Posted on 02/13/2003 6:03:04 PM PST by scripter
|
Most Christians who critique the Mormon view of God do so from a strictly biblical perspective. Christian apologists have correctly pointed out that Mormon theology conflicts with biblical doctrine in a number of important areas, including the nature of God, the plan of salvation, and the nature of man.1 THE CHRISTIAN CONCEPT OF GOD Christians claim that their concept of God is found in the Bible. Known as classical theism, this view of God has long been considered the orthodox theistic position of the Western world. Though there are numerous divine attributes that we could examine, for our present purposes it is sufficient to say that the God of classical theism is at least (1) personal and incorporeal (without physical parts), (2) the Creator and Sustainer of everything else that exists, (3) omnipotent (all-powerful), (4) omniscient (all-knowing), (5) omnipresent (everywhere present), (6) immutable (unchanging) and eternal, and (7) necessary and the only God. THE MORMON CONCEPT OF GOD Apart from biblical influences, the Mormon doctrine of God is derived primarily from three works regarded by the Mormon church (the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints [LDS]) as inspired scripture: The Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants (hereafter D&C), and the Pearl of Great Price. (Most of these writings were supposedly received through "revelation" by the movement's founder and chief prophet, Joseph Smith.) It is also found in Smith's other statements and doctrinal commentaries. Although not regarded by the LDS church as scripture per se, Smith's extracanonical pronouncements on doctrine are almost universally accepted by the Mormon laity and leadership as authoritative for Mormon theology.
For this reason, Joseph Smith wrote that "Man was also in the beginning with God. Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be."14 In other words, man's basic essence or primal intelligence is as eternal as God's.
Mormonism therefore teaches a metaphysical pluralism in which certain basic realities have always existed and are indestructible even by God. In other words, God came from the universe; the universe did not come from God (although he did form this planet out of preexistent matter). SOME PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS WITH THE MORMON CONCEPT OF GOD In our two books, Dr. Parrish and I deal with a number of philosophical problems with the Mormon concept of God.20 In this article I will present three of these. Because of space constraints, however, I cannot reply to all the possible Mormon responses to these problems. For this reason, I refer the reader to the detailed replies in my two books. The Problem of an Infinite Number of Past Events It is evident from what we have covered that Mormonism teaches that the past series of events in time is infinite or beginningless. Joseph Fielding Smith, the Mormon church's tenth prophet and president, writes that Joseph Smith "taught that our Father had a Father and so on."21 Heber C. Kimball, who served as First Counselor in the church's First Presidency, asserts that "we shall go back to our Father and God, who is connected with one who is still farther back; and this Father is connected with one still further back, and so on...."22 Apostle and leading doctrinal spokesman Bruce R. McConkie writes that "the elements from which the creation took place are eternal and therefore had no beginning."23 O. Kendall White, a Mormon sociologist, points out that because Mormon theology assumes metaphysical materialism it "not only assumes that God and the elements exist necessarily, but so do space and time. In contrast, traditional Christian orthodoxy maintains that space and time, along with everything else except God, exist because God created them."24
It is clear, then, that premises 1 and 2 are true. Given the fact that the argument is valid, the conclusion therefore follows: the Mormon universe is not true. And if the Mormon universe is not true, then the Mormon God does not exist, since his existence is completely dependent on the existence of the Mormon universe. The Problem of Eternal Progression with an Infinite Past In this second objection, unlike the first, I am arguing that even if we assume that the past series of events in time is infinite, it is impossible for the Mormon doctrine of eternal progression to be true. Although Dr. Parrish and I present three arguments for this view in one of our books,27 I will limit myself to one argument in this article.
Here is the problem: if the past series of events in time is infinite, we should have already reached our final state by now. Yet, we have not reached our final state. Therefore, the Mormon world view is seriously flawed. The Problem of Achieving Omniscience by Eternal Progression McConkie explains the Mormon doctrine of eternal progression when he writes that "during his [an evolving intelligence] earth life he gains a mortal body, receives experience in earthly things, and prepares for a future eternity after the resurrection when he will continue to gain knowledge and intelligence" (D&C 130:18-19). McConkie then states that the God of this world (Elohim) went through the same process until he reached a point at which he was "not progressing in knowledge, truth, virtue, wisdom, or any of the attributes of godliness."29 That is to say, the Mormon God progressed from a point of finite knowledge until he reached a point of omniscience (infinite knowledge). I believe, however, that this view is incoherent. Consider the following inductively strong argument:
Let us review each of these premises. Premise 1 is clearly true: Mormon theology teaches that all beings are limited in knowledge unless or until they attain godhood (see D&C 130:18-19). Consequently, every time one of these beings acquires a new item of knowledge on his or her journey to godhood it amounts to an increase in a finite number of items of knowledge.
Therefore, given that premises 1, 2, and 3 are established as valid, then conclusion 1 logically follows. And if conclusion 1 is linked with premise 5 (a foundational belief of Mormon theism), the final conclusion of the argument logically follows: the Mormon concept of God is incoherent. NOTES 1 E.g., Walter R. Martin, The Maze of Mormonism, 2d ed. (Santa Ana, CA: Vision House, 1978); Jerald and Sandra Tanner, The Changing World of Mormonism (Chicago: Moody Press, 1980). |
|
If I post a response stating that "creation ex nihilo" was not a doctrine of the early Christians, but may, in fact, be a product of the Gnostics, and nobody comments on it but ignores it like crazy instead, does it make a sound?
Maybe post #59 is only visible to the two of us...
Then even in your scenario, Somebody must have "created" God and somebody must have created that God and some other God must have created that God, and so on and so on from all eternity. Right? (I suppose that would explain the Orson Pratt God numbering estimate, huh?
Well the God of the Bible says that He is the FIRST and the LAST. Thus the God of the Bible must, if your statement is true, have been the very First of all of the gods you believe must exist, unless of course, you refuse to accept the many statements of God about him being the First and the Last. (a mistranslation or deliberate deception perhaps).
Now if God is the First and the Last, like he says he is, then he was the first and the last. The words first and last in the original languages mean... First and last. What that means is that God is not only the First God to come into existence, but that he is also the Last God to come into existence. Its pretty simple. Thus your hope to follow in his footsteps into God status is a foolish endeavor. IMHO, you blaspheme the name of the Lord when you deny his claim of self existence and claim that you can someday, if you are good enough, be promoted to a position that God has held solely for himself for all eternity.
BTW what do you believe you were before you were God's spirit child? Just a blob of ether? And was your Heavenly Father just a blob of ether before he became someone else's spirit child?
Yet another assertion without proof that does not answer the first assertion without proof
It's too bad that you can't conceive of the inconceivable. Too bad that you can't realize there are things that, in this stage of your existence, it is impossible for you to realize.
It's not actually "too bad", it is a contradiction. You may believe such a statement is indicative of your "enlightened profundity", but contradiction is really indicative of nonsense. If something is by definition inconcievable, then it is impossible by definition to concieve of it! If one can concieve of it, then it is not inconcievable! If you are going to attempt to argue at this level, you should at least take a basic course in logic!
Right now, you are limited. You have ONLY your experience in mortality, in time and space, to draw from, so you try to use that as a measuring-stick for everything else.
So, what do you do with the examples from mathematics and Physics that were presented to you? BTW, have you ever heard of Bertrand Russell? He didn't seem to have any difficulties concieving of infinite regression. Since he was an agnostic, (one of his principal works was Why I Am Not a Christian) one cannot say or claim that he was one of the "enlightened few" that you and your ilk are claiming to be on this particular subject...sounds a bit like docetic gnosticism.
If you will read up on it you will find that modern physics tells us that at the subatomic level, the universe gets very, very, very strange. It is nearly inexplicable at the level of the average man's understanding. Even concepts such as time and location in space seem to have no meaning.
What are you saying then, that our "physical laws" like the conservation of Mass/Energy no longer apply? If you really want to have your preconceptions about the universe blown, read up on vacuum energy, and variable c theories, as well as variable hc theories. If you wish to continue along this line of argumentation, you saw off the branch that you are sitting on.
The elements are eternal. They just ARE, and the notion of "beginning, middle, end" ultimately have no bearing on the way the universe operates.
So, when we look at the "evidence" it still comes down to your unsupported assertion.
Your analogy is rediculous. It's like saying before we established and defined the line there were an infinite number of points along it. You can't point to potential points in a line without FIRST DEFINING THE LINE!!!
And why is it not possible that we are rays, which is esentially the Christian Biblical view? If the Christian God is the creator and sustainer of all things, why can He not create us and then sustain us? Why must we be eternal?
I hope you can see the implications of this.
Yes...the implication behind this is that God does not have the power to create ex nihilo and is not eternal or self-existent. God is just an organized creation who organized other creations. You may call him eternal, but your definitions of God conflict heavily with that assertion. Maybe I'm just lousy at conceiving the inconceivable.
Have you ever heard of the law of non-contradiction?
From "Does the Qur'an Teach Creation Ex Nihilo?", in John H. Lundquist's "By Study and Also by Faith, Volume 1", by Daniel C. Peterson
The canonical scriptures of the Judeo-Christian and Islamic tradition are content to affirm that God is the sovereign of creation, without giving a precise description of the creation and without offering a full account of where matter came from. On the doctrine of creation, however, mainstream theology in the three great monotheistic religions has gone considerably beyond the mandate of their respective scriptures.
The Judeo-Christian Matrix
"Traditional Christian doctrine," as W. R. Inge terms it, is "that the world was created out of nothing by an act of the Divine will, and in time." [1] "Believing Jews and Christians," writes J. A. Goldstein, "have long been convinced that their religion teaches that God created the world ex nihilo, from absolutely nothing. Yet medieval Jewish thinkers still held that the account of creation in Genesis could be interpreted to mean that God created from preexisting formless matter, and ancient Jewish texts state that he did so." [2] "It would be wrong," the editors of the New Jerusalem Bible say of Genesis 1:1, "to read the metaphysical concept of 'creation from nothingness' into the text." This notion, they say, was not to be formulated earlier than 2 Maccabees 7:28, which is to say in the period between the close of the Hebrew scriptures and the rise of Christianity. [3] "The Hebrew words conventionally rendered 'create,' " notes T. H. Gaster, "though they came eventually to be used in an extended, metaphorical sense, are derived from handicrafts and plastic arts, and refer primarily to the mechanical fashioning of shapes, not to biological processes or metaphysical bringing into existence." They originally denoted actions such as to cut out or pare leather, to mold something into shape, or to fabricate something. [4] Thus, it is hardly surprising that the Bible can describe creation as "the work of [God's] hands." [5] (And it scarcely needs to be pointed out that the presupposition underlying such terms and such a description is anthropomorphic in the extreme.) [6] "Throughout the Old Testament," writes Keith Norman, "the image is that of the craftsman fashioning a work of art and skill, the potter shaping the vessel out of clay, or the weaver at his loom." [7] With that modifying fact in mind, we can proceed to Theodore Gaster's recognition that, in the Bible, "All things are represented as coming into being solely by the fiat of God. [But] it is nowhere stated out of what substances they were composed, for the central theme is not the physical origin of phenomena but their role in human existence and the orchestration of their several functions, what John Donne called 'the concinnity of parts.' " (Nonetheless, water and wind, because of their inchoate and apparently ungenerated nature, seem to have been granted some kind of priority.) [8]
In the intertestamental period, Gaster finds "a certain amount of ambivalence regarding the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo." [9] As noted above, 2 Maccabees 7:28 seems to affirm it -- a fact which had been noted as early as Origen of Alexandria. [10] Was Origen correct in his interpretation? The Syriac recension of 2 Maccabees as well as some Greek manuscripts describe rather an organization of inchoate matter, which is the explicit position of Wisdom of Solomon 11:17. [11] And this latter notion seems, indeed, to fit the argument of 2 Maccabees 7 considerably better than does a notion of creation out of nothing. In that argument, a zealous Jewish matriarch exhorts her sons to die rather than submit to the unrighteous demands of Antiochus: Do not fear, she tells them. God created the heavens and the earth out of nothing, and created man in the same way within the mother's womb. So, also in the same way, will he raise you up to life after death. But of course, as Jews of the Maccabean period well knew, human conception does not occur ex nihilo. Not surprisingly, therefore, recent scholarship on 2 Maccabees has denied that that work teaches an origination out of nothing, noting along the way that the Greek words often translated as "out of nothing" are ambiguous. [12]
Still, the connection between an expectation of physical resurrection and faith in God's creative power, so clearly enunciated in 2 Maccabees 7, is of considerable interest for Qur'anic studies. "In essence," says Jonathan Goldstein, who nevertheless denies that 2 Maccabees teaches it, "creation ex nihilo is a polemical doctrine, invoked to defend the belief in bodily resurrection!" [13] When critics of resurrection-faith pointed out the difficulties posed by the corruption of corpses, by the ingestion of human bodies by cannibals and predators and scavengers, and by other easily imagined cases, the concept of ex nihilo creation suggested a direct, effective, and essentially irrefutable rejoinder. [14]
However, David Winston meets Goldstein's argument head on. "Christian theologians," he declares, "did not feel the need to invoke the concept of creation ex nihilo in order to demonstrate the possibility of the resurrection of the flesh." [15] And as we shall see below, Winston's position is probably to be preferred. Certainly it accounts for the Qur'anic passages on the subject.
By the time of the New Testament, Gaster sees an increasing dominance of the doctrine, believing it to be affirmed at Romans 4:17 and Hebrews 11:3. [16] However, even in the latter two passages creation ex nihilo is at most ambiguously attested; the standard work on the subject of ex nihilo creation denies that any such doctrine is to be found in the Greek New Testament at all. [17] It would seem, in fact, that the notion is not clearly taught by anybody until well past the period of primitive Christianity, that it was a non-issue for the earliest Christians, that it does not come to dominate theological thinking and writing even for some period beyond that, and that it must be read into early Jewish and Christian texts if it is to be found there at all. [18] (This is exactly the thesis that I shall advance with regard to the Qur'an.)
Winston notes that "there is no evidence that the [early] rabbis were especially attached to a doctrine of creation ex nihilo. Indeed, there is prima facie evidence that such a doctrine was far from being commonly accepted by them." He cites one ancient rabbinic text which, in order to establish the uniqueness of divine acts as opposed to human ones, gives ten examples which notably fail to include the most obvious one -- namely the ability to make something from nothing. (In fact, one of the examples assumes the preexistence of water!) [19]
It may be that Tatian, a Christian writer and student of Justin Martyr who flourished at about A.D. 160, teaches the doctrine unclearly. [20] If he does, he seems to have developed it out of a confrontation with Valentinian Gnosticism, or, possibly, in response to the dualism of Marcion. [21] And, indeed, it is striking that the first Christian thinker to advance a clear doctrine of ex nihilo creation was not an adherent of the "main church" at all. This was Basilides, the great Gnostic teacher who, along with Valentinus and Marcion, actively taught during the reigns of Hadrian and Antoninus Pius (A.D. 130-160). [22] (The most sophisticated, most significant, and best educated Gnostics all seem to have denied the eternity of matter, although only he developed a true theory of ex nihilo creation.) [23] Basilides, who seemed put off by any notion that the supreme God might act directly in history, advanced a rather sophisticated negative theology -- prior even to the more famous forms of negative theology which would come to dominate the philosophical schools some decades later. [24] It seems that it was precisely this negative theology, with its intense preoccupation with the absolute transcendence of the supreme being, which led to his promulgation of a doctrine of ex nihilo creation. If God transcended this world utterly, then his mode of creation -- and Basilides, contrary to many Gnostic thinkers, thought of the supreme God as the creator of this world -- must also transcend worldly analogies and models like the demiurgic "potter" of the Timaeus. Indeed, as God was to be incomprehensible, so also must his creative act be. [25] Even to describe the creation as occurring through the "will" of God was to speak too anthropomorphically, since God has no "will" -- although Basilides would allow such talk as the most appropriate way to discuss the ineffable. [26] But the anthropomorphism of God-as-potter was simply more than Basilides could allow, and, besides, it seemed to limit God's omnipotence in the same way that the craftsman's power is constrained by the resistance and quirks of his materials. [27]
Educationally, the leading Gnostic thinkers of the first half of the second century were far better trained and equipped than the representatives of what would become the "orthodox" tradition or "main church." [28] This may go some distance toward explaining why it was that the notion of creation from absolutely nothing took hold among the Gnostics so much earlier than among mainstream Christians, who seem simply not even to have thought about it. [29] "Some Christian writers of the middle of the second century write of God's creative acts as if they were performed upon pre-existent matter," writes J. A. Goldstein, "as if the doctrine of creation ex nihilo never entered the author's mind." [30] And indeed, the idea probably had not, and would not until the third century. [31] Athenagoras, for example, who addressed his Plea for the Christians to Marcus Aurelius and Commodus about A.D. 177, taught a creation by God from preexisting matter, on the analogy of a potter and his clay. [32] Justin Martyr, too, affirmed God's creative role to be that of a giver of forms and shapes to matter already present. [33] So natural to him was the idea of creation from matter already present that he seems not to have regarded it as a problem at all. [34] Indeed, Gerhard May seems clearly irritated with him because he did not realize that creation ex nihilo was the allegedly logical implication of the biblical creation narrative. [35] It is worthy of note that, as I have mentioned previously, Justin had been a Platonist before his conversion, and he was the first Christian to equate the Genesis narrative with the account of the Demiurge in Plato's Timaeus. On this particular point, dealing with cosmogony, he evidently saw no distinction between Christian doctrine and Platonism. [36] Further, creation ex nihilo is at most ambiguously attested in the writings of Philo and Clement of Alexandria. [37] (Gerhard May denies it to both of them. He is again rather dismayed to note that Philo saw no contradiction between the Bible's account of creation and the notion of creation as an organizing of preexistent matter.) [38] However, as I have alluded to above, it is clearly taught in the works of Clement's successor at the Alexandrian catechetical school, Origen (who cannot, he says, understand how so many distinguished earlier thinkers had been able to think of matter as uncreated). [39]
By the early third century, creation ex nihilo had become a fundamental doctrine of orthodox Christianity. [40] Probably, it entered Christianity through Theophilus of Antioch, who is generally linked with Tatian as the first non-Gnostic Christian to have a clearly stated doctrine of ex nihilo creation (and for whom the case is considerably clearer than for the latter). His position in this regard was vastly influential in later Christian history, and most of the arguments used by later polemicists in this connection find their first expression from his pen. [41] (Basilides, like Theophilus, was from Syria, and this may point either to influence by the Gnostic thinker upon the catholic bishop, or, more likely, to their having drawn from a common Syrian source or tradition.) [42] For Theophilus, the idea of creation ex nihilo is necessary to safeguard the absolute freedom of God the Creator, whose omnipotence, he feels, cannot admissibly be constrained, as is that of the Timaean Demiurge, by the resistance of self-existent matter. [43] This is the argument picked up by the first great Latin Father, Tertullian (d. ca. A.D. 220), as well. Eternally existing matter, he contended, would subject God to limitations and would destroy the divine liberty. Even though the positing of a resistant and independently existing material realm would allow a fairly powerful theodicy or explanation of evil, it would do so at the expense of God's unutterable omnipotence, and this Tertullian was unwilling to countenance. It would be more worthy to believe that God freely creates evil than to view him as a slave -- that is, to see him as limited in any way whatsoever by the presence of coexistent matter. [44]
Both W. R. Inge and Gerhard May have maintained that the notion of a temporally specifiable creation out of nothing was developed and accepted by Christian theologians of (what would become) the mainstream in response to Gnosticism -- and to a philosophy which was manifestly related to Gnostic ideas -- during the latter half of the second century. [45] This may well be true, since the theory to which many of the earlier Judeo-Christian Platonists leaned was, rather, that of emanation -- a theory shared by the Gnostics. In Philo, for example, the "cause of the creation is the divine bounty, an ungrudging overflow of benevolent giving in which the Giver remains unaffected and undiminished, like a torch from which other torches are lit, like the sun in giving out sunlight, like a spring of water." [46] (The same metaphor, of one torch lighting another, was used by Justin Martyr and by Numenius of Apamea.) [47] Certainly the Christian insistence on ex nihilo creation crystallized in the writings of Irenaeus (d. ca. A.D. 202), the bishop of Lyon, from whom it received, in many ways, its lasting form. [48] And the literary production of Irenaeus was dominated by his confrontation with the Gnostics. [49] According to this understanding, ascription of the creation of the cosmos to the Supreme God was a way of undercutting the devaluation of the physical world by the Gnostics, who by and large -- Basilides himself is the obvious exception -- attributed its origin to a rebellious lesser deity. "Ironically," Keith Norman observes, "the reaction against the Marcionite and Gnostic views put the orthodox Christian God up to compete for superlatives with the Supreme Hidden God of Gnosticism, until finally the biblical Father was pushed into a transcendent alienness beyond comprehensible reality. Obviously this super-Being could be no mere craftsman or artificer." [50]
Footnotes
1. William R. Inge, The Philosophy of Plotinus, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1923), 1:145.
2. Jonathan A. Goldstein, "The Origins of the Doctrine of Creation Ex Nihilo," Journal of Jewish Studies 35 (Autumn 1984): 127. Gerhard May, Schöung aus dem Nichts: Die Entstehung der Lehre von der Creatio Ex Nihilo, Arbeiten zur Kirchengeschichte, 48 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1978), vii, contends that a concept of ex nihilo creation is the most natural expression of the biblical view of the origins of the cosmos, and that it was logically inevitable that such a doctrine should arise. Creation by "forming" or "shaping" preexistent matter was, he contends, ultimately incompatible with Genesis 1, properly viewed (cf. also 75, 135, 153, et passim). But even May admits that his doctrine is simply not present in the text. His is a strange position, in view not only of the etymologies of the words used for "creation" in the Bible, but also in the face of the fact that the Hebrews of the biblical period, as well as the rabbis and the early Christian Fathers, saw no difficulty in holding to precisely the idea of creation as the organization of preexistent matter.
3. New Jerusalem Bible, 17, n. "a" (on Genesis 1:1). We shall see below that even 2 Maccabees 7:28 is not beyond question as a proof text for ex nihilo creation.
4. T. H. Gaster, "Cosmogony," in George A. Buttrick et al., eds., The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible, 5 vols. (Nashville: Abingdon, 1962), 1:702.
5. Psalm 102:25; cf. Psalm 8:3.
6. Keith Norman, "Ex Nihilo: The Development of the Doctrines of God and Creation in Early Christianity," BYU Studies 17 (Spring 1977): 295.
7. Ibid. Among the passages cited by Norman are Isaiah 29:16; 40:22; 45:9; 51:13, 15-16; Psalms 74:13-17; 89:11; 90:2; Romans 9:20-23. We might also think of the ram-headed Egyptian god Khnum, of Elephantine, who formed the souls of men and women upon his potter's wheel, or of Ptah, the artificer-god of Memphis. Cf. Alan W. Shorter, The Egyptian Gods (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), 8, 10.
8. Gaster, "Cosmogony," 702-4. 2 Peter 3:5 may reflect the notion of the priority of water.
9. Ibid., 706.
10. Origen, De Principiis II, 1, 5.
11. On the alternate readings of 2 Maccabees 7:28, see the remarks on that passage in the New Jerusalem Bible, 731, n. "e." For a discussion of Wisdom of Solomon 11:7, consult May, Schöung aus dem Nichts, 6.
12. Goldstein, "The Origins of the Doctrine of Creation Ex Nihilo," 127, 130; May, Schöung aus dem Nichts, 6-8.
13. Goldstein, "The Origins of the Doctrine of Creation Ex Nihilo," 134.
14. Ibid., 129-30.
15. David Winston, "Creation Ex Nihilo Revisited: A Reply to Jonathan Goldstein," Journal of Jewish Studies 37 (Spring 1986): 88.
16. Gaster, "Cosmogony," 706.
17. Winston, "Creation Ex Nihilo Revisited," 90-91, doubts that Romans 4:17 clearly asserts the idea, as does May, Schöung aus dem Nichts, 27 (where such an interpretation of Hebrews 11:3 is likewise contested). The standard work is certainly the aforementioned treatise by May, which at ibid., 26, categorically denies the presence of ex nihilo creation anywhere in the New Testament.
18. On the lack of interest the question held for earliest Christian thinking, see May, ibid., 183.
19. Winston, "Creation Ex Nihilo Revisited," 91; cf. May, Schöung aus dem Nichts, 23.
20. Winston, "Creation Ex Nihilo Revisited," 88, n. 1. Goldstein, "The Origins of the Doctrine of Creation Ex Nihilo," 132, and May, Schöung aus dem Nichts, 121, would have it that Tatian taught the doctrine "unambiguously," and that he is the first Christian to do so. Winston has, I think, effectively disposed of that claim. The so-called "Shepherd of Hermas," who wrote no later, probably, than A.D. 148, might have taught ex nihilo creation. See Vision 1.6 and Mandate 1.1. But, again, the relevant Greek phrase is not definite in positing absolute, rather than relative, nonbeing. Indeed, there seems good reason to prefer the latter.
21. May, Schöung aus dem Nichts, 62, 154-55.
22. Ibid., 71, 121, 183-84.
23. Ibid., 41, 42 n. 2, 184.
24. Ibid., 68, 69 n. 26. On his dislike of a God active in history, see ibid., p. 82. McKim's contention will be recalled: "Whereas the scriptural accounts spoke of the actions of God in history, Greek philosophy centered attention on the question of metaphysical being," Donald K. McKim, Theological Turning Points: Major Issues in Christian Thought (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1988), 8. It has been suggested that Valentinian Gnosticism is a predecessor of Neoplatonism; in its concept of emanation as well as in its positing a God higher than the Intellect, it appears to foreshadow Plotinus. See May, Schöung aus dem Nichts, 110, n. 233.
25. May, Schöung aus dem Nichts, 76, 85.
26. Ibid., 71-72, 75.
27. Ibid., 75.
28. Ibid., 85.
29. Ibid., 84.
30. Goldstein, "The Origins of the Doctrine of Creation Ex Nihilo," 132; cf. May, Schöung aus dem Nichts, 139. Inge, The Philosophy of Plotinus, 1:145: "Christian orthodoxy denies . . . the theory that Matter is uncreated, and that creation consists in shaping it." This was almost certainly not always so, and it is difficult anyway to see what necessary connection might exist between absolutely fundamental constitutive Christian beliefs and this particular doctrine.
31. May, Schöung aus dem Nichts, 149. Norman, "Ex Nihilo," 307: "In fact, the rash of arguments in favor of ex nihilo creation at the end of the second century points to the newness of the concept. Tertullian's tract [Against Hermogenes] especially adds to the evidence that the argument was against an established belief within the Church, since it was directed against a fellow Christian rather than against Platonism."
32. See May, Schöung aus dem Nichts, 141.
33. See Justin Martyr, Apology 10: "And we have been taught that He in the beginning did of His goodness, for man's sake, create all things out of unformed matter." (See, too, his Hortatory Address to the Greeks XX, 29-33.) H. Chadwick, "Philo and the Beginnings of Christian Thought," in A. H. Armstrong, ed., The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 161, declares rather weakly that "Justin does not insist on creation ex nihilo." (He evidently sees an ambivalence in Justin's mind, when the passages just cited are juxtaposed to Dialogue 5.) Gerhard May, on the other hand, argues -- convincingly, in my opinion -- that Justin absolutely does not teach creation ex nihilo. See May, Schöung aus dem Nichts, 121, 127, 134.
34. May, Schöung aus dem Nichts, 126.
35. Ibid., 135.
36. Ibid., 124-125, 183.
37. Chadwick, "Philo and the Beginnings of Christian Thought," 171.
38. See, for example, May, Schöung aus dem Nichts, 9-20; cf. 126, n. 33. Norman, "Ex Nihilo," 308, contends that Clement was aware of the concept of ex nihilo creation, but that "he does not view it as crucial to orthodoxy."
39. See Origen, De Principiis II, 1, 4. See also Chadwick, "Philo and the Beginnings of Christian Thought," 189.
40. May, Schöung aus dem Nichts, 183; Norman, "Ex Nihilo," 316. Although even then, Origen, for instance, could relegate it in his Against Celsus to the secondary sphere of "physics" rather than "theology," cf. ibid., 309.
41. May, Schöung aus dem Nichts, 75, 121, 149, 151, 159, 162, 169.
42. Ibid., 78, 160, 183-84.
43. Ibid., 164.
44. Norman, "Ex Nihilo," 307. Tertullian does not care to insist on ex nihilo creation, although it is clear that he personally believes in it. See his De Resurrectione Carnis 11, and Winston, "Creation Ex Nihilo Revisited," 89-90. The dilemma of theodicy, basically stated, is that it seems impossible to reconcile the existence of a wholly good and all-powerful deity with the existence of evil. Why has he not eliminated it? Two clear and extreme alternatives immediately present themselves: Perhaps he is not truly good, or perhaps he is not able. Tertullian seemingly preferred the former option to the latter, although I am sure that he would have protested such an unnuanced statement of the dilemma.
45. Inge, The Philosophy of Plotinus, 1:145; May, Schöung aus dem Nichts, viii, ix, 119, 151, 153, 183, 184. It was around the middle of the second century that the confrontation between Christianity and philosophy began to grow serious. The two leading philosophies of the day were Stoicism and (Middle) Platonism -- peripatetic philosophy was too much a school tradition during this period to be much of a practical challenge. For Middle Platonism, which reigned supreme from roughly 50 B.C. to A.D. 250, Plato's Timaeus was by far the preeminent text. See May, Schöung aus dem Nichts, 1-4.
46. Chadwick, "Philo and the Beginnings of Christian Thought," 142.
47. Ibid., 164; Philip Merlan, "Greek Philosophy from Plato to Plotinus," in A. H. Armstrong, ed., The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 102.
48. On the pivotal role of Irenaeus, see May, Schöung aus dem Nichts, x, 151; Norman, "Ex Nihilo," 303.
49. May, Schöung aus dem Nichts, 167-68.
50. Norman, "Ex Nihilo," 303; cf. the discussion on 303-4.
I do not know.
I know that God the Father was once as Jesus Christ, and so must have had a Father as well. The Bible speaks plainly of the fact that Christ does nothing but what He sees the Father do. That is the founding point on which Joseph the Prophet expounded in the King Follett Discourse, concerning the fact that God was once a man.
Was it a different "eternity"? Was it a different "universe"? (Modern physics shows that universes can contain still other universes within them, which can either communicate with the one "above," or can be "closed off" from it entirely. Please don't ask me further on this because I do not understand the physics or mathematical principles involved, but to me it is a fascinating concept).
In the end, much of what we THINK we know is due to the limitations of understanding, and the hard-heartedness of the people to learn. This was true of the ancient Israelites, who did not want to receive the fulness of the truth offered them by the Lord through Moses, and so were content with a "lesser law" of "rituals and observances."
Later saints were able to bear more things, and so they were released from that "level" of law to go to a higher.
Later, during the apostasy, the "plain and precious truths" such as we learn in our temples were taken from them again because they could not "bear" them.
I realize that some people can understand them, but most can't. Even Einstein admitted that much of what the mathematics told him were contrary to what he "felt" to be true (such as his famous retort to the Heisenberg "Uncertainty Principle": "God does not play dice").
You seem bent and determined that all things can be "proven."
Looking forward to your "proof" that God exists. The short version will do.
Because ex nihilo is a false concept.
IMHO you LDS people struggle and wrestle the scriptures in a vain attempt to prove that God is somehow something less than what He claims to be, which is the First and the Last, the Almighty, the creator of ALL THINGS and the sustainer of ALL THINGS. You fight against the Scriptures to bring God down to the level of man, down to your level. You insist that not only was God once a man, but that Your Heavenly Father was somehow created or fashioned by some other premordial being who was fashioned before him, and on and on and on ad infinitum.
Are you willling to admit that the God that I believe in, a God that Created the Heavens and the Earth and the Universe by the breath of his mouth and all creatures and prniciplites and thones and dominions in all time from eternity to eternity, the First God and the last God and that there are no other Gods in existence anywhere in the universe or beyond the universe, is NOT the God you believe in? That you believe in a lesser God than that which I envision? Can you admit that?
No, only the antithesis that you have presented.
Looking forward to your "proof" that God exists. The short version will do.
How would you define God?
What would you consider to be "proof"?
The point is that the concept of creation ex nihilo is not a Christian doctrine. The 2nd century Christians got suckered by the Gnostics, and in an attempt to prove that their version of God was better than the Gnostics, came up with the idea that God can create something out of nothing (top that, you Gnostics!), and you've bought into the tradition.
The bottom line is that all of the wrestling with the traslation from the Greek isn't going to answer just how God created the universe, or what "creation of the universe" really means. I suggest that we all wait until we're granted a personal interview with the Creator, and then our questions will be answered.
That being said, the Bible does explain the SUBSTANCE of the creation and what God used to create the universe:
Psa 33:6 By the word of the LORD were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth.
It was not "nothing" that God used to create the Universe, it was by the "word of the Lord" and by the "breath of his mouth."
The substance of the universe is noting more or less than the particles of the breath of God's mouth. That might explain why, when you remove all the space between the particles of the universe, it can all fit in a ball about the size of your fist. And even then we don't know how much smaller it could be compressed. It could probably be squeezed into something the size of a quark.
Of course it is a Christian doctrine, your posting admits this to be true. The argument that the gnostics formulated it is irrelevant even if true. Gnostics had many belief's in common with Orthodox Christianity. This is simply a "guilt by association" ploy, and it really begs the question "where did the gnostics formulate it from?"
"Bought into the tradition" is a loaded term that provides an a-priori assumption that the doctrine is heretical, or erronious. There is no basis for this assumption.
The bottom line is that all of the wrestling with the traslation from the Greek isn't going to answer just how God created the universe, or what "creation of the universe" really means. I suggest that we all wait until we're granted a personal interview with the Creator, and then our questions will be answered.
Correct me if i am mistaken on this point, but did your posting not deal with the Hebrew translation? Do you read Greek or Hebrew? i did notice that a large part of your first posting was a quote from Joseph Smith...did Joseph Smith read Hebrew? i was under the impression that the BOM was written in "Reformed Heirogliphics", what ever that is, and was schooled in neither that language, nor Hebrew, nor Greek.
What you need consider is that the concept anything that was created in the physical universe is not attributed with eternal existence, except The physical body of Christ, which has first been "transformed", the glorified bodies of believers, which have also been "transformed", and the rest of mankind which exists in a state of eternal torment. This returns us to the question before us. Is matter eternal aside from and independent of God?
Concerning a few other issues, i am quite inclined to agree with you that mankind has not been, is not, and will not be capable of knowing, even in the "glorified" state, and if God tells us, we still will not be able to comprehend.
The teaching of normative Christianity affirms creation ex nihilo. By implication, the Hebrew verb bara' refers to ex nihilo creation as well. Not so the teachings of the Restoration. The Doctrine and Covenants affirms that "the elements are eternal" (D&C 93:33). Joseph Smith, in his sermon at the funeral of King Follett, stated:
You ask the learned doctors why they say the world was made out of nothing; and they will answer, "Doesn't the Bible say He created the world?" And they infer, from the word create, that it must have been made out of nothing. Now, the word create came from the word baurau which does not mean to create out of nothing; it means to organize; the same as a man would organize materials and build a ship. Hence, we infer that God had materials to organize the world out of chaos-- chaotic matter, which is element, and in which dwells all the glory. Element had an existence from the time he had. The pure principles of element are principles which can never be destroyed; they may be organized and re-organized, but not destroyed. They had no beginning, and can have no end. [Joseph Smith, "King Follett Discourse," in Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, 350-52.]
You have proven that Christians and LDS do not worship the same God, and there is no way that the LDS can be considered Christian any more or less that Islam could be considered Christian, and the LDS should STOP misrepresenting themselves in this manner. Let them compete in the arena of Comparative Religions as the others do. Thank you for that clarification.
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.