I sort of had this question in my other post, but what did Augustine believe about Total Depravity? I mean, I know the TERM was invented by Calvin, but it does seem based on your posts that he believed in something like it.
This is a difficult and controversial question, since Augustine's views on this matter were complex and evolving. As I understand it, Augustine believed that all human beings (other than Jesus) are sinful, in two senses. First, they suffer from concupiscence, which is a tendency to sin, which cannot be resisted (whether that means it's literally impossible to resist it, or whether it's just very difficult and in fact no-one does resist it, I'm not sure). That means that everyone commits sins. Second, human beings inherit guilt from Adam's sin, which means that even babies are born sinful - in the sense of being culpable, rather than in the sense of having actually committed sin. These two factors - concupiscence and inherited guilt - compose original sin as Augustine understood it.
Total depravity is a much more radical doctrine, since it is the claim that human beings are utterly incapable of doing anything good, and that consequently
every human action is sinful. Augustine never said these things, and the Catholic Church rejects the doctrine of total depravity as a denial of free will.
I don't know whether Calvin himself coined the term "total depravity".
Another unrelated question as well: Have any theologians ever claimed to be "Three Point" Calvinists? (Accepting all points except L and U in TULIP.) Because I heard someone claim that this was their view, and to me it seems basically a contradiction to accept Irresistable Grace but not Unconditional Election.
So: Have any theologians believed this? And is doing so a contradiction?
I don't know if any theologians have believed this, because I don't really know much about the history of Calvinism (I must admit I find pretty much everything about the Reformed tradition, from its history to its theology, deathly dull and unsympathetic). As I understand it, Arminians - including Wesleyans, if we count them as Arminian - hold the doctrine of Total Depravity but reject the other four, at least to some degree, but I don't know if anyone has rejected just the two you mention and held the others.
It doesn't seem a contradiction to me, at least not in the way you suggest. Unconditional Election means that when God graciously saves someone, it is not on the basis of any kind of action or merit on their part. Irresistible Grace means that when God graciously saves someone, that person is
definitely saved and nothing they can do will un-save them.
So it is surely conceivable that God could choose to save people on the basis of how good they have been in the past (if so, the doctrine of Unconditional Election would be false), but once he has made that decision, nothing they subsequently do could reverse or counteract God's decision (if so, the doctrine of Irresistible Grace would be true).
However, it seems to me that to believe in Total Depravity but to reject Unconditional Election is, if not a contradiction, at least rather implausible; this would involve saying that although all actions are sinful, God neverthless saves some people on the basis of their actions, but not others. Of course, the doctrine of Total Depravity does not involve saying that all human actions are equally bad (that would be the highly implausible doctrine of Utter Depravity), so it could be that God could rank people on the basis of their actions even though all those actions are sinful; but then it seems to me that the notion of "sin" as something distinct from "morally wrong" becomes very weak. I can understand the notion of "sin" as something distinct from "morally wrong" if, say, "sin" means an act that God disapproves of; but to reject the doctrine of Unconditional Election is to say that God
does approve of some acts; which would seem to mean that not all acts are sinful after all, at least not in that sense. In which case, in what other sense
could they be sinful? If to perform a sinful act doesn't mean to do something morally wrong, and it doesn't mean to do something that God disapproves of, what
does it mean?
For that reason, it does seem to me that the five points of orthodox Calvinism hang together quite well. To hold some but not others isn't impossible but it would require a bit of fancy footwork to explain how the system is consistent.
What are your thoughts on the
SATOR square situation going on regarding early Christianity? Recently watched an episode of "The Naked Archaeologist" on the History Channel, and the host was positing that Christianity was much more accepted and practiced among Romans and Roman soldiers very early on, when apparently the accepted view is that Rome was very hostile towards this Jewish sect.
On the SATOR square, I'm not sure what scholarly opinion really is; as far as I can tell, the idea that it's a Christian thing is just speculation. We don't have any real evidence that it was Christian at all, let alone exclusively Christian - although we don't have any real evidence that it wasn't, either.
On Christianity and Roman society, the situation was certainly quite variable. It depends rather on what you mean by "very early on". In the first and early second century, we know very little about Christianity's place in society; we know that there were persecutions under Nero and, later, Trajan; and there may have been under Domitian, but we really don't know, and we don't know what the persecutions that did happen really involved or what the views of general society were. For much of the second century, persecutions remained sporadic and there is good reason to suppose that, while Christianity was illegal, many governors were tolerant of it. That situation seems to have deteriorated towards the end of the second century. The first half of the third century was again rather calm, but the middle of the century saw empire-wide persecutions under Decius and Valerian. But at all of these times, it would have made a great deal of difference where one was, and which local governor one was dealing with.
I don't know what evidence there is that Christianity was widely practised among Roman soldiers. There certainly
were Christian soldiers in the Roman army. Tertullian's
On the crown is about
an incident where a Christian soldier refused to wear a triumphal wreath, on the basis that it was a pagan symbol. But it seems to me unlikely that there were many. The
Apostolic tradition attributed to Hippolytus of Rome permits soldiers to become Christians, but they cannot be involved in executions and they cannot take a military oath (presumably because this would conflict with their oath to Christ). That doesn't seem to me very hopeful for the notion that Christianity was widespread among the military or that the military looked kindly upon it. I don't know many soldiers but I think they take a dim view of people who disobey orders.
Tertullian insists that no Christian can be a soldier, but obviously Tertullian held much more stringent standards than most Christians of the day, so clearly not all Christians agreed with this view (or he wouldn't have felt the need to insist upon it). Nevertheless, it does seem to me that a generally anti-military feeling was pervasive in early Christianity, to varying degrees, which makes the claim that it was widespread in the army implausible.
I'm also curious on your views of that television show, and its host
Simcha Jacobovici. He seems to portray himself in the series as going against conventional views. I enjoyed very much his special concerning the Exodus and the Ark. He claims to have built a strong case authenticating the Jewish exodus from Egypt in objection to other more 'mainstream' theories that it is merely a myth.
I haven't seen any of his films or that TV programme, so I can't really comment on them.
I recall hearing a description of Judaism as a very ethnocentric and geographically based religion and paradigm concerning God. I remember the lecture saying that at the time of Abraham, who was apparently a polytheist, the majority belief was that the Abrahamic God was tied to the land of Israel intimately and was considered the place where God was. And in fact the God Abraham worshipped was considered the chief deity in a pantheon of gods. By being tied to a region, if a Jew were to leave Israel, it was like leaving the territory in which God resided, and explains the attachment to the Temple in Israel and why it was such a tragedy that Jews were dispersed across the world away from Israel/God. This sentiment of geographical regions being tied to god(s) sounds very much like Hindu beliefs as well.
I don't know much about Jewish history, but that seems fairly plausible. As I understand it, the usual view is that Judaism began as a polytheistic religion and gradually evolved monotheism, passing along the way through intermediary stages such as the belief that there are many gods but their god is better than the rest. Whether
Abraham was a polytheist or not is impossible to know - indeed I think it's impossible to know whether Abraham really existed or not.
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=412158&page=13
My interpretation of your post that Ajidica quoted was merely that, in your opinion, God, assuming he exists, could not do the literally impossible (For instance, making a person over 4 feet tall and under 4 feet tall at the same time), not him being bound by the laws of Physics, which you would say he would NOT have to be to avoid a contradiction. Am I correct?
Yes, that's right. The law of the conservation of energy is a law of physics, not a logical law - obviously we can imagine possible universes in which it does not hold. So I'd say that an omnipotent being could certainly perform actions which break that law. I don't see any contradiction in supposing that God could bring into existence a brand new quantity of energy or matter, or annihilate an existing one.
Indeed, it's also important to bear in mind the distinction between laws of physics as they actually are and laws of physics as we understand them. Any physical law that science has deduced is just a model, reflecting what we have observed to happen and what we predict will happen. They are all subject to revision, depending on future observations - even incredibly well established ones like the inverse square law of gravitational attraction (it's just that future observations would have to be pretty startling to undermine laws such as that). They are "laws" in the descriptive sense, meaning that they describe what is always observed to happen, not in the prescriptive sense, meaning that they determine what must happen. So any of these laws might turn out to be incomplete or even plain wrong - at least in theory - and that goes for the law of the conservation of energy. Perhaps there are circumstances under which this law does not hold after all, but these circumstances do not break the underlying physical laws of the universe - they just prove that our model of these laws is imperfect. In which case it could be the case that some entity would be capable of breaking the law of the conservation of energy without even trangressing the physical laws of the universe. It's just that current scientific theory says that that can't be done, but that is a provisional ruling, at least in principle.
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