It is very good. I recommend it, though Kreeft is so sure he's got it all figured out that it's irritating sometimes.
Posted on 07/22/2012 12:14:15 PM PDT by wmfights
the second model Blaising discusses is the “new creation model.” This model is contrary to Platonism and the spiritual vision model and emphasizes the physical, social, political, and geographical aspects of eternal life. It emphasizes a coming new earth, the renewal of life on this new earth, bodily resurrection, and social and political interactions among the redeemed.39
I broke this paper into 2 parts and will post the 2nd part in a couple days. Also, I left the footnotes in and italicized them so anyone who wishes to see the sources can do so.
I think the great question to look at is how we view Heaven. Is it strictly a spiritual realm, or is it also physical. Any thoughts?
I broke this paper into 2 parts and will post the 2nd part in a couple days. Also, I left the footnotes in and italicized them so anyone who wishes to see the sources can do so.
I think the great question to look at is how we view Heaven. Is it strictly a spiritual realm, or is it also physical. Any thoughts?
I would say neither, but something we cannot fully grasp in this life.
I imagine everyone has heard the analogy, but it’s said we have as good a grasp on what life after death is as a baby in the womb has of life after birth.
Excellent - thank you for posting.
Do you have an “eschatological ping list”? I’m interested in the 2nd installment. 8^)
I can't agree with his view of the influence of Platonism, but I don't think he's WAY off base at all. In Catholic and, especially, Orthodox conversations, we would have to work on the distinction drawing pretty carefully. It wouldn't be a wholesale operation at all, IMHO.
Two semi off the wall observations:
(1) The “Greeks” I know don't think all that much of Augustine.
(2) The writer uses the phrase “an historical eternal state.84” To me that illustrates how difficult the conversation would be. That, to me, is almost a contradiction in terms. It is more Aristotelian than Platonic thinking that leads me to think that God is “eternal” and that in some sense “eternal” means “Outside of time”and therefore outside of history.
Here is why I say “almost” and “in some sense”: When “sophisticated” non-believers challenge the idea of a personal God, two things become speedily apparent. Their idea of personality includes the defects of character and ability that we experience in ourselves and in every other personal being (excepting angels). We would say those defects are the result of the fall or of the limitation of being a creature. They are not of the “esse” of personality as such. We can envision a person without defects and inabilities.
Further, when you ask them, “Well, what is God LIKE then?” they come up with something which, upon examination seems lifeless and pallid in comparison with persons. In denying that God is personal, they come up with — or are stuck with — an idea that God is LESS than personal.
So, in talking with such folks, I adopt the language of “God is AT LEAST Personal, MORE than personal, not less.”
So if the idea of an eternal God ends up being described as —or having the ‘flavor’ of — something LESS than temporal, then it is rightly rejected. A kind of pallid, wispy, anemic Spirituality just won't do the job. Heaven may be sexless for example, but that's because it's BETTER than sex. (It's more like beer,I guess.) :-)
And this is even implicit in the careful thought of Aristotle and the “Unchanged changer” argument. The Unmoved Mover MUST have SOME sort of relationship with temporality, because where there is change, there is time, and what “the First Cause” causes is change, and therefore temporality and history.
So the usage I have come up with, with no pretense that I understand what I am saying, is that Eternity “comprehends” temporality.
I ‘get’ that some dispensationalists, JW’s in particular, are all over the idea of the eschaton working out on a new earth. Certainly they make a fine Biblical case. I think, to be less rigorous, I would say that compared to the transforming vision of God it SEEMS to me (but maybe I misunderstand) a lesser promise than being able to see with perfect vision Him who made me and who loved me before all worlds.
I don't mean any of this to be confrontative or argumentative. This is just meant to be a friendly response by a Dominican Catholic who is kind of an auto-didact in theology.
I'm glad you enjoyed this.
Very interesting. Thanks for posting.
Gnoticism teaches that human spirit was God, is now trapped in the evil matierial and only through the sufficient knowledge, can we return to be God. The process of being removed from God is called “alienation”, a theme that should be familiar to students of Marx, even as he put a secular interpretation on it. Humanity could return to God when it achieved the perfect socialist condition. The foundational ideas of Gnosticism go back to the time of Plato.
“To understand [alienation] we have to go back behind Hegel, the immediate source of Marx’s ideas, to Hegel’s own ultimate source: viz. Gnosticism. For alienation is the central theme of Gnosticism, along with the saving knowledge of how we became alienated, and from what, and of how we can escape from it. That theme is summarized in the Valentinian
formula:
‘What liberates is the knowledge of who we were, what we became; where we were, whereinto we came; what birth is and what rebirth.’
All the Gnostic texts, though they differ in details, declare that we are strangers, aliens, sparks of Light or Spirit trapped in evil matter. They recount the cosmic process whereby the circles of the world have been
created, by ignorant or evil creators and not by the Light, and whereby we have become entrapped in the midmost or deepest dungeon. Finally they impart the knowledge needed to escape back to the one Light whence we have come and which is our real home.
This is the pattern of thought that Hegel took over. But, rejecting all other-worldliness, he sought to reconcile men to this world, of nature and society, from which they had become estranged. We are the vehicles of a self-creating Geist which, in order to become and to know itself, has gone out into what is most alien to itself—the merely physical
world of Newtonian science—and is progressively coming thence to its full self-realization and self-knowledge in and through human life and history. With this knowledge, given by Hegel’s own philosophy, man’s alienation from the world is in principle, overcome although Geist has not yet fully realized itself in the world.
Marx took from Hegel two basic themes of Gnosticism, which Hegel had secularized, and re-interpreted them in his own way: viz. the cosmic drama of a fall into alienation from nature and one’s fellow men, and the saving knowledge, Marxism, which explains this and the way out of alienation back to an unalienated existence. But in one central
respect Marx did not fully learn the lesson that Hegel had to teach him about modifying ancient Gnosticism.
The Gnostic texts state that we are sparks of Light or fragments of Spirit (pneuma), and imply that we are distinct from each other and from the Light or Spirit only because of our fall or seduction into the circles of the world. As we fell through each circle, we were clothed with an outer covering. The return to the Light will be a reversal of that
process, so that, as we pass back through each circle we shall strip off each coating. Consequently, but this is never stated, as far as I know, at the end of that process each spark or fragment will cease to be distinct and will merge back into the One Light or Spirit. Hence the End will be the same as the Beginning.”
From Flew, Marx and Gnosticism, by R.T. Allen,
Philosophy Vol 68, No 263, (Jan, 1993),
pp. 94-98
(”Flew” is Antony Flew, 1923-2010, a British philosopher)
see also:
Marx as Millennial Communist
http://mises.org/daily/3769
The most logical support, to me, of the idea of the new creation is that God’s original purpose, presumably, was for Man to live here on the Earth. Surely his response to Satan’s opposition would not be to give up on this original purpose and haul everybody off to Heaven to be spirits, but rather to bring about a re-creation that implements his original purpose.
The failure to completely discredit this heresy can be seen today by how many Christians think of Heaven as strictly spiritual. We will have resurrected bodies. Heaven will be a return to how we were in the Garden before the fall.
Plato’s account of Socrates in Phaedo is one such example. When sentenced to death, Socrates rebuked his friends for mourning over him by declaring that he longed for death so he could escape his carnal body and focus on higher spiritual values in a spiritual realm.4 For Plato (and Socrates), the human body is like a tomb for the soul. Plato’s ideas have had an enormous impact. Gary Habermas observes that Plato’s concept of forms, along with his cosmology and his views on the immortality of the soul, “probably has the greatest influence in the philosophy of religion.”5
Some ideas are hard to overcome.
Thanks for drawing in how communism drew from the same idea.
Why is there any reason to believe anything other than humans were created exactly as we are and that our purpose is to live according to our nature, i.e. rational, volitional beings who are an integration of matter and consciousness? A being who has reason as his only way of perceiving reality and must use reason as his only guide to action. This is the most obvious and logical conclusion to draw it seems to me. Why is there this need to create all these theories of mystical realms and otherworldly existences? We have everything we need to make this world a heaven or a hell and for the most part it has been a hell precisely because of the rejection of reason as the primary tool for living.
I think the usual answer from the other side would be "for a while."
One is the philsophical, intellectual view while the other is the biblical view...
The spiritual vision model was inherently linked to allegorical and spiritual methods of interpretation that were opposed to literal interpretation based on historicalgrammatical contexts.
Now there's a mouthful of nothing...
In other words, 'I don't know what it means, but I certainly know it doesn't mean what it clearly says, otherwise, I'm out of a job'...
Bookmark
I think you put too much faith in reason.
Reason is a tool, it is only a tool. It provides no guide as to the purpose of life, but rather acts as a tool that can be used effectively to work towards whatever purpose one assigns to life from other than rational determination.
In particular, IMO, morality cannot be derived from reason. Reason can be used to develop a system of morality,if one accepts a few non-rational moral precepts. But freestanding reason, not so much.
It is very good. I recommend it, though Kreeft is so sure he's got it all figured out that it's irritating sometimes.
“Thanks for drawing in how communism drew from the same idea.”
The same motivating spirit is with us to this very day. Notice that BHO has been quoted on collective salvation, and collectivist social policy. Notice also that liberals far more than conservatives use the word “alienation” in a social policy context. These are all bread crumbs from the same loaf.
LOL
One is the philsophical, intellectual view while the other is the biblical view...
I came away from reading this article with the same thought. It's interesting though how this philosophical view crept into Christianity and how hard it is to get rid of. Just ask a bunch of Christians what they think Heaven will be like; will we be disembodied spirits floating around, or physical beings. I think a lot of Christians will pick the former rather than the latter.
“I think you put too much faith in reason.
Reason is a tool, it is only a tool. It provides no guide as to the purpose of life, but rather acts as a tool that can be used effectively to work towards whatever purpose one assigns to life from other than rational determination.
In particular, IMO, morality cannot be derived from reason. Reason can be used to develop a system of morality,if one accepts a few non-rational moral precepts. But freestanding reason, not so much.”
I don’t understand you, and I really want to. Are you saying that there is no logical purpose to life?
What do you mean by freestanding reason?
Standing free from what?
What other faculty of man besides reason (logic, identification, integration) is there?
You say reason can be used to work towards irrational ends. Isn’t that a contradiction.
Why can’t morality be derived by reason?
I would really, really like answers to these questions and to my initial question because whenever I ask them the answer I get is that reason is not sufficient to understand reality. Why? No one has ever given an answer to this question and their answer is to attack reason. Are you saying that man was created by a rational God without the means to perceive reality?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.