If we cannot know God's ousia, isn't that because we were created to not be able to? God (ostensibly) understands His own ousia . Would angels?
Apophatic theologians normally suppose that God's essence is intrinsically unknowable - that is, we couldn't possibly have been created in such a way that we could understand it. That would apply to angels as well, though not to God, since his knowledge is different in kind from creaturely knowledge. Cataphatic theologians don't necessarily agree with this. Origen, for example, thought that we can't understand God, but this is a contingent fact associated with the limitations of bodily existence, not a necessary fact caused by the divine nature. When we are united with God after the end of the world we may understand him perfectly.
And here's a quote from the Holy Bible from Matthew 5:
I think God disagrees with Pelagius on what Sin is.
I don't understand what in this passage you think contradicts Pelagius. Pelagius thought that a true Christian life was one in which you refrain from sin and do good, showing love and charity to others, obeying the commands of Christ and following his example. That's perfectly biblical. Let me quote from
On the Christian life again:
Pelagius said:
He is a Christian who follows the way of Christ, who imitates Christ in all things, as it is written: He who says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked (1 John 2:6). He is a Christian who shows compassion to all, who is not at all provoked by wrong done to him, who does not allow the poor to be oppressed in his presence, who helps the wretched, who succours the needy, who mourns with the mourners, who feels another's pain as if it were his own, who is moved to tears by the tears of others, whose house is common to all, whose door is closed to no one, whose table no poor man does not know, whose food is offered to all, whose goodness all know and at whose hands no one experiences injury, who serves God day and night, who ponders and meditates upon his commandments unceasingly, who is made poor in the eyes of the world so that he may become rich before God, who is held to be without fame among men so that he may appear renowned before God and his angels, who is seen to have no feigning or pretence in his heart, whose soul is open and unspotted, whose conscience is faithful and pure, whose whole mind is on God, whose whole hope is in Christ, who desires heavenly things rather than earthly, who spurns human possessions so that he may be able to possess those that are divine. Listen then to what is said to those who love this world and take pride and pleasure in the present time: Do you not know that friendship with this world is enmity with God? And whoever wishes to be a friend of this world makes himself an enemy of God (James 4:4).
Now I don't see what's unbiblical about that. It seems to me a perfectly reasonable account of the kind of life that, according to the New Testament and the church fathers alike, Christians are called to lead. Pelagius did not have some weird view about what the moral life is, or what sin is. His views on these matters were, as far as I can tell, entirely in line with mainstream ancient Christianity. What was distinctive about Pelagius was that he insisted (a) that everyone has the ability, by their own effort, to attain this ideal, and (b) that everyone has an equal responsibility to do so, and those who fail to discharge that responsibility are not true Christians and will not be saved. It was for these views, not for his understanding of the nature of sin or of the moral life, that he was condemned. And, by the way, Pelagius himself accepted that condemnation meekly and went into exile, since he was by all accounts a humble and gracious man; some of his followers, though, notably Caelestius and Julian of Eclanum, were not.
If you will seriously claim you have never done any of these things, ever, you are probably lying, for thoughts cannot be controlled. Actions can, but thoughts cannot.
Once again, it was a tenet not only of Pelagianism but also of most ancient Christians that sin is a matter of the will. If you do something involuntarily, that can't be a sin. If thoughts can't be controlled, then having the thoughts cannot be sinful. Deliberately entertaining the thoughts, of course,
could be sinful. Ancient Christians would have said that when Jesus condemns lustful thoughts and the like, he is condemning the deliberate entertaining of them - not simply having them arise in the mind, which we cannot help. Just as MagisterCultuum says.
And as for it being an "Excuse" tell that to the people who have truly been broken over their sin, the people who have wept over their own sin.
Yes, as I said, Pelagianism is not very pastorally sensitive.
Lot allowed his daughters to be raped. And they were nearly raped because of him. If you seriously think Lot was perfect, you think a pretty immoral view of Christianity.
According to Genesis 19, Lot's daughters don't get raped at all.
They rape
him. I'd agree that offering one's daughters to be raped by a crowd is an immoral act, but the ancient world had different attitudes towards that. The real question facing someone who believes that all this stuff really happened is: why do the angels kill the inhabitants of Sodom for their wickedness, but spare Lot, despite his wickedness in offering his daughters to be raped?
Pelagius states that Lot was spared from the destruction of Sodom, because he had lived a righteous life. Why else, he asks, was he saved and everyone else killed? You may think that the description of Lot's behaviour does not support the view that he was righteous, but if so, that is a problem with the story itself, not with the lesson Pelagius draws from it.
And, of course, even if the example of Lot is not a good one, Pelagianism hardly stands or falls on it. What of the plethora of biblical verses that Pelagius cites, where Christians are exhorted to live moral lives? That is the core of the Pelagian argument, not the citing of dubious cases from the Old Testament.
Also, "Virtuous" doesn't mean perfect. Of the other three characters you listed, only Noah is listed as sinning at all (He got drunk) but I suppose its possible he didn't know that was a sin, and so it wasn't under the Pelagian definition, however, not everything about these characters are listed either.
I don't believe Noah is described as sinning at all - the drunkenness is not presented as sinful in the story. It's the son who looks at Noah when he's naked (what a thought, given that he was apparently 600 years old at the time) who is condemned in the story, not Noah himself at all.
Otherwise, what you say doesn't count against Pelagianism at all.
David, a "Man after God's own heart" committed premeditated adultery and murder. Would Pelagius argue he is in Hell/Hades and headed for Hell right now?
I don't know what Pelagius' view on Old Testament characters was. He thought that those who sin
after baptism are condemned, but of course that doesn't apply to Old Testament figures. The letter
To Celantia, which is Pelagian and may be by Pelagius, mentions David's sin in passing:
possibly Pelagius said:
For what kind of confession is it that combines belief in God with disregard of his commandments? Do we say "Lord, Lord," either sincerely or truly, if we despise the commands of him whom we confess as God?... to David, who had committed a crime, it is said more explicitly: And you have despised God (2 Sam 12:9); and to Eli the Lord's utterance is: He that honours me I will honour, but those who despise me shall be brought to nothing (1 Sam 2:30).
That suggests that Pelagius, or at least the author of that letter, would say, yes, David is indeed condemned.
This basically and more or less makes Christianity a system of Dos and Don'ts, rather than what Christianity is clearly really about.
Tell me, is it worse to do a bad action, or to refuse to help those in need?
I don't know why you say this. As I have stated, Pelagius thought that a Christian life is one in which one refrains from doing what is bad, and does what is good. He says repeatedly that a Christian helps those who are in need, and that failure to do this is failure to obey Jesus.
I don't think the Pharisees would have had any real problem with Pelagius.
That's as offensive as it is ill-informed. The Pharisees would have utterly rejected Pelagianism. Pelagianism made salvation dependent upon one's own good works - that is why it was condemned. But the Pharisees believed that salvation comes from God's grace, and one seeks to keep the Law as a grateful response to that grace. Contrary to the caricature of Pharisaism which many Christians still believe, they did not insist on a vast system of "dos" and "don'ts". They merely sought to follow the Law, as Jews were commanded to do, and they evolved a system of explanations of the Law to help them do it. They did not expect other people to follow that system and they did not think that salvation depended upon it.
The negative portrait of the Pharisees found in the Gospels, particularly Matthew's Gospel, reflects the tensions between Christians and Jews at the time it was written. It doesn't reflect the real situation in Jesus' own day. In fact Jesus' teachings, as represented in the Gospels, are very close to those of many Pharisees. Statements such as the Law can be summed up in the commandments to love God and one's neighbour, or that one should do to one's neighbour as one would have them do to you, are directly parallelled in the rabbinical literature. Jesus' defence of the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, in dispute with the Sadducees, also places him in agreement with the Pharisees.
However, it says "Deliberately keep on sinning", it doesn't say or mean any sin whatsoever.
I don't really see your point. Once again, to ancient Christians, and to most Christians since, all sin is deliberate; if it's not deliberate, it's not sin.
You seemed to have said that Pelagius, according to the Bible, was correct. And now you say he was not. I am confused.
I didn't say either of these things. I merely explained what Pelagius' views were, or some of them, and I said I thought his arguments were impressive. That doesn't mean I think he was correct or that I think the Bible says he was correct (how could it?). And then I said that his views were unrealistic. That doesn't mean I think he was not correct. I don't think any of this stuff is
true!
I am confused. Is a white lie not a sin now?
I think the ninth commandment is clear that it still is.
It's not clear in the slightest, as MagisterCultuum again says concisely. The commandment in question merely condemns giving "false testimony". What does that mean? One might say it means "false" as in "a false proposition", in which case it condemns saying anything that is not factually true. Or one might say it means "false" as in "a false friend", in which case it condemns saying anything that will harm your neighbour. On that view, telling a white lie - i.e. making a statement that is factually untrue in order to benefit someone or keep them from harm - would actually be
commanded by this commandment, not condemned!
Now I'm not saying that that's what it means. I'm just saying that it's not clear what it means. And the reason is obvious: the author of that text, and indeed the authors of all the Bible, never considered this issue. Nowhere in the Bible will you find any discussion of "white lies", because the subject didn't occur to any of the biblical authors. That means that you can't be sure what they would have said about it. You simply cannot interpret the Bible - or any other text - as saying something about a topic that it doesn't address. The best you can do is guess what the author might have said on the basis of what he says about other things.
Also, I'm not really a Calvinist either, though I am convinced of one of his points, which clearly proves Pelagian wrong:
9What then? Are we Jewsa any better off?b No, not at all. For we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under sin, 10as it is written:
It is clear from the Scriptures that Man is totally depraived and unable on his own to come to Salvation.
It's not "clear" at all. If the Bible
clearly taught the doctrine of total depravity, how come no-one believed that doctrine until Calvin came along? Do you think that no-one read the Bible before Calvin? This is absurd nonsense. You might argue that if the Bible is properly understood, it supports the doctrine of total depravity. I think that would not be correct, but it could be a reasonable argument. But to assert that the Bible "clearly" teaches it - what nonsense! Fifteen hundred years of Christian biblical scholarship says otherwise.
All that the text you quote says is that everyone has sinned. It doesn't say that
everything we ever do is sinful, which is what the doctrine of total depravity says. And Pelagius would entirely agree that everyone has sinned. He simply held that
after baptism it is incumbent on us to
stop sinning. The passage you quote says nothing about the possibility or impossibility of that.
Also, Pelagius theology is killed here as well:
So according to Christ, all but one sin can be forgiven. According to Pelagius, no Sins after Baptism can be forgiven. They can't both be right.
I don't know of a Pelagian text addressing that, but it's easy to guess at a Pelagian answer. They'd probably say that the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit to which the passage refers
is sin after baptism. After all, at baptism, a person receives the Holy Spirit. To sin after that time is to blaspheme against the Holy Spirit who is now in you. Therefore, this passage teaches that other sins can be forgiven - i.e. sins before baptism - but sins after baptism cannot be forgiven. That is why, after baptism, it is incumbent upon people not to sin.
I don't know if any Pelagian argued like that but it seems an obvious way of arguing to me. In fact ancient Christians commonly believed that sins after baptism were unforgiveable, or at least very hard to forgive. There were a number of controversies about how strictly the church should deal with members who had sinned - should they be cast out of the church, or should they be forgiven and given another chance? St Cyprian, for example, had considerable difficulty trying to find a middle path between the highly rigorist views of people in his own congregation who thought sinners should be chucked out altogether, and the laxer views of Stephen of Rome who thought they should be readmitted. Many Christians deliberately delayed baptism until they thought they were near death, because they took post-baptismal sin so seriously. That is why the emperor Constantine was baptised on his deathbed. So in this respect, Pelagius was not innovating. He was merely expressing what was, at that time, a rather old-fashioned, rigorist Christian view about morality and baptism. When Pelagius lived, the Roman empire had become officially Christian and many people were converting to Christianity because it was fashionable. These people did not lead the strict and holy lifestyles that previous generations of Christians had expected of all church members. Not only that, but many were appealing to new theological ideas such as those of St Augustine, about how human beings cannot help sinning, to excuse their lax lifestyles. Pelagius was attacking these theological ideas and trying to recall people to the standards of a sterner time.
Wait, Christ never wrote a single sentence in the Bible, so can you claim "according to Christ", or should you claim, "according to <author>"?
It's According to John Mark, who is recording Peter's discourses. (Source Wiki) So you have a double "he said' there, and it should be "according to John Mark recording Peter's account of Jesus' teachings". It's third hand information, so lets be careful labeling it "according to Jesus"
Cue Plotinus or El Mac to correct the heck out of me. Well, that's what I deserve for using Wiki.
Yes, sorry, Wiki is wrong. There's no reason to suppose that John Mark really wrote the Second Gospel or that Peter had anything to do with it. It's bound to be more removed from Jesus than just "third hand" - the material in it went through a long process of oral transmission before it was written down.
You can twist Christ into saying anything by saying "You got the quote wrong." But really, that is crap. Out of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, three of them were killed on the basis of their testimony, and one was boiled in oil. If they knew what they recorded was wrong, they wouldn't have died for it.
If you're talking about the historical figures Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, no-one knows what happened to them. The stories you refer to are late legends and I'm rather surprised to hear anyone taking them seriously today. John boiled in oil? What reliable historical source do you have for
that?
If you're talking about the authors of the Gospels which are traditionally attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, those attributions are at best very weak. We don't know who wrote those Gospels and we certainly don't know how they died. The Gospels are anonymous, nowhere in the Bible are we told who wrote them, and the traditional attributions are first known from a century after the time they were written.
I don't buy that argument sorry...
The people who wrote them still heard Christ's words and DIED for them. It is clear they knew what Christ taught.
I'm sorry, but this is pure conjecture. To be able to say this, you'd have to be able to say, with very good historical backing, who wrote the Gospels. You don't know who wrote them. No-one does. You can't possibly say that their authors heard Christ's words, and you can't possibly say that they died for their beliefs, because we don't know either of these things. In fact the evidence
very strongly suggests that the Gospels were written by people who had not known Jesus in his lifetime, because there is very strong evidence that much of the material in the Gospels was compiled from existing sources, either oral or written. Someone who had actually known Jesus wouldn't have needed to do that, because he would have recorded his own memories instead of relying on other people's. (That, incidentally, is how we can be near-certain that Matthew's Gospel was not written by Matthew, because that Gospel is undoubtedly based in large part upon Mark's Gospel, and why would someone who was there at the time copy most of his memoirs from the work of someone who was not?)
Did the Muslims claim to see a man rise from the dead? And did the very people who claimed this die for that belief?
You wildly missed the point here, Domination3000, to an embarrassing degree.
You were claiming that we can be certain that what the Gospel authors wrote is true, because they were willing to die for this belief. Leaving aside the fact that this claim is pure assertion with no evidence, the others were pointing out that people have been willing to die for all sorts of beliefs, yet you presumably don't think that those beliefs are true.
What those beliefs are is irrelevant. Let's agree that Muslims don't claim to have seen a man rise from the dead. Nevertheless, they believe some things that you presumably think are not true, and they are willing to die for those beliefs. That shows that someone can be willing to die for a belief and yet for that belief to be false. In fact throughout history people have been prepared to die for all manner of beliefs - religious and otherwise - but that doesn't mean that those beliefs were true. It merely means that they held them very, very sincerely. But sincerity is not proof of truth.
In the case of the early Christians, it's certainly true that many of them were prepared to die for their beliefs (and also that many of them were not!). Whether that applies to the authors of the Gospels or not, we don't know. But in either case, it proves only that they sincerely believed these beliefs. It doesn't remotely prove that those beliefs are true. Perhaps they were very sincere in their beliefs, but they were mistaken. (That seems to me to be most probable.)
@Ziggy- Every disciple except John was killed. And John only lived since God saved him from the boiling oil, so according to you he would have been killed too.
Again, these are legends with no historical basis. If we were to believe all of the legends about the apostles, we'd have to believe that all the apostles split into several different people and went to all kinds of different places and died several times over. Plenty of later churches wanted to claim apostolic foundation. Do you also think that Jesus wrote a letter to the king of Osrhoene and sent him a handkerchief with his own face miraculously imprinted on it? And do you think that Jesus visited England and appointed Joseph of Aramathea the first English bishop? Because these are later legends as well, with equal historical worth.
You will be before the judgment seat, judged based on whether or not you had faith in Jesus Christ and whether you have accepted his blood sacrifice for your sins. Those who have not will be ushered into damnation as they deserve, while those who have will be spared the damnation they deserve.
This thread is not the place for proselytising. And as a friendly bit of advice: every time you say stuff like this you put people off Christianity. Many of your comments in this thread and elsewhere misrepresent Christianity and put people off it unjustly. That does not do the Christian faith a service.
No, not assumptions - the truth, or very probably the truth, as proved by exhaustive examination of the
evidence. That is one of the things that distinguishes scholarship from fundamentalist dogma. As long as you dismiss what has been proven from the evidence as mere "assumptions" - whether it be the findings of biblical scholarship or the findings of natural scientists - your beliefs have no credibility. They represent a refusal to accept what has been shown to be true, and are not a valid or worthwhile alternative.
Honestly: I can understand (though I cannot agree with) fundamentalists who insist that what they read in the Bible is true, despite whatever evidence there may be against it. The extraordinary thing about this issue is that you're insisting that
stuff that isn't in the Bible is true, despite the great evidence against it. The Bible never says that the Gospels were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. These people were not identified as the authors of the Gospels until a century after they were written. Why on earth would a fundamentalist who claims to get all his beliefs from the Bible be so concerned to defend these non-biblical claims? Doesn't this kind of thing just show that fundamentalism is utterly self-contradictory?
And besides, as long as what Mark said was true, who cares? And Matthew (I don't remember about Luke) was there as well and so would have known if Mark said something wrong.
Now these are the true assumptions. You can't possibly give any good evidence for these claims. The fact that you're not sure about whether Luke knew Jesus doesn't bode well for your case. Luke was, of course, a companion of Paul, and never met Jesus. And there's no good reason to think that Luke wrote the Gospel which bears his name, of course.
You do not understand Christianity do you?
I hate to say it, but someone who keeps on misquoting or misciting the Bible and presenting modern innovations as traditional Christian dogma doesn't do a very good job of understanding it either! But that said, I think you are at least trying, as evinced by your questions here. But you've got to show more humility. Please realise that you
don't know very much about Christianity; you mainly know just the version of Christianity that you've been raised in, which is a marginal, minority, and modern version. There is far, far more to Christianity than that. I don't know most of it and I've spent the past fifteen years studying it. As with most enormous subjects, the more one learns, the more one realises one doesn't know. The fact that you seem to think you know it all just shows how little of it you've really learned.
Anyway, to try and get this back on some sort of track: would Plotinus, whose left pinky understands this topic better than the rest of us put together, have any opinion on the value of the gospels as historical records?
I think that the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) contain a lot of material that goes back to Jesus and are by far our best sources for the historical Jesus. This is the view of most scholars. However, extricating this material is very difficult, because it has been through such a long process of transmission and change, and the authors have very clear agendas. I would say that we can have a pretty good idea of what the historical Jesus was like by examining this material, although we may never be able to be certain that any given action or saying attributed to him is historical. Also, even though we may have reasonable certainty regarding much of what he said and did, interpreting it is another matter.
I think that John's Gospel is largely unhistorical, but there may still be stuff in there that is of historical value; it's better than any material outside the New Testament.
Other than the canonical Gospels, Paul's letters also contain some useful information regarding Jesus' teaching, although it's only when taken in conjunction with the Gospels that we can see that. The various Gospels from outside the New Testament are worthless as sources for the historical Jesus, with the possible exception of the Gospel of Thomas; but even that is deeply inferior to the Synoptics.
I am intrigued by your analogy but on further thought, I think it can be applied to broadly to be of much value. I think every description of a thing is ultimately a description of its behavior and its interaction with its environment. I can describe a human by his actions, looks, smell, voice, etc. but that does not tell me what this human actually is, does it? And even for inanimate objects like the chair I am sitting one it is hard to tell, what they actually are. I can describe their interaction with everything else and I can classify them into a possibly infinite amount of categories, but what are they actually?
So I think the inability to define an essence for something is not a trait unique to either quantum mechanics or God. So I am not sure there is much to learn from this analogy.
Yes, I wondered if you might make that reply. You're probably right!
Ok, well it's an open question to Plotinius as well.
How about you? What are your thoughts on Mary?
I don't have any, really. We don't really know anything about Jesus' mother.
The first look is not a sin as you cannot control that, but the second look, or even to allow the thought to take root in your mind IS lust. I still think its unlikely very many people have never done this, and those that have no doubt because they were born lucky (Some people are asexual after all.)
So in other words you agree, after all, that a thought
over which you have no control isn't sinful?
As I said, Pelagius says that if you have control over an action or thought, then you have the ability to refrain from it. I'm sure he'd agree that there aren't many people who actually have always refrained from "the second look". But he would say that Christians are called to be better than most people.
Wait, so are some lies acceptable then? I am confused????
Why the confusion? The point is that the commandment in question does not give clear guidance on the issue of "white lies". That's only confusing if you expect the Bible to give clear guidance on everything. The fact is that it doesn't. That's something you've just got to deal with.
but rather moicheuo (μοιχεύω
