Hello, sorry to bother you with something which I think has probably come up already.
Genesis 2.2 and 2.3 talk about a God "resting". While there are also claims the correct translation is "completed work".
Is this a translation issue, or is it an interpretation issue?
I'm not competent to answer that. However, I can't see how "completed work" would make any sense in the context, so my suspicion is that this claim is simply made by people who want the text to be true and who don't like the idea of God literally resting. But that's just a guess.
Thanks.
When did "Pope" first become used for the leader of the Coptic church?
In fact the title was originally applied to all priests, at least in the east, and it was applied to many bishops in the west. It wasn't until the time of Gregory VII that the title was formally restricted, in the west, to the bishop of Rome. The earliest record of an Alexandrian bishop being referred to by this title is the third-century Heraclas (a former student of Origen's), in a letter by Dionysius of Rome. Of course Heraclas wasn't leader of the Coptic church, because there was no such thing at the time. When the Coptic church split off from the Orthodox Church in the fifth century after the council of Chalcedon, the bishop of Alexandria became its leader and continued to use the titles that had already become associated with that post (as well as a few more).
Whatever we do, in my opinion, we had the freedom to do it when we did it, whether or not we can do the opposite.
How do you know this? If you don't know it, but it's merely your "opinion", can you legitimately use it as the premise of an argument?
Therefore, as we cannot carry out actions that we do not have the freedom to carry out, all our actions are free. This argument, to me, is quite as valid as the argument that divine foreknowledge means all our actions are unfree;
Certainly it's valid. The problem is that it rests upon a premise that states that all our actions are free. But what use is that, if that's the conclusion you're trying to demonstrate? An argument that has one of its premises as its conclusion may be valid but it's useless, because it won't convince anyone who doesn't already believe its conclusion.
...divine foreknowledge, as I have tried to reason, could instead entail that all our actions are free, if we are willing to concede the first sentence of this post.
On your argument, it's not divine foreknowledge that entails that all our actions are free - rather, it's your assumption that our actions
are free that entails it. But as I just said, that's not a very helpful argument, because you're just using the conclusion as a premise. As you say yourself, we have to be willing to concede the first sentence of your post - but why would anyone do so?
This is a vastly preferable conclusion, because it coincides with human observation of free will.
What observation? Do we observe free will? What observations do we have that we wouldn't have if there were no free will?
Free will is apparently existent, and so, given two arguments, one of which insists on declaring free will an illusion, and the other of which does not, I prefer the latter, which is more in line with my own observations.
Maybe so, but one should follow where the argument leads, if the argument seems good. Could your observations be misleading you?
The point of the argument from omniscience is that it purports to show that if there is an omniscient being, none of our actions are free. If that argument is good, then one cannot consistently believe in both an omniscient being and free will. One has to choose which one to give up. You can't just ignore the conclusion on the grounds that it doesn't match what you'd
like to believe.
On the other hand, the more normal approach seems to be to take the other line of reasoning about the logical consequences of divine foreknowledge. Why follow that line of logic and that understanding which merely turns free will into a paradox?
Because that line of logic is based upon premises which most people would accept, at least, most people who believe in God. Your line of logic is based upon a contentious premise (namely, that all our actions are free). A good argument is one that (a) has premises that we accept or which appear to be very plausible, and (b) draws a conclusion from those premises in a valid way. The argument which purports to show that the existence of an omniscient being is incompatible with free will is, or at least seems to be, a good argument because it meets, or appears to meet, both of these conditions. The problem with your argument is that while it may meet (b) it doesn't meet (a).
But the context around you might logically not change. You might still have a mower and a lawn and the ability to mow in a week's time, in which case it would follow that it was equally possible for you to mow. If you did not mow the first time and therefore did not have the power to mow, then it follows that you could not mow on the later occasion either, which is false.
If the context doesn't change, then neither does my degree of freedom. If I choose not to mow today when I could have mown, then I make that choice freely. Next week, if I could still mow and I still choose not to do so, then I make that choice freely too; conversely, if at that point I have for some reason lost the ability to mow, then my choice not to do so is not free. Do you disagree with that?
Plotinus, I apologize for not responding sir. I had personal issues and do not have the time.
Enjoyed speaking with you and hope we can take this up at another time as your posts require a good amount of time to respond to. Appreciate your study.
No problem.
hello, great thread.
as it came up in the jesus thread, i want to ask you:
what exactly does christian heaven look like? are there different positions/bonuses attainable determined by how good you did on earth?
I don't know what the "Jesus thread" is - it sounds ghastly. It depends on what you mean by "heaven". In Christianity heaven is not one's final destination, but a temporary place or state where the soul goes after death to await the final resurrection. After that, it is reunited with the body and the person lives for ever in a bodily form which is a bit mysterious. In popular piety, however, this distinction between the interim state and the final resurrection tends to be blurred (in fact many people, even Christians, don't realise that Christianity teaches that everyone will be bodily resurrected in the future, although it's in the Nicene Creed which they all recite in church regularly).
Catholicism holds that heaven consists of the
beatific vision - that is, the blessed perceive God directly, and it is in this that their happiness consists. It also consists in the fact that they do not have the power to sin. The Catholic Church also teaches that there are degrees of happiness in heaven depending on how one did in life. This teaching goes back at least to the condemnation of Jovinian at the end of the fourth century - he taught that everyone is equal in heaven and that being chaste doesn't get you any better a reward than being married. When the church developed the doctrine of the beatific vision later on, it also developed the idea that this beatific vision itself can vary, being clearer (and thus better) for some people than for others. So that is what the different degrees of happiness consists of.
Of course, under Catholicism, most Christians do not go straight to heaven anyway - they have to pass through purgatory first, to purify them sufficiently. Only saints go straight to heaven. And how long you spend in purgatory depends on how much purifying you need to do.
The Orthodox churches generally don't stress the notion of the beatific vision so much - for them, salvation involves theosis or deification. On this view, post-mortem happiness is not a matter of perceiving God, it's a matter of becoming God, through union with him. There are different degrees of theosis, but these are not different kinds of rewards for living a better or worse life - they are simply stages along the way. One person might move more quickly along the stages than another, and some very holy people might even manifest it during their lifetimes, but everyone ends up at the same point eventually.
I think Protestants have generally rejected the idea of degrees of reward in heaven, on the basis that grace is given to all equally, and that the notion of degrees of reward implies that God doles out rewards on the basis of people's efforts rather than on the basis of grace. Matthew 20:1-16 implies that everyone gets the same no matter what they did. This is the official position of the Lutheran church, for example.
Out of curiousity, did Jesus (or any of the apostles, really) ever directly or indirectly endorse a system similar to capitalism even when taking into account Matthey 6:24 (you cannot love both God and wealth)?
If they did, is there more evidence supporting capitalism or communalism?
I think it is anachronistic to look for modern economic systems in the Bible, let alone find endorsements or condemnations of those systems. They didn't exist in biblical times. Certainly the Gospels have lots of teachings about wealth and money - especially Matthew - but you can't take those to be pronouncements about capitalism per se, since neither Jesus nor Matthew was familiar with capitalism. Of course, one may think that capitalism rests upon attitudes which are condemned there, in which case one may think that the Gospels indirectly condemn capitalism, but that's another matter.
As for communism, there are of course the well known passages in Acts which describe what appears to be something like a communist system in operation in the primitive church (Acts 2:42-47; 4:32-37). Not only that, but it suggests that complete sharing of property was compulsory, and those who held anything back were severely punished (Acts 5:1-11). However, it's unclear how accurate these passages really are, or to what degree they're a romanticising of conditions that held fifty years earlier. There are also passages that suggest that some Christians did have their own property (Acts 12:12). Moreover, one can't really equate a lifestyle system in place in a small religious community with a full-blown economic or political system, so again it would be anachronistic to see this as an endorsement of communism as such.
EDIT: Also, can the quote in Mark about the camel and the eye of a needle be interpreted to endorse the belief that the rich man can still get to heaven, it will just be very hard?
However one interprets it, it's clearly an exaggeration for comic effect. The context of the saying as it appears in Mark suggests that it's all about attitude, and Jesus criticises his questioner not for his wealth so much as for his wish to hang on to it. That is a reasonable interpretation but of course the problem is whether this was the saying's original context or not. To my non-expert eyes this whole pericope (Mark 10:17-31) seems like it contains a number of possibly authentic sayings, probably ultimately from different sources, rammed together. Remember that with most of Jesus' sayings, even though the saying itself may be authentic, the setting is probably not. So the simple answer to your question is: no-one knows.
I really sort of wish we had a Plotinius robot to answer all of our questions for us. An entire forum of Plotinius clones debating would be awsome to watch.
No, we'd all just agree with each other. It would be incredibly edifying.
I read an article a while back (I'll see if I can dig it up) about an Antiochian Orthodox priest who transfered to Coptic jurisdiction with the approval of his bishop. What obstacles, if any, exist between unity between unity between Oriental and Eastern Orthodox churches? In a broader sense, what's your general opinion of the ecumenical movement?
The initial obstacle to unity between these churches is that they all regard each other as heretics. The Eastern Orthodox churches are Chalcedonian, holding that Christ has one hypostasis and two physeis; the Copts and Ethiopians are Monophysite, holding that Christ has one hypostasis and one physis; and the Church of the East are Nestorian (using that term advisedly), holding that Christ has two hypostaseis and two physeis. Of course it's all rather more complex than that, especially since they all speak different languages anyway and don't necessarily mean the same things by these terms to start with. Now as I understand it, there has been some rapprochement between some of these churches. In the past few years, representatives of some of these churches and the Catholic Church have met and agreed that they are in substantial, if not verbal, agreement on christological matters. In 1994 Pope John Paul II signed a "common christological declaration" with the Catholicos of the Church of the East. These developments suggest that the doctrinal disagreements which led to these churches becoming distinct in the first place are now either non-existent or at least surmountable. But of course, it's not as simple as that. Once you have separate churches, it's very hard to join them back together even when there is no real reason for them to be apart, because of simple inertia. If they're used to be separate organisations, they will tend to remain so. An example is the Church of England and the Methodist church; they both agree that there's no reason whatsoever for them to continue to be distinct churches, but although there have been moves for this to happen, it's never actually come to anything because it's so difficult to overcome the inertia of separation. On the other hand, it can be done; there are striking examples in Canada and India of distinct churches uniting.
As for the ecumenical movement in general, I find it possibly the least interesting aspect of contemporary church history, although of course very worthy and commendable. I have no particular reason for that.
