Is Vincent Torley a closet Gnostic?

Here are Doctor (of Metaphysics) Torley's "quick answers" to JP415's questions about God:

  • God only interacts with material universe remotely: "[God is] on a higher plane of reality, maintaining the entire universe in being, so he's able to act on them at will."
  • "God doesn't live anywhere. God is outside space, just as an author is outside the story he writes."
Here, in contrast, is what Christianity teaches about the presence of God: 

  • "Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel, because he has come to his people and redeemed them. (Luke 1:68)
  • "For we are the temple of the living God. As God has said: 'I will live with and walk among them... (2 Cor. 6:16)
  • "What does 'he ascended' mean except that he also descended to the lower, earthly regions? He who descended is the very one who ascended higher than all the heavens, in order to fill the whole universe." (Ephesians 4:9-10)
  • "The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth." (John 1:14)
  • "Behold, the tabernacle of God is among men, and He will dwell among them...(Rev. 21:3)
The notion that God is incomprehensibly remote from direct human experience is an old idea, an idea included under the rubric of gnosticism, an idea the early Church declared a heresy. The idea that God lives outside the universe is Torleyanity, not Christianity. 

To quote Cyril of Jerusalem, “[Jesus] Himself declared and said of the Bread, This is My Body, who shall dare to doubt any longer? And since He has Himself affirmed and said, This is My Blood, who shall ever hesitate, saying, that it is not His blood?...is it incredible that He should have turned wine into blood?" (Fourth Mystagogic Catechism, IV, 22) Jesus' flesh is God's flesh and God's flesh is food. “The teaching of the Church is explicit on this point. The body eaten is the same as that once born of a virgin and now seated at the right hand of the Father." (Preserved Smith, The Monist 28 (1916) 161.)


Ignatius calls, “Jesus Christ our God," (EphesiansPrÅ“mium, 18) speaks of “the spark of life renewed by "the blood of God," (Ibid, 1) and famously calls the Eucharistic bread, “the medicine of immortality, the antidote that we may not die." (Ibid, 20) By the time 1 Clement was composed—one of the earliest Christian documents outside the New Testament—“let us  gaze upon the blood of Christ" (1 Clement 7:4) has taken on the language of epiphany, the technical language for “gazing at God or for gazing at the divine." (Fisher, Vigiliae Christianae 34 (1980) 221, 223.)

If the Sacrament of the Eucharist is the "body and blood, soul and divinity" of Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity, how can God be "outside space"? Does anyone seriously think "The Word became flesh" implied God was "outside space"? Has Vincent Torley painted himself into a heretical corner in an attempt to justify his aberrant theology or does he know literally nothing about the New Testament and primitive Christianity? Or has Vincent Torley, like thousands before him, simply invented his own idiosyncratic religious spinoff? According to some estimates there are 40,000 Christian sects. Make that 40,001.

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