Looks like I forgot to answer a load of questions again. Sorry!
How exactly does the ransom view of atonement work without compromising God's omnipotence?
The short answer is that (in my opinion) it doesn't, really. An adherent of this view might give one of a number of answers, but I think the most persuasive would be this. If we consider God's omnipotence by itself, then he is capable of redeeming those who have been enslaved by the devil without any preconditions. However, such an action would contravene his justice, because it would be unjust to rob the devil of his property. (In late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, people thought that the devil had rights over us, and this is why God couldn't just strongarm the devil into giving us up, because it would be unjust to the devil.) So in effect God's omnipotence - or, more precisely, his use of that omnipotence - is constrained by his justice. Offering Christ as a ransom to the devil is a way of redeeming sinners without acting unjustly.
A similar answer can be given to similar objections to other theories of the atonement. For example, defenders of penal substitution would say that God cannot just pardon everyone without punishing them because it would be unjust; here again his omnipotence is constrained by his justice. So he punishes Jesus instead, which allows him to pardon us but still meets the requirements of justice that someone be punished. (Of course this doesn't address the manifold other problems with this theory.)
You've talked about this a little bit (at least, in how much you disagree with it or feel that it's not a Christian trait to believe this to be true), but where did the idea that the Bible is the perfect, authoritative word of God come from?
I believe there's a verse in Timothy that says all scripture is breathed out by God and is profitable for teaching...
...but why has that view been so prevalent in the last 50 years among conservative churches in America and elsewhere, and if you could, what would you your first counterpoint to the their argument that the Bible is perfect?
Mainly, I'm asking for a history lesson.
You are thinking of 2 Timothy 3:16, but even that doesn't state that the Bible is perfect or even the word of God. According to the Bible, the "word of God" is Jesus, not anything written down. Plus of course the author of 2 Timothy is thinking of the Old Testament writings, if anything, not what we know as "the Bible".
In antiquity, the Bible - or what would become the Bible - was revered for two reasons. The first was historical and the other was more mystical. The first was that the New Testament was believed to have been written by the apostles, and so it was a very valuable record of the beliefs and practices of the first Christians. Justin Martyr, writing in the mid-second century, mentions that at their services Christians read out "the memoirs of the apostles", presumably the Gospels and letters of the New Testament. So they derived their authority from their authorship, and if someone thought that a book wasn't actually written by an apostle, they would regard it as non-canonical. For example, Dionysius of Alexandria analysed the text of Revelations and concluded that it wasn't by the author of John's Gospel, and was therefore non-apostolic and shouldn't be canonical.
The second reason was basically a transference to Christian texts of pagan attitudes to pagan texts. Classical pagans believed that the writings of the poets were divinely inspired and that the gods, or the muses, had literally played Homer, Hesiod, and the others like musical instruments. They believed that the great epics and poems about the gods contained divine instructions and teachings as a result, which required spiritual insight and the art of allegory to uncover. It was natural for the Christians to think exactly the same thing about their holy books. This is the idea in the 2 Timothy passage. Thus you find, for example, the pagan anti-Christian writer Celsus denigrating the Christians for the rubbish in their scriptures while praising the contents of the pagan writings, and the Christian Origen answering him in exactly the same way, but in reverse. So in this view, the Bible derived its authority from being directly inspired by God, not from its human authors. Although not entirely consistent with each other, these two views were combined and held in tandem by most Christians by the end of the patristic period.
However, in antiquity the Bible was not regarded as an authority by itself, taken in isolation. On the historical view, it was authoritative because it was a source for the beliefs and practices of the early church: thus it was the church which was authoritative, and the Bible was just a witness to that. Moreover, the Bible had to be interpreted by the church and in line with the church's teaching. 2 Peter 1:20-21 makes this clear. In antiquity, the ultimate authority was the "rule of faith", literally the
canon, which meant the body of teaching handed down in the apostolic churches, recorded in the New Testament, and taught by bishops in communion with the apostolic churches. This basically remained the case throughout the Middle Ages except that more emphasis was placed upon the current teaching of the church (in the west, at least).
Things changed at the Reformation when, for the first time, people began to think of the Bible and the church as
rival authorities instead of different branches of the same authority. So the Reformers criticised the church on the basis of the Bible (or of their interpretation of it). Extreme Reformation groups tried to do everything on the basis of the Bible alone. This encouraged a higher view of Scripture among later Protestants. In theory, they regarded the Bible in much the same way as Catholics, as divinely inspired and infallible, but in practice it meant much more to them because Catholics understood the Bible's inspiration and infallibility as just part of the wider inspiration of the church as a whole. For Protestants, the Bible was all they had, so they regarded it as all-sufficient and the
sole source of authority.
Of course, Protestants did, and do, read and interpret the Bible in ways prescribed by their own churches - just as much as Catholics. But they don't mean to.
And then the same thing happened again in the nineteenth century, when for the first time science really diverged from the Bible and began presenting a rival understanding of the world. This began in the early nineteenth century with the rise of geology and the view that the earth was much older than just a few thousand years, and intensified later with the development of evolutionary biology. So where, at the Reformation, the Bible and the church were wrenched apart and became rival authorities (to the Protestants), in the nineteenth century the same thing happened to the Bible and science (to those who viewed it in this way - of course not all Protestants, let alone all Christians, did). Those who saw science as a threat emphasised the authority of the Bible all the more, and moreover stressed that it held all scientific truth as well as spiritual truth. And this was the origin of fundamentalism, and so it went on from there.
I think the links between fundamentalism and political conservatism came a bit later. In fact in the early twentieth century fundamentalism was more often linked to progressive politics, as in the case of William Jennings Bryan. But this is more US-specific so I don't know much about it.
As for how to oppose the fundamentalist conception of scripture, it's not easy to do simply because fundamentalists accept so few basic procedures of rational thought. One can find plenty of inconsistencies between different biblical books, but there's always an answer if you contrive things enough - even if, as a last resort, the answer is that the text has been corrupted. If someone says that there's not much you can say to disprove it. The problem is that fundamentalism of any sort - not just Protestant, and not even just religious - is about taking some particular idea, text, or whatever and making that your absolute authority, and then judging every other idea, text, or whatever in its light. If you do that you cannot even conceive of judging the thing that you're taking as primary, and even if you could conceive of doing so, you have no means of doing so because you have nothing to judge it
by. Thus, an objective person might examine the Bible and other texts and draw conclusions about the nature of the Bible on the basis of this examination and by comparison with other texts. A fundamentalist is committed to a certain view of the Bible before he even opens it, and so the only conclusions he is capable of drawing are those of other texts in the light of the Bible (as he understands it); he has no resources for considering the Bible itself. This is why one cannot really debate with them. And the same for fundamentalists of other kinds.
I've stumbled upon this downloadable edition of early Christian source texts:
http://www.ploughbooks.co.uk/english/the-early-christians.html. Thought it might be interesting.
On a related note: what is your view of the editor, Eberhard Arnold?
His introduction seems very idealistic. I don't know if the early church was really as revolutionary and wonderful as he suggests and it seems to me that he's often attributing his own ideals to them, such as the claim that they thought private property was sinful or that slavery was evil. And he forgets that the early Christians disagreed greatly among themselves, including over the ethical standards that he attributes to them. He also seems to favour a charismatic sort of ministry, and overlooks the proponents of more institutional, official ministry - including quotations from Ignatius of Antioch on other topics, for example, but not those where he exhorts everyone to obey the bishop as they would obey God. He presents a picture of an idealistic, counter-institutional, charismatic church up to the end of the second century AD, which then began to be corrupted into an institutional one, and he's quite clear that he thinks this was a Bad Thing.
Aquinas holds God outside of time since he knows all future contingents. He also says that although God primarily wills himself indepdently of other things, he can love things other than himself insofar as their relation to his goodness is their end. God loves all his creatures, but not equally, since they are differing in their actuality versus potentiality (God being pure form without potentiality, unmoved mover, primary cause independent of any other form which would condition it further into actuality, etc.).
But doesn't this unequal love violate God's externality to time? How can he love something less for its lack of perfection, if perfection is a temporal process and God is outside of all temporality?
To put it another way, Aquinas says God cannot create a better world in essence, but surely he can in existence. Essence is already perfect...so back again to God loving something less because of its existence, even though its essence is perfect. God's love is then temporal, right? But how can that be?
I don't see how this follows. Take your first argument first. Let's accept that temporal things vary in their perfection, and that God is atemporal. Why can't an atemporal God love temporal things? He doesn't have to
be temporal to do that. I can like the fish in an aquarium - perhaps to varying degrees - without having to be underwater myself.
In your second argument, I don't see why God's love has to be temporal. He's loving something that is temporal, but that doesn't mean that his love has to be temporal. If you think it does then you need some argument to support it.
Sorry to quote an older post, but I'm doing a research report on the development of pacifism within Christianity. Do you have any good sources on this? I'm particularly interested in the decline of this ideal. Were there any overtly pacifistic writers (heretical or otherwise) in the Middle Ages?
I'm afraid I don't know much about this, but I will try to find out.
[EDIT] I've said a bit about it
here.
Um this got me thinking, what is the Pope supposed to be and do, exactly?
The Pope is the bishop of Rome. (Although today he does not perform any episcopal duties for the Roman Christians as other bishops do - he has special people to do that for him, just as the prime minister has special people to discharge his duties as MP in his constituency.) In antiquity, the idea developed that some bishops were more important than others. These were called metropolitans or archbishops. Basically, each city or town has a bishop. But in the case of a large city, it has an archbishop, who is in control of the church in the whole area. The bishops of other towns in the area are his subordinates. And the archbishops themselves are subordinate to patriarchs. A patriarch is the bishop of a really major city. In late antiquity, it was held that the bishops of Rome, Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Constantinople were patriarchs. (The Church of the East did not recognise the bishop of Constantinople as a patriarch and held that the bishop of Ctesiphon was a patriarch.) So you have patriarchs at the top as the most important bishops, then archbishops, and finally normal bishops.
The patriarch of Rome was considered especially important. This was partly because Rome was obviously an especially important city, although by the fourth century it had lost its political importance; the capital of the empire was now Constantinople, which is why the bishop of Constantinople became a patriarch. And even the western empire was governed not from Rome but from Milan, which is why the archbishop of Milan became very important. Whoever was bishop of the imperial city was automatically important. However, the patriarch of Rome was also important because Rome had been historically a significant city to Christians: both Peter and Paul were supposed to have died there; Peter, the most important apostle, had been the first bishop of Rome; and it was to the Roman church that both Paul and Ignatius of Antioch wrote very important early letters. This, combined with the pre-eminence of the city of Rome within the Roman empire during the first couple of centuries of the church, led to the church of Rome and, by extension, its bishop being seen as especially authoritative.
When the Catholic and Orthodox churches separated from each other, the Catholics had only a single patriarch, namely the patriarch of Rome. The other patriarchs were all in the eastern, Greek-speaking part of the church. So naturally the Roman patriarch came to have far more authority within the western church than any single patriarch did in the eastern church. This, combined with the fact that he had always been regarded as the most important patriarch for the reasons given above, made him ever more important and authoritative.
Today, the Pope retains his authoritative power over the Catholic Church. He has the power to appoint cardinals, for example. Cardinals appeared in the Middle Ages and are basically bishops with special powers. (Actually not all cardinals are bishops, but the vast majority are.) One of the powers is the ability to elect Popes. The Pope also does things such as canonise saints, write encyclicals expressing the teaching of the church, and call councils of the church. In modern times the First Vatican Council and the Second Vatican Council are examples of this. The Pope is also the only person in the Catholic Church who can authorise breaching the secrecy of the confessional: if a murderer goes to a priest and confesses his sin, the priest cannot inform the police or anyone else unless the Pope himself permits it.
Since the nineteenth century, the Pope has also been infallible, at least sometimes. Papal infallibility derives from the infallibility of the church. In the Middle Ages the idea developed that the church, being inspired by God, cannot go wrong in its teaching - although individual representatives of the church might do so, of course. In early modern times some Catholics believed that the Pope, as the head of the church, is infallible as well. The idea was highly controversial until Pope Pius IX made it an article of faith that, when the Pope speaks "from his seat", in a special capacity, when defining the faith of the church, he does so infallibly. So he is not infallible as a general rule, only under certain conditions when he basically acts as the mouthpiece of the church. However, it is not entirely clear exactly when those conditions hold.
