RE: Christians, what is it like to have a personal relationship with Jesus?
July 14, 2016 at 5:30 pm
(This post was last modified: July 14, 2016 at 5:32 pm by Neo-Scholastic.)
(July 14, 2016 at 4:38 pm)Irrational Wrote:(July 14, 2016 at 9:19 am)ChadWooters Wrote: What is your relationship to Truth? What is your relationship with what is Good? Are these real to you or just convenient fictions? As for me, I believe they are real and that belief affects my life in a very deep and personal way. And so it follows that since Jesus Christ is the full actualization of what is Good and True, I have a personal relationship with Him. Does that make sense to you?
(FWIW I consider the this way of stating it as just a more philosophical way and without the "churchspeak" manner that Drich used above.)
It makes sense only superficially. There is a major problem of vagueness in your answer. So it's still not clear to me what your relationship with Jesus really is like. How is your relationship with Jesus different from the relationship former Christians claim they had with him? Perhaps some examples may help?
I don’t know enough about the experiences of former Christians. From what I gather those experiences vary from intellectual dissatisfaction to physical/emotional abuse. So I cannot really say how my current relationship compares with those who lost faith.
To me, it seems more like a shift of attention and categorization. As an oil painter I can attune myself to minor shifts in hue and tone and these get identified in terms of very specific and real pigment mixtures – low saturation Cerulean, high saturation Indian yellow with transparent oxide red, etc. as opposed to meaningless descriptions like “sky blue” or “salmon.” By training I have traded-in arbitrary terms for color with terms that directly relate to objective realities.
So by reading Holy Scripture and attending to the Holy Spirit, I feel like I now live and breathe in a world where some things are actually good and true, not because the majority says so based on a consensus perception, but because good things verily participate in and manifest a real transcendent Good, one that is intelligent, just, and purposeful.