity - A Justification of Man

10/2/2021

"Many have written their justification of God, their theodicy, but the time has come to write a justification of man, an anthropodicy." - Nicholas Berdyaev

In Self-knowledge, Berdyaev observed that he could only accept and experience Christianity as a religion of Godmanhood.

To Berdyaev, Godmanhood entails the understanding that "not only man needs God, but God also needs man." This understanding is not rooted in any notion of replacing God with man or man with God, but rather on the "radical" belief that the eternal divinity of man is godlike. The Christian tradition asserts God as the Creator; Berdyaev postulates that man is also a creator possessing inherent supernatural potential.

The idea that God needs man as much as man needs God contains within it the very meaning of creativity, which is joint action between God and man. God is both father and Creator; man is a co-creating child.

Thus worshiping and glorifying God demands continuing the work of the Father. And the way man continues the work of the Father is through creativity.

Man's creativity is an essential part of God's activity. The transformation of the world is carried out by man, not God - but it can only be carried out by man if he works from his Divine Self and works in accordance to the Divine Plan.

Once he learns this, man will know that is he not a means, but an end. And he will understand that creativity is not a choice between good and evil, but his creation of good and evil.

That is how human power becomes Divine Power.

If man were utterly insignificant and irrelevant to God's activity, the side opposed to God and Creation would not work so diligently to obscure and destroy all that is divine in man.

7 Comments

Carol

10/3/2021 03:26:06

What if part of "Divine Plan" is that God will only intervene in world wide 'events', if enough believers accept their 'roles' as His "co-creating" children...and join together in intercessory prayers for intervention?

Maybe we just have to 'believe' more creatively?

Or maybe...we just need to believe/create an 'opening' into this world for God (Jesus) to step through into it, and He will?

I suddenly remembered - when Jesus healed people, he would ask them first if they 'wished to be made well', almost as if they needed to 'choose' to have a miracle...
...and then he would say, "Your faith has made you well."

Maybe we have to (as 'co-creators') choose miracles and believe in them?
I know it sounds childish - like wishful thinking...but it 'feels' true.

Francis Berger

10/3/2021 17:27:37

@ Carol - Yes, what you have said rings true to me. The point is we have to be willing to meet God half way. The heavy lifting is up to us, and a great deal of that heavy lifting occurs in thinking (belief).

As for intervening in the world, I believe God certainly intervenes when needed and when the proper conditions present themselves, but I also believes He leaves the general course of world wide events up to human agency and freedom. We must not become focused on improving the world in any general, abstract sense - only in direct, personal ways.

10/3/2021 20:56:16

I absolutely agree with your reply, except for one thing...(sorry it's turned out rather long)...

The current "course of world wide events" is not (at root level) the result of "human agency"...
...For, though the 'Establishment' certainly believe (as you wrote Sept. 30) they can "Build Back Better" after they successfully "Destroy Worse First" -
- the demonic forces behind those humans surely know that once civilization is collapsed, there can be no building back, as such destruction erodes even the very ground on which the foundations had once been built.

My husband once commented, "Well, if we end up in another "Great Depression", we'll get thru it just like our grandparents did."...

...To which I replied, "The difference is that back in the 1930's, people with homes and enough to eat, only had to worry about the next poor, hungry soul to come knocking on their door asking for a handout -

- with a "Depression" in this day and age, people will be worried about marauding gangs coming to kick in our doors, take all our food, enslave our children (to a fate worse than death), and very likely decide to amuse themselves awhile by torturing the homeowners to death."

The average person thinks that if civilization collapses, we'll all just toughen up and go back to being agrarian societies...but it won't be anything quite so picturesque.

I'm very sorry to be so harsh, but in my response to your post, I wasn't talking about "improving the world in any general, abstract sense".

The fact is; God's intervention will be needed here sooner or later -
- and, the "What if..." I started my original comment with, was based on an extremely insistent intuition that (as you stated) "the heavy lifting is up to us"...
...and that we are being 'called' to become 'stronger' in our creative "thinking (belief)", and perhaps to join together in this "creativity".

May I ask you to reread the original comment with this in mind?
And truly, my apologies again for the ugliness of the "Depression" discussion - I didn't know how else to get my point across.

Lady Mermaid link

10/4/2021 03:32:44

Maybe this sounds childish, but it rings true to me as well. I have witnessed miracles in my life over the past year. However, I cannot prove them in court and there is an alternative explanation. One must be willing to accept God's work in our lives or we can miss when He does get involved.

In fact, I've been reading about Lewis and Tolkien's ideals of subcreation. This may sound totally bonkers, but I wonder if "alternative universes" could be created by our thoughts as part of participation in creation. Of course, this type of creation must be aligned with the will of God. Bruce Charlton and William Wildblood have recently written excellent posts about the dangers of genius levels of creativity that are not aligned w/ God.

https://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2021/10/the-immorality-of-opera-and-many-other.html

http://meetingthemasters.blogspot.com/2021/10/leonardo-fallen-genius.html

10/4/2021 11:20:54

@ Lady mermaid, @ Carol - "Maybe we have to (as 'co-creators') choose miracles and believe in them?
I know it sounds childish - like wishful thinking...but it 'feels' true."

The "childish" aspect of what you have addressed is spot on as far as I'm concerned.

10/4/2021 03:26:25

This justification of man can be seen in Genesis. God created Adam in a good world without sin. Yet there was something missing that God alone could not provide leading to the creation of Eve. God could not satisfy Adam's loneliness, He "needed" a woman to do that.

You could argue that prayer is a form of man participating in divine creation. I sometimes wondered why did we pray since God already knows what we will request and can answer our prayers anytime. I would say that while God doesn't "need" us to pray, He wants to be active participants in His work.

10/4/2021 09:30:20

@ Carol - Thanks for the clarification. What I said about general world improvement was not aimed at your comment directly, just an addition to my own line of thinking about the topic.

I agree with your "grim" assessment of the current state of the world. People underestimate the destructive Sorathic elements popping up all over the world.

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Divine Humanity - A Justification of Man

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