Jesus is human.
Jesus has no trace of sin or its effects.
So one can be human without a trace of sin or its effects.
So Mary can be human without a trace of sin or its effects.
Further:
A Maxim is (or could be), “Waking understands sleeping; sleeping does not understand waking. That is, the distorting effect of sin distorts the inellective and apprehensive faculties so that the sinner’s understanding of virtue or vice, sinlessness or sin, is not as good as that of a sinless person. Similarly, it is not necessarily that case that to have compassion for the guilty requires one to be guilty.
Further:
Isn’t sinlessness part of the Xtian hope? Do we expect to be less human or more human “in heaven”? I’d submit that we will be more human than ever when we are finally sinless. And similarly IHS is more truly human than I am and the Panagia as proleptically benefiting from the Victory of Christ is also more truly human than I am.
Is it an implication of your stand that sinfulness of some kind is part of the “ontos” of humanity?
Don't think I'm claiming more for this line of arguing than I am. I'm just tossing it out like steak to a hungry attorney pitbull to be torn apart.
Howdy, MD! :)
“Jesus is human.
Jesus has no trace of sin or its effects.
So one can be human without a trace of sin or its effects.
So Mary can be human without a trace of sin or its effects.”
Last time I looked, the dogma was that Christ is “True God and True Man”. Pyro and I have already had a little talk about “True Goddess and True Woman”. Not the sort of place any of you RCs, save maybe some of the Co-Redemptrix crowd, want to go, MD.
““Waking understands sleeping; sleeping does not understand waking. That is, the distorting effect of sin distorts the intellective and apprehensive faculties so that the sinner’s understanding of virtue or vice, sinlessness or sin, is not as good as that of a sinless person. Similarly, it is not necessarily that case that to have compassion for the guilty requires one to be guilty.”
OK...for now....
“Isn’t sinlessness part of the Xtian hope? Do we expect to be less human or more human “in heaven”? I’d submit that we will be more human than ever when we are finally sinless. And similarly IHS is more truly human than I am and the Panagia as proleptically benefiting from the Victory of Christ is also more truly human than I am.”
“Sinlessness” is “part of the Xtian hope” to this extent; if we arrive at a point when we have died completely to the self so that our will is so coextensive with that of God that we never “miss the mark”, then we shall have fulfilled our created purpose and I suppose you could say that we hope for that. More or less “human” when we are “in heaven”? If we arrive at a state of Theosis, we shall have fulfilled our created purpose, we shall have become both the image and the likeness of God. Is that “more human” or simply as we were intended to be? Is Christ “more human” than we? No but His human nature is as human nature was created to be. The same goes for Panagia who is in a state of perfect and complete Theosis.
“Is it an implication of your stand that sinfulness of some kind is part of the “ontos” of humanity?”
Not at all. While Augustine taught, outside the consensus patrum, that prior to the Fall Adam and Eve were in a state of perfection, the other Fathers taught that Adam and Eve were in a state of potential perfection, or Theosis or divinization. Thus, we are not ontologically “divinized” but rather we ontologically, before the Fall and since the Incarnation, have the potential to become like God.