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To: DaveMSmith

Interesting.

But let me ask again: Did the concept of “community” exist prior to creation?


42 posted on 01/06/2012 12:27:08 PM PST by Theo (May Rome decrease and Christ increase.)
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To: Theo

I don’t have an answer. Before creation was the un-created and infinite Lord — from eternity. You are asking a question about before the beginning which was without form and void.


43 posted on 01/06/2012 12:42:11 PM PST by DaveMSmith (Evil Comes from Falsity, So Share the Truth)
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To: Theo
A qouote from Swedenborg on the subject about contemplating what God was doing before creation:

" The natural man can hardly apprehend spiritual things, consequently those things which are of heaven. Who of this character can comprehend that spaces and times are not given in heaven, but instead thereof states? Would not the merely natural man believe that there must be mere emptiness and nothingness where there is not time and space? Hence it is evident, if the natural man concludes with himself that nothing is to be believed but what he apprehends, that in such case he casts himself into enormous errors. As it is with spaces and times, so also it is in many other things; as, for example, the natural man must needs fall into fantastic thought concerning the Divine, when he thinks from time, what the Divine had done before the creation of the world, that is, what He had done from eternity till then; nor can he be extricated from this labyrinth, until the ideas of time and space are removed; the angels, when they think of this eternity, never think of it from time, but from state. In the other life there appear two statues, partly of flesh and partly of stone, placed in the boundary of the created universe in front towards the left, and it is said of them, that they swallow up those who think of the Divine what He had done from eternity before He created the world; the swallowing up represents, that man, inasmuch as he cannot think but from space and time, cannot extricate himself thence of himself, but from the Divine, which is effected either by the dissipation of that thought, or by the removal of the ideas of time." (Secrets of Heaven 8325.)

44 posted on 01/06/2012 1:23:29 PM PST by DaveMSmith (Evil Comes from Falsity, So Share the Truth)
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