GOD is MIND, Part 1 *******
Let us examine from Chapter 5 several names for God as they have developed over the millenniums and how they have been interpreted.
God as Divine Mind
… Over the centuries of the Christian era, a number of both Catholic and Protestant theologians and literacy scholars have addressed Deity as Mind.
- St. Gregory — On the Making of Man, referred to God as “the very Mind.”
- St. Augustine — 3 times in The City of God referred to God as “the divine mind.”
- St. John of Damascus — Exposition of the Orthodox Faith: “God then is called Mind and Reason and Spirit and Wisdom and Power, as the cause of these, and as immaterial, and maker of all, and omnipotent.”
- St. Thomas Aquinas — 7 times within a short space in his Summa Theologica called God either “mind” or “the divine mind.”
- Dante Alighieri — The Inferno, (as translated by the American poet and scholar John Ciardi) called God “the Eternal Mind”
- Martin Luther’s German Bible reads as follows: God said, Be it our wish to process man after our mind, after our likeness. … And God created man after His mind; after God’s mind created He him; He created them male and female.
- René Descartes — a reference to “the Divine intellect”
- Benedict de Spinoza — “an infinite thinking Being”
- John Locke — “eternal Mind” (3 times), “eternal infinite Mind,” “thinking eternal Being,” “eternal thinking Being,”
- Samuel T. Coleridge — “the infinite mind”, “There is one Mind, one omnipresent Mind”
- William Wordsworth — “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” wrote the deific phrase “the Eternal Mind”
- James Hastings, Scottish divine and scholar — in the first paragraph of his discussion of time in his Dictionary of the Bible, called God “the Divine mind”
- Thornton Wilder — Our Town, … “The United States of America; Continent of North America; Western Hemisphere; the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the Mind of God.”
- The Ten Commandments(1956), when Moses had returned from the mount of the burning bush … As Joshua questioned him, Moses said, “He revealed His Word to my mind. The Word was God.” Joshua asked, “Did He speak as a man?” Moses responded, “He is not flesh, but Spirit, the Light of eternal Mind, and I know that His Light is in every man.”
- Paul Lee Tan, Th.D. — The Interpretation of Prophecy. On infinite mind and the written words. — Concerning the reasoning that Infinite Mind should not be confined to mere words and thus a double sense should be sought, we state that God is not trying to reveal in Scripture all that He knows — only what He intends man to know. …