Posted on 10/18/2008 12:03:58 PM PDT by Truth Defender
What of it? Meaningless, if an all-powerful God controls it.
Historical side note: arabs preferred their negro slaves castrated. There are no race problems in Saudi these days, are there?
>>also what of free-will?
>
>What of it? Meaningless, if an all-powerful God controls it.
Then are you saying that God is not good? Or dishonorable? Or are you calling Him a liar?
No.
No.
and
No.
So then, what are you trying to say. And what is your underlying reasoning?
The problem being that given an All-powerful God, EVERYTHING is a moot point.
No point in trying to understand a universe when the explanation for everything is God did it. May as well burn every book, save the Bible.
I completely understand what you are getting at, and that is all well and good. At the very least, it is conductive to an intelligent conversation, unlike a great number of the posts one sees on this thread’s topic. Let me pick up on a small but very important topic you have brought up, which actually deserves its own thread.
I said, “I say that God has, in what He chose to reveal to us in the Scriptures, not yet gifted any man, other than Jesus, with immorality.”
You said, “Here I’d suggest that it’s important to understand the difference between ‘eternal’ and ‘from everlasting to everlasting’.”
To which I replied, “I agree, and that is a worthy topic for discussion.”
Exactly! To what both of us just said. With that in mind, I will start a thread on it in the very near future (if I’m able to) and invite you to take a leading part in it. In the meantime, on this thread, let’s see if we can succulently discuss what Mr. Fortier’s preliminary study on the “soul” brings out and if it is of value in our growing in the knowledge of God as He has revealed Himself to us in the Scriptures. This in no way detracts from what you are saying in your post to me when you said “spare me, unless you’re really interested.” I’m interested, but would, at this time, prefer to stay on the topic of this thread if that’s okay with you.
That said, permit me to start with the following argument.
In over 300 passages in the Old Testament alone, we find that a “soul” (psuche/nephesh) can die. I do not know of a single biblical scholar, Catholic or Protestant, who would deny this exegetical fact. If the existence of a “soul” separate from the body be admitted, the death of that soul will be the cessation of all individual functions. The possibility of this is not at all an inadmissible hypothesis. Every being that has had a beginning may have an end, whether animal or man. This, in studying what the scriptures say according to universal hermeneutical standards and etymology, is an incontestable principle. Infatuated with himself, man is too ready to forget that, being a contingent creature, he exists only by the good pleasure of the Creator.
It is vain to argue that when a soul is in question death is only an image. Were it so, the image reproduces the salient features of the object represented; the characteristic and principle feature of physical death is neither disorder nor suffering, it is the complete cessation of all functions, immobility, and insensibility. If the death of a soul consisted in a life of suffering or disorder, the image that would most naturally be used to represent it would be an illness or persistent agony. Life and death are opposites, like black and white. To say that death is a kind of life, a certain “state of life”, is like declaring that black is a kind of white, a certain “state of white”. If death were a certain “state of life”, it would be a manifestation of life: the contradiction is very evident.
The usage of all language protests against such violence done to the words. To die, when the predicate is something animate, means to cease to exist. When the unbelieving materialist tells us that after death all is dead, there is no doubt as to the meaning of the word; it signifies that the dead person no longer exists at all. So also in the negative term “immortal” as applied to a soul: everyone will admit that the meaning is indestructible, imperishable. If “to die”, when spoken of a soul, is to signify to “suffer far away from God”, a soul that is immortal, or that “cannot die”, could not “suffer far away from God”; their very immortality would prevent this liability to that fate, and the very terms of the traditional “immortal soul” dogma would thus be contradictory – reductio ad absurdum.
As you stated in the close of your long post, “How’s that?” So too, I repeat it to you, “How’s that?” I look forward to your response in anticipation of some excellent discussion.
BTW, let me say that goals shape the nature of those who aspire to reach them. The destiny toward which one moves furnishes him with the motive that drives him toward it. In saying what I did I am concerned with the ultimate destiny of man as intended by the Creator Who brought me into existence and Who obviously has the power to bring me to fulfillment of that destiny. It is equally obvious that any goal not in harmony with the purpose of God will but lead its pursuer to failure. I believe that God’s purpose is revealed in Christ, and Christ proclaimed this purpose in His own preaching. The goal Christ revealed can be summed up on one word I believe, LIFE. He set forth in plain language the fact that He is the life-giver, that those who believe on Him should not perish, but receive an immortal life at His return. Thusly (there’s that word again), this is the question: life or death? Jesus made it clear that He could and would raise men from the dead, and give SOME of them an immortal life. The question as I see it, is not WHERE one is going to live, but IS one going to live?
>The problem being that given an All-powerful God, EVERYTHING is a moot point.
>
>No point in trying to understand a universe when the explanation for everything is God did it. May as well burn every book, save the Bible.
LOL - That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve read all day, thank you!
You must also be unaware that many of the first naturalists, physicists, AND mathematicians, were biblical scholars.
Examples:
Gregor Mendel, “Father of Modern Genetics”, Augustinian monk
Blaise Pascal, Mathematician (founder of classical probability), Philosopher, and Physicist (the Pascal unit of measurement), Christian Apologist
Isaac Newton, Physicist & Mathematician, his lifelong work was studying biblical prophecy.
And finally, why not take a look at: http://www.bible.org/page.php?page_id=545
That was after the Church started to lose it’s grip.
Buno’s ashes might disagree with your thesis, as would Galileo, if he dared ever open his mouth again.
Examples from the time when Christianity asserted that everything was an All-Powerful God’s will are few and far between.
Do you believe that God is omnipotent? Or would you agree that most Christians would ascribe omnipotence to God?
The God of the Bible surely isn't.
Or would you agree that most Christians would ascribe omnipotence to God?
I suppose so.
To muddy it up some, I think of my dead body being vivified with the in-breathing of the Spirit of Christ - which I can't say I can "PROVE" but which certainly resonates with major chunks of Romans and I Corinthians.
Anyway since we talk about ana-stasis and re-surrection, and there is a continuation of identity, "I" get "my" life restored) yet there is this "yet not I, but Christ in me" stuff to contend with. Kind of a "both/and" issue.
I am VERY sympathetic with the view Fortier proposes if the strokes are broad enough.
I gotta go engage in strange Papist cultic activity. I look forward to an eternity thread.
Well, that's not how we Catholics see it. (Can we avoid the classix comix rehashing of Galileo? Hey we DID apologize, fer crine oudloud.)
Despite our reputation and the example that some of us set, we have a very "high" doctrine of reason or mind. While we htink reason is Tainted and hobbled, it still is the faculty whereby much truth (both of natural science and of philosophy) is discerned. Without reason, we think, there is no freedom and no will, and we would be like "the brute beasts that perish."
Reason unassisted cannot discern the high truths of religion, and can scarcely be said to understand some of them, as in the Trinity or the Hypostatic Union in Christ.
It is Islamic thought of the period that they underwent while we were doing the renaissance and enlightenment (so-called) that really crippled natural science with the notions (1) that Allah does everything directly, without intermediary and (2) this is so important that to speak of, say, momentum's being conserved in closed systems without saying at every breath that it is conserved because Allah wills it in each instance ... to speak that way borders on blasphemy.
"You know what you are. What you're made of. War is in your blood. Don't fight it. You didn't kill for your country. You killed for yourself. God's never gonna make that go away. When you're pushed, killing's as easy as breathing." John Rambo.
Indeed, after several centuries the Church did apologize.
OTOH, Galileo got off light, Bruno was burned at the stake, and the Church hasn't apologized for that.
As to the rest of your post?
Well said!
>>Do you believe that God is omnipotent?
>
>The God of the Bible surely isn’t.
And what evidence do you have for this assertion?
To muddy it up some, I think of my dead body being vivified with the in-breathing of the Spirit of Christ - which I can't say I can "PROVE" but which certainly resonates with major chunks of Romans and I Corinthians.
I think it is sufficient for me to say I agree with what you said above. The same goes for me: I can say with the Apostle Paul, "I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me."
Anyway since we talk about ana-stasis and re-surrection, and there is a continuation of identity, "I" get "my" life restored) yet there is this "yet not I, but Christ in me" stuff to contend with. Kind of a "both/and" issue.
Exactly! I do not contend with this at all. In fact, I praise you for being bold enough to come right out and tell eveyone of the hope that is within you.
Obviously the Creator intended for His creatures to have bodies. he created them with such. We have already realized how man lost his deathlessness by sin, and "death (mortality) passed unto all men" (Rom. 5:12). Even after Jesus met the penalty for our sin by His own death, and after believers have responded in total faith to this merciful grace of God, there still remains the fact of man's mortality. Therefore it is is necessary, in the fulfillment of God's purpose, for His chosen ones to be restored to life through a resurrection of the body when He returns.
The gospel which the apostles proclaimed was that "Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures; and that he was buried, that he rose again according to the Scriptures" (I Cor. 15:3). Wherever they preached, the burden of assurance was that Christ who had died was now alive. The resurrection of Jesus was a demonstration and example of what every Christian may expect in the day of resurrection (2 Tim. 1:910). Paul worte, "Now if Christ is preached that he has been raised from the dead, how say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there is no resurrection of the dead, neither has Christ been raised" (I Cor. 15:1213). Note that Paul does not argue taht if CHrist has not been raised then men will not be raised. His argument is the other way around, that if there is not a resurrection of the dead, then of course Christ could not have been raised. Chriast as a member of the human race, born of a woman, and subject to himan death and decay represents all the race in being resurrected. Paul said, "We witnessed of God that he raised up Christ; who he raised not up, if so be that the dead are not raised" (vs 15).
In the chronological calendar of events of Christ's return, the first thing we are told will happen will be the resurrection of the dead. The unbelievers will face judgment and destruction, but the saints shall be raised to immortality and the fulfillment of God's purpose.
In the 15th chapter of First Corithians, Paul makes it clear that the resurrected body will be a changed body. "We all shall not sleep, but we all shall be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump; for the trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised incorruptable and we shall be changed. For this corruptible must put on incorruption and this mortal must put on immortality" (I Cor. 15:51-53)
"Resurrection", Oscar Cullman has written, "is a positive assertion: the whole man, who has really died, is recalled to life by a new act of creation by God. Something has happened - a miracle of creation: For something has also happened previously, something fearful: life formed by God has been destroyed" (Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead, MacMillan, New York).
The apostel John wrote that at Christ's coming "We shall be like him." (I John 3:2). Paul wrote that Christ "Shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation, that it may be confromed to the body of his glory" (Phil. 3:21). His image at last! The purpose of God fulfilled. God will nto be thwarted. he will have what he set out to create and enjoy forever; man in His image. This is the destny of the believer.
Sorry to have preached..couldn't help it. The subject is dear to me. As to you also, I hope.
For starters, he lost 1/3 of his staff, and angels don’t have free will in the sense that humans do.
After Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (BTW, before that how were there supposed to know disobeying was evil?) God had to ask “Adam, where are you?”
Hello? TWO people on earth, and he can’t keep track of them????
And that whole Job thing, how can an omnipotent being gamble?
>For starters, he lost 1/3 of his staff, and angels don’t have free will in the sense that humans do.
Ah, now where are you getting that idea? The bible doesn’t say much on that subject one way or another. Also, if you look at the ten commandments (or the two greatest, as Jesus said) then there is so much more that we are allowed than we are not... and that’s speaking from a moral perspective and not an ability perspective.
>After Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (BTW, before that how were there supposed to know disobeying was evil?) God had to ask “Adam, where are you?”
>Hello? TWO people on earth, and he can’t keep track of them????
And you’ve never seen parents who know exactly what their kid has done ask about it? Or when he’s hiding ask “where are you?”
>And that whole Job thing, how can an omnipotent being gamble?
Where did He gamble? Satan says, “C’mon God! Of course Job loves you, You’ve given him the good life. If you were to crush all of his belongings he’d curse you!”
God says, “Ok, then you can take all his things away, but don’t touch him!”
In one sense it is a gamble, but if God created the universe, then He created time, and if He created time, then He exists outside of time. So, now, is the same to God as the beginning of time, is the same as the end of time, is the same as when Jesus was dying on the cross... in at least some sense. Of course, that He wants and can have a relationship with you or I requires experience, that is time, on some level.
What if it’s like when I write something, go and do something, and look back later and say to myself “Yeah, I remember that!”?
I think the problem with your understanding is that you think of God as both too small/weak and impersonal; my God is neither.
When I was an Episcopal priest, I always urged the passages from I Cor 15 for funerals of somebody who had died "full of years" and, so to speak "well". As a pastor, of course when there was much sorrow, I might suggest more consoling passages. But it seemed to me that, ceteris paribus, we ought to just put it right out there every once in a while.
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