That's a new one to me. How does someone square the idea of Jesus not knowing he was God incarnate, of not knowing he had an eternal soul, of not knowing anything of a supernatural nature with the miracles reported in the gospels?
Easy: someone doesn't have to be divine, or to think they are divine, to perform miracles. Lots of people perform miracles in the Bible, from the Old Testament prophets to the New Testament apostles, without either being or thinking they are divine. In fact, according to Matthew 24:24, false prophets are capable of performing miracles. In the worldview of antiquity, miracles are practically everyday occurrences.
If Jesus thought he was just another human, then how did the authors decide afterwards he was more than that? Just the resurrection story?
I would say it was their own personal experience. The first Christians felt that they were united to Jesus, that he was still a living presence with them, and that they were experiencing the saving power of God through him. That is what we find in the earliest expressions of Christian belief that are preserved in certain passages of the New Testament, such as the speeches in Acts or the opening of Romans. Later, they developed this basic experience by expressing it in terms of Jesus actually
being divine, which is hard to find explicitly in the earliest stages.
That is, the traditional (at least, the evangelical) view is that things went in this order:
(1) Jesus said he was God.
(2) The Christians believed Jesus was God, because he said he was.
But I think it's more plausible to see things as going in this order:
(1) The Christians believed that they experienced God in Jesus.
(2) They came to believe that Jesus actually was God.
(3) They retrospectively projected this belief back onto some of their stories about Jesus, which is why John's Gospel, at least, presents Jesus as divine (in some sense).
If Jesus only discovered he was more than human after he died, then how does he have the authority to tell the two people getting crucified next to him where they're headed for?
Why would Jesus need to think himself to be divine to do that? Wouldn't it be enough for him to think that he had great insight into the mind of God?
In any case, maybe this never happened, and is a story that came about in the later Christian community as an expression of
their belief that Jesus spoke with divine authority.
Why is there nothing in the post-resurrection stories of him talking about what he learned during those three days?
The idea we're proposing is this:
(I) Jesus was divine during his earthly life, but he didn't realise it, since he wasn't omniscient during that time (or at least didn't exercise his omniscience). Only after the resurrection did he (re)gain his divine omniscience, including the knowledge that he was divine.
That is a common belief among modern philosophical theologians, especially those inclined to a kenotic understanding of the incarnation.
What I'm
not proposing is that the authors of the Gospels, or any other early Christians, believed (I). If they had believed (I), then yes, you might well expect that the authors of the Gospels would have presented the post-resurrection Jesus as explaining that he'd learned (remembered?) a load of new stuff after his resurrection. The fact that they don't may well be taken as good evidence that the Gospel authors did not believe (I). But that is not, in itself, reason to suppose that (I) is not true; it could be the case that (I) is true but the early Christians, including the authors of the Gospels, did not realise it.
As for the bolded bit, I don't think I agree with that either. But that might be my bias, especially my anti-authoritarian bias, showing again. If God created us, gave us free will, gave us the power to think for ourselves, make moral judgements ourselves, then why shouldn't we use those faculties? Why do we need to be commanded at all?
God clearly
hasn't given us the power to establish beyond all doubt what actions are right and what actions are wrong, since we disagree about the matter. So it seems to me entirely plausible that there could be a role for divine commands in our understanding of ethics.
I certainly don't think that the nature of right and wrong themselves could be explained in terms of divine commands. That is, divine command theory states that something is right simple because God commands it, or wrong simply because he forbids it - that is what it is to
be right or wrong at all. That seems to me to be indefensible, because it makes God irrational.
However, that doesn't mean that
our justification for behaving in a certain way mightn't be based on God's commands. By way of illustration, consider a parent who instructs his child not to do something dangerous. The child doesn't understand why it's dangerous and perhaps doesn't understand the concept of danger at all, at least not this kind of danger. Nevertheless, the child might be justified in obeying the parent. Note that here, I'm not suggesting that the parent's command is what makes the activity in question dangerous or prudent to avoid; rather, it's the parent's command that tells the child, who can't really understand the rationale, what is prudent. Similarly, it could easily be the case that there are certain acts that are right or wrong, but we simply don't have the ability to understand why, and that God commands or forbids them accordingly. In such a case, God's commands would give us moral justification to perform or avoid the acts in question, provided we had good reason to think that God does command what is right.
If God's rules can be justified without divine authority, as most of the ten commandments can be, then we should be following them without needing God's command. If there's no good justification for a rule, then why should divine authority make a difference?
Because, as I say, there could be good justification that isn't available to us.
To me, allowing that to happen leads to justifying what Abraham did. That Abraham was morally correct to ignore all logical & moral arguments about why murdering his son was bad, because divine command trumps them all. I find that morally repugnant.
Yes, so if that really happened, you might think that good reason to suppose that God does
not issue commands that are morally correct.
If Jesus was Christ incarnate, then sure, I agree that connecting with Christ will also mean/require connecting with Jesus. What I want to know is where humanity would be without Christ incarnating? Why is it that we wouldn't have a proper connection with Christ? If Jesus was necessary & sufficient to enable that connection, then where would we be without it happening?
Jesus isn't "Christ incarnate". He is the Son (i.e. the second person of the Trinity) incarnate. The incarnate Son is identical with Jesus, who is identical with Christ. (According to Christian orthodoxy, of course.) "Inhominate" would be a better word than "incarnate", really, since he's not just embodied but actually human, but we're stuck with the existing terminology.
I suppose the orthodox answer to your question is that the nature of divinity and the nature of humanity are such that there couldn't exist such an intimate relation between humans and God without divinity and humanity first being united to each other in a hypostatic union like that of the incarnation. As to why that is, I'm not sure how one could go about answering that. The church fathers typically assumed some kind of Platonic realism about universals, along the lines that "humanity" refers to a really existing universal which is changed when the Son acquires it; the consequence is that human nature is itself changed by this, including the human nature that's instantiated in all of us. But that depends on rather contentious metaphysics.
Yep, I've run across it before. To me, it seems like a copout. We can't figure it out, but God knows more than us, therefore God must have a good reason for it. That line of thought can resolve any apparent contradiction, any apparent ethical problem with God's actions, with why the world is the way it is. As you said a few pages ago, Christianity is supposed to be founded upon reason. We were created able to think for ourselves, able to be intellectually curious. Why should we suspend that curiosity & reason when we run into hard questions about why evil exists, why God seems arbitrary & capricious, etc?
It's not a matter of suspending our reason and intellectual curiosity, it's a matter of weighing different considerations and drawing conclusions. Suppose you have very good reason to think that God exists (it doesn't matter for our purposes what this is). The existence of evil poses a problem, but it does not seem to you that the evidence against God presented by suffering outweighs the evidence for God. Now you can reasonably conclude from that two things:
(1) God exists.
(2) God has some reason for allowing suffering.
Now you might then inquire into what that reason is. Why not? And plenty of theists have done so. But if you can't work out a satisfactory reason (and as far as I can tell, no theist has done so), there's nothing wrong with saying that you don't know what it is, but you still have good reason to think that there is one. That's not a refusal to exercise your powers of reason and inquiry, merely an admission that those powers have not proven sufficient to solve the problem, although they are sufficient to suggest that a solution exists.
You might draw an analogy with modern physics. There are very widely diverging interpretations of the implications of quantum physics - for example, whether the physical world is fully determined, whether there are other physical worlds, whether the existence of physical reality is observer-dependent, and so on. Scientists just can't agree on the answers to these pretty big questions. Of course they're doing their best to resolve them; but perhaps some of them are simply not resolvable, at least by the methods known to science. If a scientist therefore says, "There are answers to these questions (e.g. it is presumably the case that the world either is fully determined or isn't), but we just don't know what those answers are," that might not be very satisfying but it wouldn't represent an intellectual cop-out.
Of course, if someone merely says "God has his reasons" and doesn't make any attempt to ask what those might be, perhaps that would be a cop-out. But the mere claim that those reasons exist but we don't know them isn't, at least in itself.
If God wants us to think about stuff, use reason, surely he wants us to think about those things too? Maybe solving those apparently insoluble problems is the way for us to learn, grow, ascend towards God's level? Maybe saying we can't figure it out, we'll just trust it's part of the ineffable plan is exactly what God doesn't want us to be doing, because it's choosing not to use the thing that separates us humans created in God's image from the rest of his creation. Just a thought. I'm curious if any Christian groups have a similar viewpoint.
That sounds a little like the Origenist perspective that spiritual growth is a form of intellectual growth: you become spiritually developed purely through learning more about God and spiritual things. That in turn is dependent upon the view that the soul is just the mind - that is, the rational part of you is the part that's really
you, and the other parts don't matter so much. This general view ended up getting condemned, or at least very severely frowned upon, because it stresses the mind so much that it overlooks the rest of the human person (and was linked with the supposed Origenist denial of the resurrection of the body).
Of course, there would be nothing wrong with saying that such intellectual progression couldn't be
part of spiritual progression, at least in principle. But then you still run the danger of making spiritual progression dependent upon intellectual development. That would be elitist. Thomas Aquinas points out that not everyone has the ability, the inclination, or the sheer time to sit about pondering deep philosophical questions about God. Does that mean that spiritual advancement should be closed to them?
Well, I was thinking more along the lines that he wanted to help people in this life and teach them to become happier. He would have used the word "God" in order to be intelligible to religious people, or as a metaphor in the same way it's understandable for an atheist to say that we can find the kingdom of God by being nice to each other.
It of course wouldn't need to be exactly true that Jesus believed so to make this way of reading worthwhile: Whether you can learn a lesson doesn't depend on someone actually teaching it (Socrates & Plato for example), and on the other hand it could give new points of view for Christians too.
What you suggest is not unlike what nineteenth-century liberal theologians thought, people such as Ritschl or Harnack. They interpreted all the talk of the "kingdom of God" in terms of a nice earthly society. However, scholars today don't see that as a very plausible interpretation of Jesus. But as you say, that doesn't mean people can't choose to interpret it in such a way if they so desire.
That's not a question I can answer without a bit of context. What do you mean?
That seems like a fairly weak argument to me, but the response doesn't seem much better, as it seems to take "bringing into existence" far too narrowly. We are brought into existence by our parents, in a manner of speaking, but not in the same way that God brought humanity into existence. After all, what parents do is effectively rearrange matter so that it becomes a human. While this was necessary for your creation or mine, it's not necessary inherently (Even if we accept that there was no literal first creation of man out of non-life, I don't see any reason to believe that God could not do so, if we're to take the idea of God seriously) and it's certainly not sufficient, in and of itself, as it relies on the prior creation of the matter used by God. God's creation of man is, potentially at least, both necessary and sufficient, while man's creation of man can never be. God's creation seems to be of a quite different sort, so I'm not sure how far you can take this. So while I'm not sure that this is a terribly good reason to worship God, I don't think the response is terribly convincing either.
Might it not be the case that my parents were necessary for the existence of
me? Perhaps a person indistinguishable from me might have been brought into existence by some other means, but perhaps that person couldn't have been
me, since it's part of my essence that I should have had a certain origin.
I'm not sure I understand why it's hard to see that this is grounds for worship. If worship is something like "to render religious reverence and homage," then worshiping a maximally excellent being makes a good deal of sense. (I realize I'm opening another can of worms, but what do they mean when they say worship?)
What do you mean by "makes a good deal of sense"? That it's prudent to do so? But that's not the same thing as morally obligatory.
On the second version: I don't think either response is terribly convincing. You might be able to "get by" by eating cheetos and drinking diet pepsi all your life. (It's certainly possible to survive on potatoes and milk, although it's hardly healthy) In the same way, it might be possible to get by by worshiping a garden gnome or Dear Leader Kim, but it's hardly the best diet of worship possible, just as cheetos and pepsi is hardly the best nutritional diet possible. If we start with the idea that God is maximally excellent, as Christians typically do, then it makes sense that He would be a better choice for worship than any other being. So I think you can make a quite decent argument that even if this need can be satisfied by worshiping other things, it is better for us to worship a maximally excellent being, and since we have a moral obligation, in general, to better ourselves, it's generally morally obligatory to worship a maximally excellent being over less excellent beings, if we can.
Yes, it seems plausible that such an argument could be constructed.
And I'm not sure at all what you mean when you say that "if our worship is ultimately motivated by self-interest, it's not really a moral matter at all." Why would you think that actions motivated by self-interest cannot also be morally obligatory?
That's not the claim. The proposal is that worship is morally obligatory
because it is in our interest, not merely that it is morally obligatory
and in our interest. The counter-argument is that the fact that something is in our interest does not make it morally obligatory. It may, for example, be in my interest to transfer my current account to a bank that offers a better deal, but that does not morally oblige me to do so.
Well, I think this one works, but only by pushing the issue back. I think we can reasonably say that the Christian God genuinely wants the best for His children, and only commands that they perform moral actions. Therefore, if He tells us to worship Him, then I think there's a decent case to be made that it is morally obligatory to do so -- perhaps not because He told us to, but because there logically must be a reason, even if we're not quite sure what it is. But while I see how this makes sense, I also see how unsatisfying it is!
Yes, it's like what I said above about the reasons for suffering. One might be rationally justified in thinking that God has a reason for allowing suffering even without knowing what that reason is. Similarly, if God commands us to worship him, one might be rationally justified in thinking that worshipping him is indeed morally obligatory, without knowing why. But as you say, that's not very helpful if our question is
why worshipping God might be morally obligatory. Of course, one could make the claim stronger by saying that it is morally obligatory
simply because God commands it - that is what it is for something to be morally obligatory at all - but that suffers from the crippling weaknesses of any divine command theory.
I actually think that's a pretty good response! I think you can sort of fudge it a bit by saying, in effect, "Well, they were thankful for the salvation that was coming," but that seems rather weak, and it's unclear who exactly knew what about what. While I think this argument is true, I don't think it can stand on its own at all.
Yes, I agree. A basic ethical principle is that "ought implies can" - that is, if you're morally obliged to do something, it must be something you can actually do. You can't be blamed, morally speaking, if you fail to do something that you weren't even able to do. So it seems to follow that if worshipping God is morally obligatory because he has saved us, people who don't know that he has saved us - such as people who lived before Christ or who have never heard the Christian message - are not morally obliged to worship God, because they cannot do so, or at least, they cannot know that they are morally obliged to do so.
