Sunday, May 8, 2011

Quotes from God in Christ by Horace Bushnell



Two of Bushnells most interesting works are God in Christ and The Character of Jesus. God in Christ, published in 1849 created quite a stir and Bushnell was brought before the association of Congregational ministers to answer to a charge of heresy. His views concerning the Godhead, the deity of Christ and His character were very enlightening. In this volume is the reprinting in its entirety of The Character of Jesus and in part his God in Christ. Paperback, 64pgs. Apostolic Editor. Click here for more info on purchasing this edition published by editor Thomas Weisser.
"But, as soon as the question is raised, what are we to intend by the word person, the appearance of agreement, and often of self-understanding, vanishes." 

"The mind is involved in a dismal confusion which cannot think of without the sincerest pity. No soul can truly rest in God, when God is two or three, and these in such a sense that a choice between them must be continually suggested."

"when we speak of God as unrevealed, to speak of Him anterior to His act of creation; for the worlds created are all outgoings from Himself, and in that view, revealments of Him. God unrevealed is God simply existing as spirit, in Himself."

"There is in God, taken as the Absolute Being, a capacity of self-expression, so to speak, which is peculiar, a generative form, a creative imagination, in which, or by aid of which, He can produce Himself outwardly, or represent Himself in the finite. In this respect God is wholly unlike to us."

"Our imagination is passive, stored with forms, colors and types of words from without, borrowed from the world we live in. But all such forms, God has in himself, and this is the Logos, the Word, elsewhere called the Form of God...It is God mirrored before His own understanding, and to be mirrored as in fragments of the mirror before us...He bodies out His own thoughts."

"whatever may be true of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, it certainly is not true that they are three distinct consciousness, wills, and understandings. Or, speaking in a way more positive, they are instrumentally three, i.e. for and as related to our finite apprehension and the communication of God's incommunicable nature."

No comments: