Christianity and the force

I admit that I am very hesitant to post this for many reasons. For one I have no doubt that this has been covered, but I havent delved through all of the pages to look. For two, because I know that there are as many schools of thinking in this topic as thier are sects in christianity. I myself have gotten away from denominational Christianity and have started to delve into the bible itself and use historical context and the actual full scriptures itself to find Gods meaning, instead of out of text scripture snipping.
What I wish to know is this; how does one take the force and apply it to our faith?
I have no doubt that a belief in Eloheem and Yeshua is as much a belief in a Living Force as anything. However, I must admit that I fibd myself struggling with my faith in these dark times in the worlds history. In a time where people where the mask of faith to force thier own interests I wish to regain my faith through a pure understanding....and that has brought me to using aspects of the ways of the Jedi. I hope my question and the reasons behind it is understood.

TerraUmbra wrote: However, I must admit that I fibd myself struggling with my faith in these dark times in the worlds history.

I'm not of any Abrahamic faith so I'm just gonna make this quick comment and then show myself the door.

Your note above made me think of this book I just finished reading.

Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

Take care.

Hi TerraUmbra,I would struggle should someone suggest that the force is anything but the same as the Holy Spirit.Concerning people wearing the mask, that can so easily be related to times when I myself have found it troubling to step beyond my current expression of trust in God, I put on the mask of my tradition to avoid experiencing grace at a new depth. Does that answer your question?

TerraUmbra wrote: What I wish to know is this; how does one take the force and apply it to our faith?

We obviously haven't met. I'm steamboat28, syncretic animist/Buddhist/Abrahamic Jesus-follower and resident pain-in-the-butt. How are you today?

I hold to a more panentheistic view of the Force than most other Christians who utilize it in their faith. Many will say "The Force is God" or "The Force is the Holy Spirit", and I personally find those comparisons blasphemous, because (as my name reminds me daily) "Who is like God?" I couldn't influence any member of the Trinity, Godhead, or individual aspect of Adonai the way I can the Force, so it must be something They've set in motion, something They created that is separate from Themselves. Perhaps The Force is the watchspring of the Universe, the aether working behind the scenes to help guide the motion of things?

Anyhow, I need coffee.

TerraUmbra wrote: I admit that I am very hesitant to post this for many reasons. For one I have no doubt that this has been covered, but I havent delved through all of the pages to look. For two, because I know that there are as many schools of thinking in this topic as thier are sects in christianity. I myself have gotten away from denominational Christianity and have started to delve into the bible itself and use historical context and the actual full scriptures itself to find Gods meaning, instead of out of text scripture snipping.
What I wish to know is this; how does one take the force and apply it to our faith?
I have no doubt that a belief in Eloheem and Yeshua is as much a belief in a Living Force as anything. However, I must admit that I fibd myself struggling with my faith in these dark times in the worlds history. In a time where people where the mask of faith to force thier own interests I wish to regain my faith through a pure understanding....and that has brought me to using aspects of the ways of the Jedi. I hope my question and the reasons behind it is understood.

Full disclosure: I'm no longer a Christian.

I have been where you are (though I wasn't into Jeddism at the time) and confronted the same spectre you're facing. I was using the Hebrew versions of the names and titles "elohim and Yeshua" too because for me it helped to highlight an important distinction.

That is, simply put, that the original people and the original God is different from the versions advanced in later history.

I think there has always been a question about God because ultimately God wasn't talking to any of them to set them straight. In the actual text it says over and over that there is one God and numerous quotes of Yahweh say that there is only one God and there is no God other than him (YHWH).

And when I was doing my research on this whole trinity thing the internet was a new thing but it allowed me to search the bible in ways I simply couldn't have dreamed of before. So I felt like I was armed with a new powerful weapon that many other people (who tend to accept the party line) just accept.

So it was clear to me that, according to the bible, YHWH was the only God and Jesus was kind of an altered version of Yeshua who was turned into a god the same way that Hercules was. He basically earned his way into a higher status. ...in people's minds.

And then people would argue "so what about the Holy Spirit then?" and try to use that to prove there is at least 2 so why not 3? If there are 2 then the One God concept has to be out the door. Right?

But not so fast.

From my research, which was basically me coming from the Christian tradition trying to understand basic Judaism because THAT is what Yeshua believed and taught, the Holy Spirit was a title that was used to speak of or make reference to the "presence" of God. The bible literally says "God is a spirit".

So if I were you... which I'm not... but if I was... that's where I'd start.

When the bible says "the spirit of God moved across the face of the waters" it's not talking about some other being but rather the same God. Switching titles does not switch people. It is humans that created this "offices" as if God is a corporation. We imagine this based on our own needs for structure and organization. Why do we need organization? Because we are naturally inefficient and lacking in power and need to work together. Assuming God requires offices and co-pilots co-captains co-owners etc is basically saying he can't do it by himself.

Yeshua regards YHWH as his "Father", but the bible clearly says he was conceive by the holy spirit. That's because YHWH is holy. And YHWH is a spirit. Therefore... (doing some algebraic math here...) God is the holy spirit. And these two terms were used together in order to differentiate God from any other spirit.

Now...

What IS a spirit?

The answer I came up with is that spirit is energy. If someone is "high spirited" they're energetic. In Japanese "good spirits" is basically positive vibes/energy. And in science basically everything is energy. All matter is really just slower moving energy that is more dense.

You could then extrapolate other ideas from this that may exist in religious terms. If energy is everywhere then one could easily say God too is everywhere and is therefore omnipresent. Energy is also power so one could say God simply represents all energy and is therefore "omnipotent".

I could keep going but the point is that the bible really isn't a science book and people were trying to put names on things they didn't understand. They wanted to know before they had any means of scientific detection. So "gods" were an easy answer that they could use to cover most things.

Various cultures used gods in interesting ways. They used pairings of gods to talk about and teach laws of nature and duality. This god may handle this. This god handles that. But they both work together and this other thing is the result. So it was like an archaic form of science that used fictional characters to represent real things. These real things didn't have personas but rather metaphorical dispositions. What can you say about earth, for example? Firm... Solid... these words can also represent human behavior. So it was easy to draw different parallels so that it could create systems like astrology and numerology.

And it wasn't really about who the gods were but rather understanding it as a system of knowledge. Were there many gods? Or one? Even Israel struggled with this question because they had come from and thus integrated the knowledge of both Egypt and Canaan. And it's not like no one ever wrote myths and legends about gods and people who would later become gods. So all I'm suggesting is the bible is not somehow special or exempt from these same cultural phenomenons.

So why does God need to be personified? Is it because "he" must be a person or is it because we need him to be a person so "he" can be personal and relate to us? So that we wont feel alone and so we can feel that we have a father who created us and loves us. But what if that's not the case and we were created through a process of intersecting circumstances? What if our creation was a result of the Force trying to balance itself? And errors in our own "code" are part of that attempt? And because we ourselves are imbalanced we seek partners (masculine or feminine energy) to help form a balance in our lives? What if?

If we keep following the thread of history back to its source I believe that all we are left with is the Force. You can call it YHWH, elohim, God, Allah, if you wish. And if you need that energy to take some kind of human form and have hair and teeth and feet and butt cheeks, then you can have that. You're never going to be told "no." because no one ever is. But all of these extra things that describe God are really mirrors that reflect the wants and needs of humans seeking to but not really understanding the Force.

Whenever I’ve had someone asking me or a apprentice about this in the past, there’s a book I’ve always recommended for just a basic look at, a starting point.

Author: Dick Staub
Christian Wisdom of the Jedi Masters


Here’s a link at Amazon that has it in Kindle, Hardback or Paperback...

https://www.amazon.com/Christian-Wisdom-Jedi-Masters-Staub-ebook/dp/B001OQBQF2

Feel free to contact me if you would prefer a private discussion on this or get in touch with Pastor Carlos.

steamboat28 wrote:

TerraUmbra wrote: What I wish to know is this; how does one take the force and apply it to our faith?

We obviously haven't met. I'm steamboat28, syncretic animist/Buddhist/Abrahamic Jesus-follower and resident pain-in-the-butt. How are you today?

I hold to a more panentheistic view of the Force than most other Christians who utilize it in their faith. Many will say "The Force is God" or "The Force is the Holy Spirit", and I personally find those comparisons blasphemous, because (as my name reminds me daily) "Who is like God?" I couldn't influence any member of the Trinity, Godhead, or individual aspect of Adonai the way I can the Force, so it must be something They've set in motion, something They created that is separate from Themselves. Perhaps The Force is the watchspring of the Universe, the aether working behind the scenes to help guide the motion of things?

Anyhow, I need coffee.

All of these "aspects" let's call them are like slices of a pizza. If you're holding the knife (or pen) you can slice that pizza into as many slices as you physically can. YOU. Your limitations are your agility and the thickness of the knife's blade.

For some people God was a warrior because they thought they needed war. For others God was a Father because they needed love and protection. The titles used for God are often based on the roles, created by humans, that reflect our need. These multiple roles can be illustrated by different titles but there is still just one Pizza.

The trinity was simply a theory that was agreed upon as if there wasn't 7 different beliefs at the time about the divinity of Yeshua ha Mashiach or "Jesus the Christ". No such theory existed before the character of Jesus existed in the bible. And if Jesus did not exist the bible would not even include a "New Testament" with newer writings thought to augment the earlier ones.

But to me that is a fundamental flaw. There was a law in Israel that there was one God and people were supposed to repeat this statement of faith in one God every single day (Dueteronomy 6:4). So the idea that there is a 2.0 version that changed the rules of version 1 to the extent that something people got executed for is suddenly not the case... I find too hard to believe. What I find much easier to believe is that human beings could not agree on who or what "God" is and therefore they made God "Everything". But by being everything God isn't distinguished from anything. There is no God the Father and God the Son. Because if women were equals there would have also been Goddess the mother and Goddess the daughter. It was a male dominated patriarchal system. And Asherah or Astarte may have been an idea for awhile but never the law.

So that brings me back to the universal pizza. You can slice it up and you can put whatever toppings suit your taste buds. And that's why everyone loves pizza. And that's why everyone loves God.

ZealotX wrote: honestly, a lot of things I read and kind of understood, but don't want to clutter the post with

In rabbinic literature, the Presence of G-d has its own name (the Shekinah), and in the Kabbalah it is regarded as the feminine aspect of the Divine.

All this discussion about trinitarian doctrine is moot because, ultimately, "Adonai echad" -- G-d is One. Trinitarian thought doesn't dispose of that notion at all; it simply shows three "avatars", if you will, of the same Divine Being--the Father is the mind of G-d, the Son is the hands of G-d, and the Holy Spirit is the heart of G-d. At least, that's where my rabbit trail of belief led me.

It's a lot like the Faith of the Seven in A Song of Ice and Fire; the Father, Mother, Warrior, Maiden, Smith, Crone, and Stranger aren't different gods. They're all just faces, facets, aspects, or personae of one.

The existence of Yeshua haMashiach, Jesus the Christ, could be that of an ascended or awakened master. Either way, Yeshua Himself did nothing to contradict the Shema--G-d is still One, just One with many faces and omnipotence enough to send a sliver of Themselves into a human body to live and walk the earth as Yeshua. And Yeshua did nothing to discredit the Ten Commandments or the 613 mitzvot, because He claimed that if one loved G-d and loved their neighbor, they would unwittingly keep all the Law and the Prophets.

I see no contradiction there whatsoever, but it's vastly off-topic.

The reason I don't see The Force as the third part of the Trinity is that many people believe you can actively manipulate the former, bending it to your will, when that is not the case with the Holy Spirit. You can speak with the Spirit, reason with the Spirit, grieve the Spirit, but you cannot control the Spirit--it, as G-d, is wholly unique and above our power levels to even comprehend. So, I clearly define a difference between the two, because anything else borders on the only unforgivable sin listed in my copy of the Bible.

From my point of view, the only reference to something clearly akin to the Force within foundational Christian texts is in the book of Luke, where - after a woman touched Jesus' robe to receive healing, and he said: "Someone touched me, for I perceive that power has gone out from me." That "power", in context, sounds very much like the Force.

I have trouble seeing either God or Jesus as the Force. They both have a will, have intentionality, and are relatively resistant to manipulation from others. Maybe the Holy Spirit could be the Force; at least in the writings, unlike God or Jesus, it does not speak, never takes visible form, yet is seen to act. The Holy Spirit does, however, seem to apply intention (it initiates the events of Pentecost), and Jesus promises he will send him/her/it to his disciples (indicating it had to come from someplace, and does not perpetually "surround us and penetrate us"). I think the evidence there is a bit mixed.

More broadly - the entire narrative of the Bible is dynamic, telling of men, women, and supernatural beings active in the world in very tangible ways. It does not share, with the traditions of the East, concepts like prana or chi. It does not urge the stilling of body and mind to align oneself with a cosmic presence - its preferred mechanism for that being prayer.

I don't think Christianity is necessarily in conflict with the existence of the Force ... any more than it is in conflict with the existence of, say, pizza (sorry ZealotX!!) just because pizza is never mentioned in the Bible. But I don't see it as particularly supportive of a relationship with the Force either.

Just my two cents and a donut.

My understanding is that of Jesus having been a character parallel to others written about such as Buddha, whom both were "awake" to the root nature of their existence but communicating it in somewhat different ways and somewhat similar ways as well. Jesus's way of speaking about following him, in historical translations had many undertones that are infomous for being taken literally when it's more likely he was teaching others how to become "awake" (connected with The Force) by using himself as "the example".

Many Christians relvolve their belief around "being like Christ". This usually is lazily interpreted as simply "being nice to your neighbor" and even then is used only when it's convenient. A more complete understanding of "being like Christ" would involve learning how to realize the nature of one's own existence on such a level that their connection to the world around them transforms their behavior into one of deep selflessness and their experience of their world as one in which them and their world become one and the same (connection). This would be realizing the Force. Being "like Christ" is going through the trials of your own humanity to realize what you really are to mature into becoming that which is larger than yourself for a deep purpose. The story of the death and resurrection is that of the human being dieing of their adolescent ego and being reborn into an integrated function of the Force.

Obviously this is an interpretation, but I'd like to think it is shaped out of the consideration for theological parallels and psychological representations of common human myth which is quite present in the stories of the Bible.