I have some questions.
1) Why, in Christianity, did God use the particular mechanism of Jesus to save humanity, as opposed to another mechanism or no such mechanism at all? Why not just save people by divine decree, without this rather peculiar method of coming down to earth and living a model life and being crucified? Why does it matter for our salvation that Jesus died, given that God was presumably good and therefore going to save some of us at least at his discretion anyway, regardless of whether the Jews chose to have Jesus crucified (which, surely, they might not have done if you take the position that free will exists)?
I think I answered this in my previous post.
2) Are people from before Christ's time supposedly all damned? How does this vary from sect to sect?
No; it is certainly an orthodox Christian belief that the Jewish prophets, for example, are not damned. And it is an article of faith that Adam is (or will be) saved. Tatian the Syrian was regarded as a heretic for denying this.
Of course, different people will have different views regarding
who and
how many from before Christ's time would be saved, but I would guess that these views would reflect their views on who is saved in general (from whatever time).
3) What is the theological basis of the Catholic principle up to recent times of using Latin in Church services? I mean, I know it's partly a matter of convenience and consistency and the use of a lingua franca, but given that they seemed to care about it so much and treated groups like the Utraquists who went against it as heretics, surely it must have a theological justification as well as a temporal one?
I don't really know about that, but as far as I know, there wasn't any particular theological justification.
Hi Plotinus,
I've got a question for you. I've been reading (a Dutch translation of) the Quran and one of the things I found remarkable is that Muhammed is constantly urging the people not to listen to false prophets but to listen to him. How are the people supposed to know that he is the true prophet, instead of all the others (I figure they'd be saying the thing)? This question holds for others prophets/faiths as well of course.
Also, I don't know if you're an expert on the Quran, but what do you think are the main differences between the Quran and the Bible?
I'm afraid I know virtually nothing about the Quran or the Muslim doctrine of prophets, so I can't answer that.
Fair enough. Though I can still see some objections to that. First, the story I know doesn't involve humans offering the sacrifice to God in order to be closer to him. What makes Jesus' martyrdom enable uniting with God, that doesn't apply to other martyrs who are 'sacrificed' in a similar way, such as Peter? If the difference is Jesus' divine origin, then how does that work? Who is actually offering the sacrifice? Second, I find the idea of a god that can't be united with without a sacrifice to be objectionable too.
Those are all reasonable points if you take "sacrifice" language literally, but the point I was trying to make is that you're not supposed to. To call Christ's death a "sacrifice" is merely to say that it is something that unites human beings to God, just as traditional sacrifices were supposed to. It's not saying that Christ's death literally
is a sacrifice, let alone that it functions in the same way as traditional sacrifices. So to ask who is offering the sacrifice, and to whom, seems to me to be asking the wrong question.
Similarly, Christ's death is sometimes called a "ransom" in the New Testament - a very different sort of language. In late antiquity and the early Middle Ages a lot of Christians took this literally and supposed that Christ's death must be literally a payment that is made to somebody. They asked who it is who is making the payment, and to whom it is made, and the generally agreed answer was that it is God making the payment, and he makes it to the devil. The idea was that, because of our sin, the devil has acquired rights over us - we have literally become his property. God therefore has to buy us back, and to do this he makes the ransom payment of Christ's death. But this whole theory fell into disrepute later on (most especially after the publication of Anselm's very different theory, which I outlined in my previous post), and people came to realise that the "ransom" language is not supposed to be taken literally, or it leads you to absurdities. I'd say the same is true of the "sacrifice" language.
Possibly this is my own bias based on not believing in any sort of afterlife, eternal soul, etc. But I'd say other martyrs suffered to the point of death for something they believed in, and they hoped their beliefs were correct about what happened afterwards. Whereas Jesus suffered to the point of temporary death for something he knew.
You're making some big assumptions about what Jesus knew. There's no compelling reason, from a Christian viewpoint, to suppose that Jesus had any special knowledge about things like life after death, the resurrection, or anything of that nature.
Yeah, that makes more sense. But it seems to be just one part of how prayer is used today. The idea of praying for other people seems to be pretty widespread, and contradict that view of what prayer's for.
Yes, that's true.
Which to me, is another major objection. If a god didn't demand worship, I'd find that god much more worthy of respect.
Not necessarily. Surely God should command people to do what's right. If it is actually right that people should worship God, then there's nothing wrong with God commanding that; to do otherwise would be false modesty. So the question isn't really about God's arrogance or humility - it's about whether it actually is, or would be, morally incumbent upon us to worship God.
Is Jesus a necessary element of salvation coming through Christ though? It seems like it is, but it seems like there's not much consensus on why it is, on why salvation wouldn't be possible without Jesus' time on Earth. It seems like for a lot of groups, the answer is 'we don't know, it just is'.
Well - Jesus
is Christ, so you can't have Christ without Jesus, at least not without some very heretical doctrines. But yes, the basic answer is "we don't know, it just is" - although obviously different Christians will nevertheless try to give a more comprehensive answer than just that.
I should have said seemingly arbitrary & capricious. Which applies to those alternative explanations as much as it applies to the idea that God actively listens to prayers and chooses which ones to respond to. Your examples of how it might not be arbitrary also applies equally well to those alternative explanations for prayer and to the idea that God actively listens.
Well, it's not a theological problem if God's actions
seem arbitrary or capricious but in fact aren't, is it? It's only awkward from our point of view. I take it that it's orthodox to hold that at least some of God's actions appear to be arbitrary or capricious but in fact aren't, given that it's orthodox to suppose that we do not, and in fact cannot, understand God's motives for everything he does. That's a basic assumption in any response to the problem of evil, for example.
How about the trans-dimensionality of Heaven? We currently think of Heaven as being within 'another' dimension, and apparently have little trouble thinking of it this way. Heaven isn't 'up'. Hell isn't 'down'.
When did this transition take place, or did it even take place? Was there a time when the people actually thought that Heaven was in the sky (or higher)? The question about the Qur'an is what made me ask about the history of this. The Qur'an is perfect, as you know, and it consistently thinks of things coming 'down' from Heaven. Rain comes down from Heaven. Angels come down from Heaven. etc.
And even the Mormons might think of God as 'out there' in 4D space.
What do you think Jesus, Paul, and other church leaders thought?
I don't think that Jesus or Paul had much of a concept of heaven, except in the most basic sense of "wherever God is". They didn't have a concept of heaven in the sense of somewhere that the soul goes to after death, for example.
I'm not sure what you mean by the idea of heaven being "another dimension". Is that what people think? What does "another dimension" mean anyway? Does it mean something like another space, like ours, only not spatially related to it - like Narnia? I don't think that's the usual view of heaven, since as far as I can tell, the usual view is that it isn't spatial at all.
On the Narnia view, if anyone has ever held this, I don't think people did in antiquity. I don't think that the concept of another space which is not spatially related to ours would have made any sense to people in antiquity. When ancient people thought of God in physical or spatial terms - as at least some Christians, notably Tertullian, did - they thought of him as existing in
our space. Thus, according to the Stoics, God is diffused throughout the universe (or is actually identical with the universe, depending on your point of view). The idea of a spatial God who isn't anywhere we could, in principle, travel to would have made no sense.
In Christianity, the idea of God as physical persisted for quite a while, and gave rise to the Anthropomorphite controversy in Egypt at the end of the fourth century. But we don't know much about the people who were attacked as "Anthropomorphites" or what they really thought about God, let alone where they thought he was.
The idea of God as non-physical, and non-spatial, became dominant from at least the third century onwards, I think (partly thanks to the influence of Origen). If you think that God is incorporeal, and you think of heaven as simply being wherever God is, then you will think of heaven as non-spatial. So there isn't anywhere that it is. I think that this is how people came to think of heaven, and why.
Also, under the influence of Greek philosophy, Christians developed the idea that your soul survives your death and goes somewhere to wait for the resurrection of the body. Where it goes is a sort of foretaste of its final destination. Virtuous souls therefore go to be with God. That is the origin of the later concept of "heaven" as a place that you "go to" when you die. Similarly, vicious souls get a foretaste of damnation, and that's the origin of the later concepts of both hell and purgatory.
EDIT: Just saw the note. I'm sorry I keep hijacking your thread Plotinus! To bring it back to the real topic: Plotinus, what's the general view on why worship of God is morally obligatory, in Christianity?
Simply put, there isn't one, as far as I know. It's generally just taken that a being with God's attributes
would, necessarily, be worthy of worship, but there has been very little examination of this claim or indeed of what it means to be worthy of worship.
Tim Bayne and Yujin Nagasawa published an article entitled "The grounds of worship" in the journal
Religious studies in 2006 considering this issue. They identified a number of possible answers to the question why it might be reasonable (or obligatory) to worship God:
(1) God created us, and so we have an obligation to thank him for this, which is manifested as worship.
Bayne and Nagasawa quote Richard Swinburne as a representative of this view. But they aren't convinced by it. First, it would imply that any being not created by God wouldn't have any obligation to worship him. Of course, theists think that all beings (other than God) are created by God, so there aren't any beings not created by him - but still, it seems an odd conclusion. Second, and more importantly, it's not clear that if A creates B, B has any obligations to A in virtue of this. Bestowing existence on something is not clearly a way of benefiting it. (Some might feel quite the reverse.) After all, if we really thought that bringing someone into being is a good thing, we'd feel morally obligated to have as many children as physically possible. And third, if being created by God obliges us to worship him, wouldn't this also mean we're obliged to worship our parents and others upon whom we depend?
(2) God is maximally excellent, and worship is the appropriate response to such an excellent being.
Bayne and Nagasawa object that, while a maximally excellent being might be worthy of admiration, it's hard to see how that is grounds for worship. They suggest that the theist might hold that one of God's perfections is
holiness, and that a holy being is intrinsically worthy of worship. But it's not clear what holiness is supposed to be anyway, which means it's not very useful in explaining anything else.
(3) It is prudential to worship God.
There are two versions of this. First is the idea that if we don't worship God, he'll punish us. That's not very convincing as a reason for why it's
right (as opposed to sensible) to worship him. The second version is better: we are created in such a way as to need to worship God, in the same was as we need to eat and drink. Our obligation to worship God is thus similar to our obligation to eat and drink: it's necessary to flourish as human beings. But Bayne and Nagasawa object that even if this is so, it doesn't show that we have an obligation to worship
God, only that we benefit from worshipping
something. Moreover, if our worship is ultimately motivated by self-interest, it's not really a moral matter at all.
(4) We just should worship God - this is a brute fact, not based on any property of God's or anything.
Bayne and Nagasawa point out that if this is the case, it would be impossible to tell whether or not one should worship God. Plus, of course, it doesn't really answer the question at all.
The following year, Benjamin Crowe published an article entitled "Reasons for worship: a response to Bayne and Nagasawa" in the same journal. He argued that there are two other possible justifications for there being an obligation to worship God, which Bayne and Nagasawa overlooked:
(5) If God commands us to worship him, we should worship him.
In other words, this suggestion appeals to divine command theory, holding that if God commands something, that in itself makes it right.
(6) God has redeemed us, and that is justification for our worship of him.
This is similar to (1), except that we're worshipping God in gratitude for salvation rather than for creation. This avoids the objections that Bayne and Nagasawa made to (1). Crowe appeals to Lancelot Andrewes (a major early Anglican theologian) in support of this view.
Bayne and Nagasawa published a response to this, which appeared right after Crowe's article. They argued that (5) doesn't really work, because divine command theories don't really explain why certain actions are right or wrong in the first place; we're still left asking
why God would command that we worship him. And they're not convinced by (6), because it leaves unanswered the question why anyone should have worshipped God
before he saved us. After all, isn't God supposed to be saving us from sin, and isn't sin supposed to be, in part, a failure to worship God as one ought? In which case, the concept of worship is prior to that of salvation, not vice versa.
So as far as I can tell, the question why worshipping God might be morally obligatory is still wide open.
Isn't that what the Lord's Prayer asks of us - forgive us our trespasses Lord as we forgive those who trespass against us. Almost sounds like a requirement... If we refuse to forgive trespassers, why should God forgive ours.
No, I don't think it's meant to be conditional. Both Jewish and Christian understandings of God's forgiveness have traditionally held it to be unconditional. In Christianity, at least, the idea that God will forgive you if and only if you forgive others would be bordering, at best, on Pelagianism.
And I'd add a somewhat in-depth analysis of Dante and other concepts of a layered Heaven, if you might Plot.
I'd really rather not!
Is the Secret Gospel of Mark, from the Mar Saba letter, currently believed to be authentic?
That depends on what you mean by "authentic". The letter in question, which quotes a couple of passages from the Gospel, is thought to be an authentic letter of Clement of Alexandria, so the Secret Gospel of Mark did exist at the beginning of the third century. But what relation it bore to the canonical Gospel of Mark is uncertain.
I've been wondering for quite some time, just what is a heresy? I can think of plenty of examples (say, Gnostics or Arians), but I'm not sure what makes them heretical, when other doctrinal disputes don't lead to the same sort of condemnations.
Is it A) just a matter of degrees of importance in the doctrines being discussed? B) Dependent on who the theologians involved in the discussion are, with some more ready to drop the Heresy Hammer? C) Is there some criteria that might be used to say that Gnostics are heretics but (say) Young Earthers (or theistic evolutionists) are in the fold, even if their beliefs are bizarre and wrong on many levels?
I think that something is technically a heresy if it's been condemned by a sufficiently authoritative body. What counts as a sufficiently authoritative body will obviously depend on who you are. From a Catholic point of view, if a doctrine has been condemned by a Pope or by an ecumenical council, that would make it formally heretical. There are of course lesser councils, but how authoritative they are is not quite so clear. So in the case of Young Earth Creationists, I don't think they have been condemned in such a way, so it's hard to make a case that they are formally heretics. However, one might make a case that their views entail certain other views that
are formally heretical.
