Humanly incomprehensible, ergo not a valid proposal. Fellowship can ONLY be conceived over time. A child won't say, "Thanks for all the fellowship, Dad, even though you never spend any time with me."
You are confusing eternality with intimacy and emotional experience, and experience in general. And what is more, you are suggesting that what is incomprehensible is invalid, however, the inscrutable nature of God is attested to in Scripture. That God is entirely transcendent and unknowable in His divine nature is a completely scriptural doctrine. We know and experience God on a human level only because of the Incarnation of the Word.
As is common, you put forth with one hand...
What you take back with the other:
and thus try to stand on both sides of the fence. Only someone indoctrinated into this equivocal stance would accept your words.
Firstly, please refrain from the ad hominem arguments.
Secondly, I have not been “indoctrinated” into this idea, indeed, I don’t recall coming across one catechism of any major church which teaches this position (or which teaches against it). Rather, the position that God created time is one I arrived at completely independently, before reading the quote stated at the beginning of this thread.
However, the fact that a number of members whose churches do not, so far as I am aware, make any point of teaching that God created time and exists outside of it
There is not a shred of hard evidence for the translation "immaterial spirit" in Scripture. That blatant, incredibly egregious mistranslation is rooted only in the insidious teaching of the homosexual pagan philosopher Plato,
In contrast to other Athenian elites, Plato attempted to reform their perverse system in such a way as to end the physical abuse of boys that was rampant in ancient Greek society, which is why we have the phrase “Platonic relationship.”
However, I have not read anywhere that Plato suggested God existed outside of time, and as I stated in the preceding paragraph, I arrived at this conclusion independently, based on John 1. When it states that by Christ all things were made, since spacetime is a thing, quite obviously, I accept that as fact.
That being said, just because Plato or someone else you dislike (the early church was in fact extremely mistrustful of both Plato and Aristotle; Plato was used in a de minimus way only when the early Church had established that he was not directly connected to neo-Platonism, and likewise only used Aristotle when it was established that he was not of particular importance to the Gnostics) says something, it does not mean they are automatically wrong. To argue along this basis is a logical fallacy known as
argumentum ad hominem. The use of ad hominem, ad populum and related arguments, which are appeals to unqualified authorities or against authorites on the basis of a perceived lack of qualification results in us failing to rationally evaluate the truthfulness of what is being discussed.
The vast majority of people living on Crete are Greek Orthodox Christians, yet if we misread (by using the Ad Hominem fallacy) St. Paul and his amusing reference to the Epimenides Paradox, we would have to conclude they either did not believe in Christianity, or that Christianity was false, because when they recite the Nicene Creed at every one of their numerable church services, they are lying.
Regarding the materiality or immateriality of God, since God created all matter, it follows that logically, God is material through the Incarnation of the Word. Before that time, before we met Jesus Christ, although it is obvious there were physical interactions with God, these were clearly with either our Lord or the Holy Spirit, and not the Father, who has only ever been heard. In the case of the Holy Spirit, in the New Testament He is seen in the form of a dove and as tongues of fire, so it seems reasonable that the fire which burned but did not consume (it is very much alive and in the courtyard of the Monastery of St. Catharine in Sinai) the bush where Moses encountered God was the Holy Spirit, and likewise the Pillar of Fire, while other Theophanies in the Old Testament point to our Lord.
insofar as the church fathers fell for that nonsense, with the (thankful) exception that Tertullian recognized God to be a physical being. I've discussed all this on other threads.
If Tertullian actually believed that, it was in error, and, while some of his contributions were valued and accepted by the early church, Tertullian did become a Montanist heretic, because he believed that Montanus, a man, was the Paraclete (and if what you are saying is accurate, he may have thought Montanus to be the Holy Spirit, which is…sad). Note this is not an appeal to authority but rather a rejection of an appeal against unqualified authority, since there is some reason, as I just stated, to consider that you might be reading Montanist-influenced doctrines of Tertullian, which were rejected by the Early Church for very good reasons.
