----- Original Message ----- 
From: "H Dorrington" <hjdinfl@...>
> So a gnostic Christ would pretend to eat and then slip the food to the
dog? So did He appear to bleed and die on the cross as well?

Depends on the sect.  Generally, gnosticism held Christ didn't die with the
body but left the body prior to the crucifixion and then reappeared at the
Resurrection.  Kind of convenient.  The more bizarre versions were little
more than prequels to "invasion of the body snatchers". :-)

> Then would we not be as much human as He was?  Then what He did in His
humanity we should also be able to do if we are the same. Or is there a
distinction?

The distinction is that Christ did the man thing perfectly in perfect
reliance on the Spirit.  To be honest, I haven't worked through all of the
implications
spelled out by Ferguson's (The Holy Spirit) paradigm completely.  Most of
Christ's life, including his miracles, can be
explained in terms of Christ's relationship to the Spirit.  The most obvious
implication is *if* Christ's power came from His dependence on the Spirit,
ours does as well via Pentecost.  Now... does that mean we could raise the
dead if we were as perfect as Christ was in His dependence on the Spirit?
Probably not.  Raising the dead might suggest some transcendent qualities
were present in distinction from us... but then again, we're also not "The
Logos".  IOW, the revelatory function of Christ's life may have more to do
with the distinctions between us and Him than transcendence.  I do not deny
that the transcendent might be present in Christ.  If it is... transcendence
is just as much an imposition into the text as dependence on the Spirit.
And certainly I do not believe the text warrants transcendence as the rule,
but as the exception.  Else he really wasn't all that human.  The human
experience in Adam goes beyond emotion and physical.  The gnostic tendencies
in the transcendent view limit the human experience to pretty much those two
characteristics of creaturehood... but even the animals have those
creaturely characteristics.

Chad Bresson
Xenia, OH