General Trying to understand unitarian views

[stignatius]

I just want unitarians to think about this. A metaphor is to apply a word or phrase to an object. It is to take a perhaps foreign or difficult concept and connect it with something familiar. Literally everything that is familiar to us in our universe does not have a pre-existence.

By the logic that unitarians tend to employ, in order for Jesus to teach you that he has a pre-existence he cannot use any metaphors about himself whatsoever.

 

[Shelley]

This thread is only dealing with one particular scripture and a couple of picked out words. I cannot do it justice. I just don't approach scripture the same way I did when I was JW, if I did at all. And I do not claim to be expert since I have just recently discovered I don't believe Jesus was anything other than a man born human like us and not a god man materialized somehow as a baby. Someone else can provide insight again on this particular scripture and I'll learn more.

 

[stignatius]

I think that's a good point. These are tricky questions and working them out over a message board is only going to bring limited discoveries for anyone involved. Let's all keep digging!

 

[LeeB]

Our human spirit, the breath of life, comes from God. God is the creator of spirits. In this sense you, your spirit, the real you not your body of dust, came from heaven, from God. When you die this breaks the union of the soul and the dust goes to dust but the spirit goes back to God who gave it in a dormant state Jesus compared to sleep. We all came from heaven and all return there, Jesus was no different.

 

[LeeB]

God creates all human spirits, the breath of life, our bodies are the dust of the ground. The real person is the spirit, the human spirit that came from God and at death returns to God. Jesus was the same as he was human. Those preexisting statements are in error because of this. Shortly before he died Jedus said, receive my spirit. Job said there is a spirit in man, Job 32:8 . The body without the spirit is dead but the spirit returns to God in a "sleep" state, it cannot function without a body. The spirit awaits a resurrection either first or second determined by God. The first is at the return of Jesus where the saints receive immortality and impeccability , the second is to a fleshly existence where people people either repent or perish in the second death.