8 Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ. 9 For in him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily.
Colossians 2:8–9.
Early on Christianity soundly defeated Gnosticism and its claim that Jesus wasn't truly a fleshly being, but rather, a spiritual being (in contradistinction to the rest of we physical, fleshly, beings). The crucial distinction between Gnosticism, and the argument above, is that whereas Gnosticism implied Jesus was a spiritual manifestation of the Godhead who merely
manifested physicality (ala the angels who appear in the guise of men), Paul, and the Church, are patently clear that Jesus is no less flesh than any one of us.
ln something like an inverted Gnosticism, perhaps we could call it out Gnosticizing the Gnostics, the argument in this thread is that when Paul claims (Col. 2:8-9) that Christ is the fullness of the Godhead in bodily form, he's not mixing the Godhead with the bodily form, as though that's the incarnation of the Godhead, but is instead claiming that the incarnation of the Godhead is itself (i.e., the incarnate nature of the Godhead) the newfound ability of the spirit to be grasped and held, for the first time, fully, by a member of those of us consigned to the illusion of the physical world.
Because of Adam's sin, we're all born into the backward illusion of an asymmetry of time that implies the physical comes before the spiritual, that our body predates our mind and soul, as though the latter two are epiphenomena of the former. Because we're born in sin, our inborn nature can never truly believe the ideas we have that come from a place other than the allegedly antecedent biological thought mechanisms, since we're born into the backward asymmetry which privileges the physical over the spiritual/soulish (the latter being other than natural thought, other than empiricism, rationalism, logic, the latter being the higher thought that all men intuit as coming from a non-physical place which makes most persons shut down the thought without a hearing).
What some Christians (notably this one) experience as their conversion event is situated in an act of freewill whereby they willingly, knowingly, for the first time, accept a "faith proposition" that has zero, absolutely zero, justification in the history and physicality of their pre-faith epistemology and hermeneutical understanding. The true conversion event is an act of pure faith whereby the person undergoing the conversion is aware that they are, in their own mind, handing authority for their soulish existence, over to a kind of thought/thinking that has no place in the world prior to their willingness to accept it and elevate it over and against every thought that existed prior to this conscious conversion event.
In the parlance of Paul, those Christians who understand what's taking place at their conversion are aware that for the first time in their lives, a concept, idea, word, that has no logical precedent, no empirical justification, no physical reality, is being willfully situated as the new prism for their observation and understanding of their world, and their life within the world.
Naturally, even those who understand what's happening at the conversion, experience fall back into the well-worn and comfortable practices of the thinking that preceded their conversion. But those who take the time and exert the effort to undergo what Col. Thieme referred to as "post-salvation epistemological rehabilitation," do the hard, but invaluable work of bringing every one of their thoughts, and more importantly the very mechanism for how they think, under the authority of the conversion event that's in some sense a theological out-Gnostifying of the Gnostics.
John
