Meaning of hyperdivine | Babel Free

Definitions

Superdivine; of a transcendent being or reality that is above and beyond merely divine.

rare

Examples

“The hyperdivine power of the Divinity of Jesus hath shone forth in us God-beseemingly ; for, having in flesh tasted death on the cross for all, He hath destroyed the stronghold of the hades; Him unceasingly bless, O ye children, hymn, O ye priests, ye people exalt Him unto all the ages.”

“Theologian Millard Erickson explains inerrancy as follows: "Inerrancy is the doctrine that the Bible is fully truthful in all of its teachings." When all the relevant facts are known, and when properly interpreted, Scripture never contradicts itself, nor does it misrepresent the facts. The phrase "when all the relevant facts are known" is key to understanding the Chicago statement, which affirmed that God's hand lies behind Scripture but also was concerned that the hyperdivine interpretations sometimes led to misinterpretation by neglecting to take into account qualities such as genra, language, indirect reports, and so forth.”

“The second word, literally, is “hyperexistent,” or “more than existing.” That God is existent and yet also beyond existent is a particularly Dionysian form of simultaneous information and negation, all in the prefix hyper-. This Greek modifier occurs fully ten times in this opening prayer alone, starting with hyperexistent, hyperdivine, and hypergood, all in the opening line. A single prefix here previews and even carries the entire Dionysian “mystical theology” within itself: whatever we think we perceive or know of God, while true on one level, falls short of the transcendent reality, for God is hyper-that, super-that (in the Latin translation), more-than-that.”

“In the Timeaeus, Plato's philosophical theology achieves its fullest form and articulation. Plato weaves philosophy and teology together in almost every section in the dialogue. Indeed, he presents the cosmos as a divine animal designed by a hyperdivine maker. The cosmic soul runs the universe and keeps it moving by way of the rational circlings of its mind. The human soul is also divine: its nous operates in the same way as that of the cosmos (though it does not have the full perfection of the cosmic soul). The rational human soul begins its life in a star and sees "the nature of the all". Once the soul incarnates in mortal bodies, in encounters massive impediments. The soul must master its human body and work to recover its original rational abilities. It does this by practicing philosophy and astronomy. Studying the rotations in the heavens allows it to perfect the circlings of its own mind. The human soul studies the divine cosmos both physically and intellectually. Indeed, the cosmos manifests its divinity to the philosopher by way of the "visible gods" in the heaven. Here, Plato uses the traditional Greek notion of divine epiphany, in which a god could appear in a variety of bodies, including heavenly bodies. In fact, the star-gods show the divinity of the cosmos in their choral dances every single night.”

“There had been some sprinkling impulses to push against the prevailing Hellenistic preference for limit and form and intelligibility limitlessness and formlessness and unintelligibility to posit something that might be beyond form and intelligibility and yet not therefore something horrible and chaotic and evil, as the limitless and formless and unintelligible had always hitherto been thought to be in this tradition, but rather the grounding of all intelligibility: Plato's Form of tradition of the Good, and sometimes (e.e., in Alcinous's Didaskalikos of the second centure CE), "God" as Nous, thinking itself or a thinking thing, which is nevertheless (rather problematically) also considered beyond all thought. Plotinus cuts the Gordian knot and makes the unnamable and unknowable One, beyond being and thought, the very centerpiece of his system -- the unthinkable that is the source of all thought, the unknownable that motivates and grounds all knowing, the hyperdivine void around which all divine Nous circulates. From that moment on, the divine darkness has a new role to play in theology; the prohibitions on naming God in the revealed religions can now be read as colorful invocations of the impossibility of naming God.”

CEFR level