Christianity and the force

I admit that I am very hesitant to post this for many reasons. For one I have no doubt that this has been covered, but I havent delved through all of the pages to look. For two, because I know that there are as many schools of thinking in this topic as thier are sects in christianity. I myself have gotten away from denominational Christianity and have started to delve into the bible itself and use historical context and the actual full scriptures itself to find Gods meaning, instead of out of text scripture snipping.
What I wish to know is this; how does one take the force and apply it to our faith?
I have no doubt that a belief in Eloheem and Yeshua is as much a belief in a Living Force as anything. However, I must admit that I fibd myself struggling with my faith in these dark times in the worlds history. In a time where people where the mask of faith to force thier own interests I wish to regain my faith through a pure understanding....and that has brought me to using aspects of the ways of the Jedi. I hope my question and the reasons behind it is understood.

TerraUmbra wrote: However, I must admit that I fibd myself struggling with my faith in these dark times in the worlds history.

I'm not of any Abrahamic faith so I'm just gonna make this quick comment and then show myself the door.

Your note above made me think of this book I just finished reading.

Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

Take care.

Hi TerraUmbra,I would struggle should someone suggest that the force is anything but the same as the Holy Spirit.Concerning people wearing the mask, that can so easily be related to times when I myself have found it troubling to step beyond my current expression of trust in God, I put on the mask of my tradition to avoid experiencing grace at a new depth. Does that answer your question?

TerraUmbra wrote: What I wish to know is this; how does one take the force and apply it to our faith?

We obviously haven't met. I'm steamboat28, syncretic animist/Buddhist/Abrahamic Jesus-follower and resident pain-in-the-butt. How are you today?

I hold to a more panentheistic view of the Force than most other Christians who utilize it in their faith. Many will say "The Force is God" or "The Force is the Holy Spirit", and I personally find those comparisons blasphemous, because (as my name reminds me daily) "Who is like God?" I couldn't influence any member of the Trinity, Godhead, or individual aspect of Adonai the way I can the Force, so it must be something They've set in motion, something They created that is separate from Themselves. Perhaps The Force is the watchspring of the Universe, the aether working behind the scenes to help guide the motion of things?

Anyhow, I need coffee.

TerraUmbra wrote: I admit that I am very hesitant to post this for many reasons. For one I have no doubt that this has been covered, but I havent delved through all of the pages to look. For two, because I know that there are as many schools of thinking in this topic as thier are sects in christianity. I myself have gotten away from denominational Christianity and have started to delve into the bible itself and use historical context and the actual full scriptures itself to find Gods meaning, instead of out of text scripture snipping.
What I wish to know is this; how does one take the force and apply it to our faith?
I have no doubt that a belief in Eloheem and Yeshua is as much a belief in a Living Force as anything. However, I must admit that I fibd myself struggling with my faith in these dark times in the worlds history. In a time where people where the mask of faith to force thier own interests I wish to regain my faith through a pure understanding....and that has brought me to using aspects of the ways of the Jedi. I hope my question and the reasons behind it is understood.

Full disclosure: I'm no longer a Christian.

I have been where you are (though I wasn't into Jeddism at the time) and confronted the same spectre you're facing. I was using the Hebrew versions of the names and titles "elohim and Yeshua" too because for me it helped to highlight an important distinction.

That is, simply put, that the original people and the original God is different from the versions advanced in later history.

I think there has always been a question about God because ultimately God wasn't talking to any of them to set them straight. In the actual text it says over and over that there is one God and numerous quotes of Yahweh say that there is only one God and there is no God other than him (YHWH).

And when I was doing my research on this whole trinity thing the internet was a new thing but it allowed me to search the bible in ways I simply couldn't have dreamed of before. So I felt like I was armed with a new powerful weapon that many other people (who tend to accept the party line) just accept.

So it was clear to me that, according to the bible, YHWH was the only God and Jesus was kind of an altered version of Yeshua who was turned into a god the same way that Hercules was. He basically earned his way into a higher status. ...in people's minds.

And then people would argue "so what about the Holy Spirit then?" and try to use that to prove there is at least 2 so why not 3? If there are 2 then the One God concept has to be out the door. Right?

But not so fast.

From my research, which was basically me coming from the Christian tradition trying to understand basic Judaism because THAT is what Yeshua believed and taught, the Holy Spirit was a title that was used to speak of or make reference to the "presence" of God. The bible literally says "God is a spirit".

So if I were you... which I'm not... but if I was... that's where I'd start.

When the bible says "the spirit of God moved across the face of the waters" it's not talking about some other being but rather the same God. Switching titles does not switch people. It is humans that created this "offices" as if God is a corporation. We imagine this based on our own needs for structure and organization. Why do we need organization? Because we are naturally inefficient and lacking in power and need to work together. Assuming God requires offices and co-pilots co-captains co-owners etc is basically saying he can't do it by himself.

Yeshua regards YHWH as his "Father", but the bible clearly says he was conceive by the holy spirit. That's because YHWH is holy. And YHWH is a spirit. Therefore... (doing some algebraic math here...) God is the holy spirit. And these two terms were used together in order to differentiate God from any other spirit.

Now...

What IS a spirit?

The answer I came up with is that spirit is energy. If someone is "high spirited" they're energetic. In Japanese "good spirits" is basically positive vibes/energy. And in science basically everything is energy. All matter is really just slower moving energy that is more dense.

You could then extrapolate other ideas from this that may exist in religious terms. If energy is everywhere then one could easily say God too is everywhere and is therefore omnipresent. Energy is also power so one could say God simply represents all energy and is therefore "omnipotent".

I could keep going but the point is that the bible really isn't a science book and people were trying to put names on things they didn't understand. They wanted to know before they had any means of scientific detection. So "gods" were an easy answer that they could use to cover most things.

Various cultures used gods in interesting ways. They used pairings of gods to talk about and teach laws of nature and duality. This god may handle this. This god handles that. But they both work together and this other thing is the result. So it was like an archaic form of science that used fictional characters to represent real things. These real things didn't have personas but rather metaphorical dispositions. What can you say about earth, for example? Firm... Solid... these words can also represent human behavior. So it was easy to draw different parallels so that it could create systems like astrology and numerology.

And it wasn't really about who the gods were but rather understanding it as a system of knowledge. Were there many gods? Or one? Even Israel struggled with this question because they had come from and thus integrated the knowledge of both Egypt and Canaan. And it's not like no one ever wrote myths and legends about gods and people who would later become gods. So all I'm suggesting is the bible is not somehow special or exempt from these same cultural phenomenons.

So why does God need to be personified? Is it because "he" must be a person or is it because we need him to be a person so "he" can be personal and relate to us? So that we wont feel alone and so we can feel that we have a father who created us and loves us. But what if that's not the case and we were created through a process of intersecting circumstances? What if our creation was a result of the Force trying to balance itself? And errors in our own "code" are part of that attempt? And because we ourselves are imbalanced we seek partners (masculine or feminine energy) to help form a balance in our lives? What if?

If we keep following the thread of history back to its source I believe that all we are left with is the Force. You can call it YHWH, elohim, God, Allah, if you wish. And if you need that energy to take some kind of human form and have hair and teeth and feet and butt cheeks, then you can have that. You're never going to be told "no." because no one ever is. But all of these extra things that describe God are really mirrors that reflect the wants and needs of humans seeking to but not really understanding the Force.

Whenever I’ve had someone asking me or a apprentice about this in the past, there’s a book I’ve always recommended for just a basic look at, a starting point.

Author: Dick Staub
Christian Wisdom of the Jedi Masters


Here’s a link at Amazon that has it in Kindle, Hardback or Paperback...

https://www.amazon.com/Christian-Wisdom-Jedi-Masters-Staub-ebook/dp/B001OQBQF2

Feel free to contact me if you would prefer a private discussion on this or get in touch with Pastor Carlos.

steamboat28 wrote:

TerraUmbra wrote: What I wish to know is this; how does one take the force and apply it to our faith?

We obviously haven't met. I'm steamboat28, syncretic animist/Buddhist/Abrahamic Jesus-follower and resident pain-in-the-butt. How are you today?

I hold to a more panentheistic view of the Force than most other Christians who utilize it in their faith. Many will say "The Force is God" or "The Force is the Holy Spirit", and I personally find those comparisons blasphemous, because (as my name reminds me daily) "Who is like God?" I couldn't influence any member of the Trinity, Godhead, or individual aspect of Adonai the way I can the Force, so it must be something They've set in motion, something They created that is separate from Themselves. Perhaps The Force is the watchspring of the Universe, the aether working behind the scenes to help guide the motion of things?

Anyhow, I need coffee.

All of these "aspects" let's call them are like slices of a pizza. If you're holding the knife (or pen) you can slice that pizza into as many slices as you physically can. YOU. Your limitations are your agility and the thickness of the knife's blade.

For some people God was a warrior because they thought they needed war. For others God was a Father because they needed love and protection. The titles used for God are often based on the roles, created by humans, that reflect our need. These multiple roles can be illustrated by different titles but there is still just one Pizza.

The trinity was simply a theory that was agreed upon as if there wasn't 7 different beliefs at the time about the divinity of Yeshua ha Mashiach or "Jesus the Christ". No such theory existed before the character of Jesus existed in the bible. And if Jesus did not exist the bible would not even include a "New Testament" with newer writings thought to augment the earlier ones.

But to me that is a fundamental flaw. There was a law in Israel that there was one God and people were supposed to repeat this statement of faith in one God every single day (Dueteronomy 6:4). So the idea that there is a 2.0 version that changed the rules of version 1 to the extent that something people got executed for is suddenly not the case... I find too hard to believe. What I find much easier to believe is that human beings could not agree on who or what "God" is and therefore they made God "Everything". But by being everything God isn't distinguished from anything. There is no God the Father and God the Son. Because if women were equals there would have also been Goddess the mother and Goddess the daughter. It was a male dominated patriarchal system. And Asherah or Astarte may have been an idea for awhile but never the law.

So that brings me back to the universal pizza. You can slice it up and you can put whatever toppings suit your taste buds. And that's why everyone loves pizza. And that's why everyone loves God.

ZealotX wrote: honestly, a lot of things I read and kind of understood, but don't want to clutter the post with

In rabbinic literature, the Presence of G-d has its own name (the Shekinah), and in the Kabbalah it is regarded as the feminine aspect of the Divine.

All this discussion about trinitarian doctrine is moot because, ultimately, "Adonai echad" -- G-d is One. Trinitarian thought doesn't dispose of that notion at all; it simply shows three "avatars", if you will, of the same Divine Being--the Father is the mind of G-d, the Son is the hands of G-d, and the Holy Spirit is the heart of G-d. At least, that's where my rabbit trail of belief led me.

It's a lot like the Faith of the Seven in A Song of Ice and Fire; the Father, Mother, Warrior, Maiden, Smith, Crone, and Stranger aren't different gods. They're all just faces, facets, aspects, or personae of one.

The existence of Yeshua haMashiach, Jesus the Christ, could be that of an ascended or awakened master. Either way, Yeshua Himself did nothing to contradict the Shema--G-d is still One, just One with many faces and omnipotence enough to send a sliver of Themselves into a human body to live and walk the earth as Yeshua. And Yeshua did nothing to discredit the Ten Commandments or the 613 mitzvot, because He claimed that if one loved G-d and loved their neighbor, they would unwittingly keep all the Law and the Prophets.

I see no contradiction there whatsoever, but it's vastly off-topic.

The reason I don't see The Force as the third part of the Trinity is that many people believe you can actively manipulate the former, bending it to your will, when that is not the case with the Holy Spirit. You can speak with the Spirit, reason with the Spirit, grieve the Spirit, but you cannot control the Spirit--it, as G-d, is wholly unique and above our power levels to even comprehend. So, I clearly define a difference between the two, because anything else borders on the only unforgivable sin listed in my copy of the Bible.

From my point of view, the only reference to something clearly akin to the Force within foundational Christian texts is in the book of Luke, where - after a woman touched Jesus' robe to receive healing, and he said: "Someone touched me, for I perceive that power has gone out from me." That "power", in context, sounds very much like the Force.

I have trouble seeing either God or Jesus as the Force. They both have a will, have intentionality, and are relatively resistant to manipulation from others. Maybe the Holy Spirit could be the Force; at least in the writings, unlike God or Jesus, it does not speak, never takes visible form, yet is seen to act. The Holy Spirit does, however, seem to apply intention (it initiates the events of Pentecost), and Jesus promises he will send him/her/it to his disciples (indicating it had to come from someplace, and does not perpetually "surround us and penetrate us"). I think the evidence there is a bit mixed.

More broadly - the entire narrative of the Bible is dynamic, telling of men, women, and supernatural beings active in the world in very tangible ways. It does not share, with the traditions of the East, concepts like prana or chi. It does not urge the stilling of body and mind to align oneself with a cosmic presence - its preferred mechanism for that being prayer.

I don't think Christianity is necessarily in conflict with the existence of the Force ... any more than it is in conflict with the existence of, say, pizza (sorry ZealotX!!) just because pizza is never mentioned in the Bible. But I don't see it as particularly supportive of a relationship with the Force either.

Just my two cents and a donut.

My understanding is that of Jesus having been a character parallel to others written about such as Buddha, whom both were "awake" to the root nature of their existence but communicating it in somewhat different ways and somewhat similar ways as well. Jesus's way of speaking about following him, in historical translations had many undertones that are infomous for being taken literally when it's more likely he was teaching others how to become "awake" (connected with The Force) by using himself as "the example".

Many Christians relvolve their belief around "being like Christ". This usually is lazily interpreted as simply "being nice to your neighbor" and even then is used only when it's convenient. A more complete understanding of "being like Christ" would involve learning how to realize the nature of one's own existence on such a level that their connection to the world around them transforms their behavior into one of deep selflessness and their experience of their world as one in which them and their world become one and the same (connection). This would be realizing the Force. Being "like Christ" is going through the trials of your own humanity to realize what you really are to mature into becoming that which is larger than yourself for a deep purpose. The story of the death and resurrection is that of the human being dieing of their adolescent ego and being reborn into an integrated function of the Force.

Obviously this is an interpretation, but I'd like to think it is shaped out of the consideration for theological parallels and psychological representations of common human myth which is quite present in the stories of the Bible.

steamboat28 wrote:
In rabbinic literature, the Presence of G-d has its own name (the Shekinah), and in the Kabbalah it is regarded as the feminine aspect of the Divine.

All this discussion about trinitarian doctrine is moot because, ultimately, "Adonai echad" -- G-d is One. Trinitarian thought doesn't dispose of that notion at all; it simply shows three "avatars", if you will, of the same Divine Being--the Father is the mind of G-d, the Son is the hands of G-d, and the Holy Spirit is the heart of G-d. At least, that's where my rabbit trail of belief led me.

Kabbalah is kind of like an unsanctioned version representing some of the dissenting views of Jewish orthodoxy. I believe they believed that much of the writings were simply written by different men who were "inspired" but not "directed" to write what they did. And so again, they have their own knife to slice the pizza with. Hebrew scripture battles these other versions as well as the "lying pen". You had groups like the Essenes which both Yeshua and John the Baptist were likely members of.

http://www.essene.org/Ancient_Essenes.htm

This is further complicated by different manuscripts.

"God is the Two in One. He is She and She is He.... Therefore shall the name of the Father and the Mother be equally hallowed, for they are the great aspects of God, and the one is not without the other, in the One God."

According to this, the Essenes didn't believe in multiple "persons" as the Trinity claims but rather that God was a BALANCE of masculine and feminine.

I don't think the Trinity is compatible with the OT. The NT was never concerned with the fundamentals of Judaism because it wasn't written as a bible or holy book, but rather mostly supplemental letters and guidance for people who were studying Torah. So the idea that one can obtain a new doctrine, especially about the identity or very idea of God, is incomprehensible to me.

I'll give you a few examples of why I think this:

Deuteronomy 4:35 Unto thee it was shewed, that thou mightest know that the Lord he is God; there is none else beside him.

Now... let me render it again but how it actually reads in Hebrew.

Deuteronomy 4:35 Unto thee it was shewed, that thou mightest know that YAHWEH he is God; there is none else beside him.
http://www.linkedword.com/deut/4/35-4/35
(simply click on Lord to see that adonai here is a substitution for the ineffable name YHWH)

So here God = YAHWEH and at the same time it denies the existence of anyone else who might lay claim to the same title.

2 Samuel 7:22 Wherefore thou art great, YAHWEH God: for there is none like thee, neither is there any God beside thee, according to all that we have heard with our ears.

http://www.linkedword.com/2sam/7/22-7/22

One more. Isaiah 44:6-8.

6 Thus saith YAHWEH the King of Israel, and his redeemer YHWH of hosts; I am the first, and I am the last; and beside me there is no God.
7 And who, as I, shall call, and shall declare it, and set it in order for me, since I appointed the ancient people? and the things that are coming, and shall come, let them shew unto them.
8 Fear ye not, neither be afraid: have not I told thee from that time, and have declared it ? ye are even my witnesses. Is there a God beside me? yea, there is no God; I know not any .
http://www.linkedword.com/isa/44/-44/22

For me this is the clearest you can be. This isn't a title saying no one else can have this title. This is a name saying no one else can have this title. No one else is name YHWH and clearly he says "I" and "ME" and "MY" indicating there is but one speaker, identified as YHWH, who is saying he is the only God and there is no other. For ME... this makes the Trinity impossible because it relies on titles being like "offices" where you can have different people be president and vice president and so in their minds they wanted Jesus to have great power instead of Jesus having access to great power because he was a "son" of God. Who else was called the son of God in the bible? Adam. Who else? David.

A lot of people took the whole sonship thing quite literally without understanding the spiritual/metaphoric nature of it. But we can see an example of this was understood spiritually in the letter to the Corinthians. I want to make the "TWO Corinthians" joke here but its first Corinthians lol.

1 Corinthians 4:15 For though ye have ten thousand instructers in Christ, yet have ye not many fathers: for in Christ Jesus I have begotten you through the gospel.

This question of who begets who is like the olive tree representing Israel where Yeshua becomes the BRANCH that others are grafted into. I believe the idea from a spiritual perspective is more aligned with an understanding of the Force than what you will have if you try to pass the spiritual understanding through later forms of religion like Christianity because they, without many surviving rabbinical teachers and lacking access to the Torah, prone to misinterpretation and the took things literally that should have been spiritual. They even created an evil counterpart to God where no such being originally existed. But it was because they (pizza analogy) were holding the knife.

And of course they didn't speak the same language either so when they go back with that bias and try to understand words like "elohim" I can understand why they thought they were correct, because "el" or "eloah" is singular while the 'eem' ending makes it plural. HOWEVER... the word itself is "power" and the pluralization makes it a plurality of power. Not "powers" in every context but rather "powerful". Powerful is a plurality of potency. Since there were other "powers", including rulers and judges, they used superlative pluralities to differentiate G-d from the other gods (ex: the AL-might-y).

What is a synonym for "force"? Power. So literally the same Hebrew word for God is literally synonymous with the Force. And all I'm saying is that different groups of people had control of their own knife because even if they agreed there was one God not everyone agreed with what that meant. I submit to you that the Essenes did understand God to be a single person but that "he" was generic in the sense that "he" was a perfect balance of both genders. So they didn't need a God married to a Goddess. And this was important, imho, because it showed that God wasn't being given human features for the sake of being easier to relate to. They were willing to see God as a neutral genderless... "Force". So that's why I think it's good that we don't try to force each other into 1 belief or opinion about the Force or which religion was correct and what not because like you said, they're all just faces. To me the problem with the Trinity is that these were thought to be separate personas. Jesus talks to God and asks why he was forsaken as if he was a literal Son God which became God the Son. To me that goes against Yahweh's statements in the Torah. HOWEVER, I also believe that these statements in the Torah are also just the writings of men and reflect their beliefs, not the voice of a cosmic deity. But... for me the Torah is the foundation of the Tanakh which is the foundation for any holy books based on the Hebrew tradition. And so I just think the Trinity stepped too far outside the box and did so for the purpose of appealing to pagan gentiles; especially sun worshipers like Constantine.

It's a lot like the Faith of the Seven in A Song of Ice and Fire; the Father, Mother, Warrior, Maiden, Smith, Crone, and Stranger aren't different gods. They're all just faces, facets, aspects, or personae of one.

The existence of Yeshua haMashiach, Jesus the Christ, could be that of an ascended or awakened master. Either way, Yeshua Himself did nothing to contradict the Shema--G-d is still One, just One with many faces and omnipotence enough to send a sliver of Themselves into a human body to live and walk the earth as Yeshua. And Yeshua did nothing to discredit the Ten Commandments or the 613 mitzvot, because He claimed that if one loved G-d and loved their neighbor, they would unwittingly keep all the Law and the Prophets.

again, I agree with 99% of what you're saying but I think the "me" and "my" and "I" is incompatible with the "they" and "themselves" used in Christian dogma. Yes, Genesis says "let us make man in our image" but I believe that us and our were inserted into the English which is why I like the Linked Word Project so you can actually see which words were actually there and which were the original Hebrew. But I don't expect to change anyone's mind on this. I just like talking about it since I spent a lot of time researching it so thank you for the opportunity and for listening.

26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
http://www.linkedword.com/gen/1/-1/0

You referred me to this book years ago. It was a fantastic and enlightening read and I believe it's time to take another look at it. I highly recommend this book to anyone struggling with these same questions.

Edit- replied to Master Neaj regarding Christian Wisdom of the Jedi Masters

Omg! I'm reading this book now!

As it were, Christianity is not an island among faiths. It is one, and a fairly recent one, of thousands. What is interesting is the similarities in the feeling - the intériotity - of the religious experience as felt across these (seemingly) wildly divergent cosmogonies.

Much of the same expression of that interiority is reported in the Christian mystics (exs: St Bernard of Clairveaux, Thomas Acquinas, Maurice Zundel, Nicolas Berdiaev...). Communion with the Force is more esoteric than exoteric ; we need to stop looking for that "thing" or even proof of that "thing", that is going to let us believe. The belief is already there (if you don't think about it too much). The Holy Spirit, that utterly vague entity which is the most elusive of the trinity, is also that part of us, "Spirit", that is just as elusive. The tripartite anthropology takes this aspect as the one that needs to be cultivated, rather than merely imposed upon each and all by the facticity of one's biological birth - those aspects being body and "soul". "Soul" here is not immortel ; it is all of the non-corporeal apagages of us that make us "Us" : sentiments, intellect, emotions, imagination, creativity... &c. Where "Spirit" must be cultivated is in that "in between" of two individuals in sincere meeting/encounter (in the Buberian sense).

Anyway, Steam's "rabbit trail" was laid down my a pretty sensible (and sensitive) rabbit.