Pretty much I mean moral responsibility, but I mean full moral responsibility. A four year old who steals a cookie is in some sense responsible, but he isn't 100% aware of what he's doing.
Basically I meant at what age people have to either do or believe what is required for Salvation (Worded vaguely due to the differing opinions) or face damnation.
I don't think that most churches specify. To widen the issue, does anyone have any clear idea of how old one has to be to have moral responsibility, quite apart from religious questions? I think that we generally think that there are certain conditions that must be fulfilled for someone to have moral responsibility - e.g. they must understand what they are doing, and in borderline cases the question then is simply whether these conditions are fulfilled for that individual. I would say that a sensible approach to the age of responsibility for matters of salvation would be similar.
So Catholics do believe in differing degrees of punishment in Hell?
Makes sense I suppose, but how can there be any such thing as a MILD eternal torment?
Eternity is matter of duration, not of intensity. An eternity of mild headache would be less severe than an eternity of being boiled alive, for example. In the quotation from Dante, an eternity of being aware that you're missing out on heaven is not as bad as an eternity of having this awareness and also being actively punished.
So not official but acceptable?
That's right.
Are you unaware of the Protestant arguments for some reason? You seem to have gone through all the different Catholic arguments, but you didn't even mention the Protestant arguments, perhaps since I'm already aware of them.
I don't know of any Protestant positions that are interestingly different from the ones I mentioned.
Either way, I've never heard of any Protestant saying all babies who die are damned. I have heard before that it depends on the parents, that all babies are saved, that its God's choice, I've even heard it theoretically stated that babies could potentially choose for or against Christ after death, or that their salvation depends on, if they have lived, whether they would have chosen God or not.
No-one says that all babies are damned. My point was that there must be something reprehensible about a theology that says that any babies, or other non-culpable individuals, are damned.
To be Honest, I've never heard any Protestant say baptism has anything to do with it. Most Protestants don't hold water baptism as a prerequesite for Salvation, and most that do hold to believer's baptism anyways. Infant baptism securing their salvation is a Catholic thing I think, not sure if the Orthodox hold it or not.[/QUOTE]
Your argument is wrong, because contemporaneity does not work like that. Two events can only be said to be happening at the same time, if they are also at the same place. In all other cases there can only exactly one reference frame (arbitrarily chosen from an (close to) infinite amount of reference frames), where the events happen at the same time. Generally the most one can say is that the distance between two events is space-like (i.e. there is a reference frame where they happen at the same time, but no reference frame where they happen at the same place) or time-like (you can find a reference frame where events happen at the same place, but there is no reference frame where they happen at the same time). But to do that you need to know the spatial separation between these events.
So unless you want to pinpoint an exact location of heaven in the universe it makes no sense to refer to "now" with respect to heaven, because the definition of "now" also requires a place, which you cannot define. Therefore the statement "Peter is in heaven now" is not false but indeterminate. If heaven was far enough away, you could find a reference frame where this is true.
What you say is right, but I don't think it makes what I said false - it just gives additional reasons why it's correct. Surely, on the basis of what you've said, "Peter is in heaven now" is indeed false when uttered anywhere other than in heaven, or at least tolerably close to heaven for it to be tolerably close to being true (after all, I can say "Peter is in Rome now" even when I'm in London, which is technically not true but as close to being true as makes no difference). The truth value of "Peter is in heaven now" is indeterminate only if it's a live possibility that heaven is right here, and I take it that this is generally not a live possibility.
For a modern conception of God this is even more important, because omnipresence immediately demands atemporality. Or maybe it would be better to talk about omnitemporality (I am probably making up a word here) - omnipresence in time.
I think that's not an uncommon concept in process theology (if process theology is still around - it was fashionable in the 1970s). I also remember Keith Ward arguing for much this view of God in his lectures that I went to as a student.
To clarify, Palamas would have been considered an Aristotlean theologian as well, correct?
I'm not sure to what extent that's the case. Palamas was not, as far as I know, particularly anti-Aristotelian, although he certain opposed the form of Aristotelianism espoused by Barlaam. But I don't know that he was particularly Aristotelian either.
Question: I am aware of the Catholic viewpoint of Salvation ("Outside the Church there is no Salvation" with limited exceptions being the simplified version) but what is the most common Orthodox view?
The "exclusive" teachings of church fathers such as Cyprian and Augustine are part of the Orthodox heritage as well as the Catholic one; obviously they take these teachings to refer to the Orthodox churches rather than the Roman Catholic Church. As I understand it, there is a variety of interpretations within Orthodoxy. On the question of salvation outside the Orthodox churches, I think the general consensus is to leave it up to God and refrain from commenting. There's an interesting book on the subject here which you might find useful to look through.
Do all non-heretical Catholics reject predestination?
No, predestination is part of Catholic teaching, as you can see here. Catholics differ from orthodox Calvinists in that they believe in both predestination (in some sense) and libertarian free will, which is a bit of a paradox, but not necessarily an insoluble one.
If Jesus were alive today, based on what he said in the gospels, what Christian group do you think he'd endorse the most?
As others have said, I think this is an impossible question. If Jesus were alive today I should think he couldn't possibly comprehend any Christian group, let alone rank them by endorsement.
If you take the same question, but instead of Jesus, you use Paul, what Christian group would Paul most likely endorse (In your opinion)?
I think that Paul would be appalled to find that the world had not ended, and this is what would occupy his attention for the most part. He would have to rethink his whole theology. He could probably find a way to do it - just as he successfully rethought it all when it became apparent that most Jews were not going to accept Jesus - but since he was a religious genius and I am not, I don't know what the outcome of this would be or how he would assess the existing churches. My guess is that he would probably most approve of the less institutional Protestant churches - the free and charismatic churches - since they are probably closer to the churches that he knew; however, that assumes that approval would be based on familiarity. No modern church is, or could be, much like a first-century church anyway.
And same question with the writer of the book of James.
This is even harder to say, because the book of James contains almost nothing distinctively Christian. If it weren't for a couple of mentions of the name of Christ, there would be no reason to think it Christian at all, and it would have been classified as just another piece of Jewish wisdom literature. (How amazing, for example, that in chapter 5 an apparently Christian author, seeking an example of someone who willingly endured suffering, names Job, not Jesus!) I think it would be impossible to say which modern churches this author would most approve of, given that his teaching is almost entirely ethical; I suppose he would approve most of those that live in a most moral way.
What would you recommend for Biblical commentaries? I'm interested in reading analysis regarding genre and historical significance as I go through each book in the Bible.
I couldn't really say - I'm not sufficiently familiar with biblical literature. (The Bible really isn't my thing.) But I'm always pointing people to this site as a good place to begin.
1) Whenever Fr. Sergius Bulgakov is mentioned on Orthodox forums, reactions are... polarized at best. What did he teach that was especially controversial? In general, who's your favorite 20th Century Eastern European theologian?
I really don't know enough about this to say. As I understand it, Bulgakov taught that the Virgin Mary was so suffused with the Holy Spirit that she became hypostatically united to him, and could therefore be considered identical with the Third Person of the Trinity and properly worshipped as him. Which would seem to make Mary the incarnation of the Holy Spirit, just as Jesus was the incarnation of the Son. Which is heterodox, to say the least. However, whether this is an accurate representation of what Bulgakov taught, I don't know.
I'm just not sufficiently familiar with eastern European theologians to designate a favourite!
2) What did you think of Futurama's response to the Problem of Evil?
It only works if you assume that God is not really omniscient and omnipotent.
And to add another question:
Someone posted this in a VM conversation:
Matt 16:18 clearly states that upon this rock (Simon Peter) should the Church of Jesus be built. Simon Peter was also the first Bishop of Rome (and Antioch as well). That means it's pretty clear how papal succession works then from the Bishop of Rome (Antioch as I'm sure you know ceased to exist soon after). And just because half of Christians disagree does not mean they are right. They are just ignoring really obvious Gospel passages.
Is this, in your view, as "Really obvious" as this person says? Or are there good arguments against it? And what do you think the best of those arguments are?
I don't think it's obvious at all. Suppose I were to say that Steve Jobs is the rock upon which Apple is built. We'd all understand what that means: his insight and clever business and design decisions are a key factor behind the company's success. It wouldn't necessarily follow that his successor is to be viewed in the same light, because it's a testament to Jobs' own personal qualities. Similarly, I'd say it's perfectly possible that Jesus meant that Peter was to play a major role in the establishment of the church - indeed I'd think that the most obvious interpretation of the passage. It doesn't at all imply that any particular authority attaches to Peter's successors. And no Christian author seems to have thought that it did until Cyprian at the earliest; and no bishop of Rome tried to appeal to it in defence of his own authority until the fourth century (it was either Liberius or Damasus, I can't remember which).
Of course, I would also say that I don't think that Jesus really meant anything by the saying, because it's highly unlikely that he ever said it. The correct question is what the author of the First Gospel meant by it, so where I say "Jesus" above, I mean in the sense of the character in the text rather than the historical person.
Plotinus, I have a question, but it's more historical than theological -- still worth a shot, I guess. Is there anything you can tell me about the Christianization of the Anglo-Saxons? The impression that I've got is that it took place fairly rapidly once it began, was done largely for political reasons, and was probably heavily associated early on with a significant degree of syncretization between Germanic paganism and western Christianity. But that's all terribly generic -- is there anything that can't basically be gleaned by a fairly cursory reading of Bede? How did the Roman Catholic Church handle syncretization/minor "backsliding" in other formerly pagan areas?
I realize that's rather specific and pretty far from your area of specialization, so if you can't really think of anything, that's fine. I just thought it'd be worth a try.
This is unfortunately rather hard for me to answer too. As I understand it, Christianisation of the Anglo-Saxons and other peoples was something of a two-pronged affair. First you got the famous missionaries turning up and converting the king, so that the kingdom was now officially Christian. But that didn't really mean very much to ordinary people. So second you got the beloved saints turning up and wandering the kingdom itself and actually talking to people and converting them. In the case of the Anglo-Saxons, King Edwin of Northumbria was converted to Christianity by Paulinus of York, in the famous story given by Bede where he compared the life of man to a sparrow flying through the king's hall. But that didn't really make much difference to the kingdom. It took Aidan of Lindisfarne, spending his life travelling the length and breadth of Northumbria and explaining Christianity to people and converting them, to make the kingdom really Christian. So as far as political motives may go, the first kind of conversion may well have been closely connected to politics, but the second wasn't.
As for syncretism, I don't think there was any more blending between Christian and pagan beliefs or practices in England than anywhere else. Of course missionaries re-interpreted traditional festivals in Christian ways, or built churches in established holy places, and so on, but they did that everywhere, following the express advice of Gregory the Great.
It certainly was rapid though - at least as far as we can tell. But then it only takes a generation for an almost complete change in religious attitude. Just look at Britain today - fifty years ago it was a Christian country, and today not only are most people not Christians, but most people don't know anything about Christianity at all. All it takes is a single generation to raise their children not to go to church, and it's largely forgotten. Similarly, all it takes is a single generation to raise them to go to church, and it's established. That's one reason why Julian the Apostate could never really have succeeded in undoing the work of Constantine.
I'm not going to try to answer this for Plotinus, since most of what I can speak to comes from Bede anyway. But most of the problems of syncretism came not from 'paganism', although Bede and other authors make the standard complaints about that. Several Anglo-Saxon kings, and even one notable queen apparently, were Bad, Bad Pagans even after the good missionaries from Canterbury came to spread the Truth and so Suffered Horribly. Surprise. What was more interesting was the clash between 'Roman' and Irish interpretations of Christianity. This manifested itself historically in the synod at Whitby in 664, one of the centerpieces of Bede, where the Northumbrian kings jettisoned Irish advisors and agreed to pay heed to Rome.
It's worth noting that 'paying heed to Rome' didn't mean the same thing in 664 that it did in 1664, obviously. Bede pushed the line of a papacy that rightfully dictates doctrine in the Ecclesiastical History, but back in the Mediterranean, nobody was even close to deciding that this was a good idea. After all, the RCC didn't exist yet in any meaningful sense.
Anyway, in the pages of Bede this Irish problem manifested itself over obviously silly minutiae like the style of tonsuring monks and the calculation of the exact date of Easter. What was more important to the dudes at Whitby was who held the reins in Northumbrian Christianity. When guys like Wilfrid got up to 'persuade' the Northumbrian king Oswiu (who had probably already made his decision, but whatever) of the rightness of the Roman cause, they didn't waste a whole lot of words talking about how important it was that Easter be celebrated on the correct day, that's for damn sure. Irish arguments focused on how they were basically there first, and had the older tradition of Christianity in Britain.
It's hard to guess at exactly why Oswiu sided with the 'Romans', although there are any number of possible reasons, like Roman Christianity being more prestigious, or the immense distance from the central religious authorities. Maybe he realized that the other side was, you know, the friggin' Irish. Who knows. Anyway, the whole "I love the Irish Christians for their piety and conversion efforts but they were WRONG WRONG WRONG" line of discussion runs through Bede more than whining about "backsliding" to paganism, and is arguably second only to the "I love Wilfrid for driving out the Irish but he was WRONG WRONG WRONG" line of discussion in terms of importance to Bede's work.
Thanks for this. But one thing I would say is that the date of Easter and the style of the tonsure were more important than you might think. In the case of Easter, how you calculated its date said a lot about your attitude to Judaism. If Easter was to be tied to Passover then the implication was that Christianity was a Jewish sect. In the case of monks' haircuts, the Irish style (shaved at the front, long at the back) was the same hairstyle sported by Celtic druids. Having your monks look the same as Celtic druids was quite a bold statement about the nature of monasticism and, by implication, Christianity. The Roman tonsure (shaved on the crown), by contrast, was an imitation of the crown of thorns worn by Jesus. So one tonsure linked the monks to a pagan past, the other linked them to Jesus' passion. Clearly these are quite important choices to be made. Besides which, irrespective of the merits of one method of dating Easter over another or one tonsure style over another, there was the question of Roman authority. Never mind whether the Roman method of cutting monks' hair was superior or not - it was the Roman method. Were the churches going to be united or not? Were they going to follow different practices or the same ones? These were also very important questions.
Have you read John Boswell's somewhat-controversial work on this topic, and the subsequent responses? (I'm assuming that's what prompted this question.)
No, I haven't.
Well, I'm certainly not a theologian, but Jesus clearly says that Peter is the rock upon which he will build his church, so I'm not sure wherein lies the confusion.
The confusion is obvious: "rock" is not meant literally, so what does it mean? Any time that someone uses a metaphor there's a recipe for confusion, because different people may understand it differently.
Personnally, the only ROCK that was not "prevailed" against by the gates of hell was Jesus the Christ, when He died and descended into hell and led free those who were held captive. He broke the chains of death. Even Peter himself said that Jesus was the chief cornerstone for the foundation of the church.
That does not help us understand the passage, because in it Peter is identified with the rock in question. Whether Jesus himself was also a rock is neither here nor there. Also, the "cornerstone" image comes from the book of 1 Peter, but Peter himself did not really write that. It is actually a deuteropauline work - that is, it is written by someone after the death of Paul, developing his ideas - but unlike the other deuteropauline works we possess, the author of this one chose to attribute his work to Peter rather than to Paul.
History was rewritten so as to make people think that Peter was in Rome.
That is a very provocative statement. Who do you think "rewrote" history in this way, and when? Peter's presence in Rome was a well established tradition by the time of Irenaeus and Tertullian and I know of no reason to reject it.
Plotinus, have you covered the issue of what language the Four Gospels were originally written in? A classical scholar tells me that the consensus is that were originally written in Greek, but is this not somewhat problematic, given that there is no evidence that Jesus and his disciples spoke anything other than Aramaic? Surely it's more likely that the original reporting of Jesus' life and work and words would have been in the language used by Jesus and those who knew and heard him? Would this imply that there is an original document in Aramaic, on which the Gospels are based?
The Gospels were certainly written in Greek. And this can be seen quite clearly when you consider that they exist in a literary relationship to each other. That is, there are passages that are word-for-word the same in different Gospels, in the Greek. That means that one Gospel author must have copied another, or they both copied another, now lost source. And that means that all apart from the first must have been written in Greek - unless they were miraculously somehow all translated in a way that preserved the word-for-word identity between the different passages.
Certainly Jesus very probably taught in Aramaic. I think it's possible that he knew Greek and perhaps even taught in it, but I don't know if there's any consensus among scholars regarding how likely this is. So I'm sure that his words were originally circulated in Aramaic. But there were thirty or forty years between his death and the writing of the first Gospel, by which time the language of the Christian movement, as far as we can tell, was predominantly Greek. Paul wrote in Greek and so did all of the other New Testament authors. Evidently by this time Jesus' words had been translated into Greek and either transmitted orally in that language or written down (Q, a lost source used by both Matthew and Luke, was apparently a document written in Greek).
As for a question: What would you infer from the fact that the Bible is full of God talking directly to people, and miracles being worked, and all sorts of other things which can only be described as divine intervention, yet such things seem almost completely absent from the last two thousand years?
I would infer that people in the times when the Bible was written had a very different understanding from most of us about the nature of the world and its relation to the supernatural. And I think that inference would be borne out by most ancient literature too.
Thanks, Flying Pig, I'm well aware that the Gospels weren't written by the Apostles, and that the earliest surviving manuscripts of the Gospels are written in Greek. However, I also thought that those manuscripts date from several centuries after the Gospels were written, so that is quite weak evidence of what language the Gospels were originally written in, particuarly when an almost-contemporary writer, Eusebius, actually says that Matthew was written in Aramaic.
What I'm trying to get at is how close the Gospels can be to what happened in the first century AD. I've seen some writers claim that Jesus spoke Greek, presumably so as to bring the Gospels nearer to his actual words, but is this plausible? Why would a Galilean Jew, speaking to fellow Jews, have used any language other than Aramaic or Hebrew, even if he also knew some Greek?
Galilean Jews weren't all the same. Jesus grew up practically next door to the highly hellenised city of Tiberias, where presumably Greek would have been widely spoken (and where the most Law-abiding Jews wouldn't live, since it had been built on a graveyard). I don't see it as intrinsically implausible that Jesus might have spoken to people from that city in Greek, assuming he was capable of doing so. Although it's striking that Tiberias is, I think, never even mentioned in the Gospels.
As for the manuscripts, you're right that they're not particularly convincing evidence for the original language of the Gospels. What is convincing is simply the study of the internal evidence for their composition, i.e. the study of the texts themselves. Their relationships to each other, and the different layers of their composition and editing, can be explained on the assumption that we have them in the original languages, but they can't on the assumption that we don't. That's why scholars don't place much weight on ancient claims about earlier versions in other languages, just as they don't place much weight on ancient claims about their authorship either. Such claims may seem early to us but they're still the best part of a century after the fact.