Ask a Theologian III

[flyingchicken]

What're some good (entertaining or detailed) books on Christian demonology, ones on demonology and the demons themselves? It's just so fascinating.

 

[Kyriakos]

You might be interested in something similar, although not exactly a demonology book.
Tashen has an artbook on demons, and in it one can find a large number of paintings of them.

Anyway, i have a question too (again) for Plotinus.

Made current by the Stephen Hawking quote, what is your view on theorizing on the existence/non existence of an afterlife?
Let me say that i ask out of my own general thoughts on the subject, according to which it seems rather impossible to actually imagine non-existence. Most people seem to liken it to sleep, but we know from psychology that sleep is nothing of the sort, instead being a very important part of existence where most of the human mind is working very rapidly.
Then there is the (popular with non philosophers who dabble the question) argument that the brain, itself a material form, is what causes all of the psychical manifestations. But this is both obvious and irrelevant in my opinion, since those manifestations exist on a purely psychical plane as well, and in fact are recognized primarily as such. To say that, for example, a mental connection is attributed to the material differentiation in the mind is like claiming that the lines a child makes in the sand are attributed to the sand itself; at the same time partly true, since the sand can have lines formed in it, but partly false as well since it does not take into consideration the agent behind the action.
Again there is a question of whether one thinks (or actually is like that) that the mind itself controls the developments, or an independent to a degree agent. Surely free will exists in various levels in different people, and probably not utterly in anyone, however the mere existence of a degree of free will seems to show that something qualitatively distinct from the rest of the mind is in control, no matter what kind of control that is and if it can degenerate.

 

[ParkCungHee]

Was Catholic Ethics always non-consequentialist?

 

[Perfection]

Are there any theological concepts that you will utilize in your new role as admin?

 

[timtofly]

Are there any theological concepts that you will utilize in your new role as admin?

He is going to look up all of your old quotes and deem you unfit to post here.

 

[civ_king]

How did the Church Fathers stand on Paedobaptism?

 

[Plotinus]

As usual, please bear with me while I get to these. I will at some point.

Other than this one, which I can answer now:

Are there any theological concepts that you will utilize in your new role as admin?

I think my ability, honed over years of theological studies, to recognise large quantities of nonsense when I see it will come in very handy.

 

[GhostWriter16]

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=10535467&postcount=439

For the last 2 pages, no Catholics have been able to answer this question, so I'm curious if you can.

 

[flyingchicken]

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=10535467&postcount=439

For the last 2 pages, no Catholics have been able to answer this question, so I'm curious if you can.

I don't know if this guy is Catholic but he answered it: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=10537782&postcount=461

 

[GhostWriter16]

Yeah, he did, but at the time I posted this, nobody had. And yeah, that guy is Catholic.

 

[Plotinus]

Sorry to take so long getting to these...

If there is serious question as to whether the Apocrypha should be included, is this evidence that the books are of lower quality and so less likely to be valid Scripture than the other books?

Surely not, because the criteria for inclusion in the canon have nothing to do with "quality"; books were included in the canon because (a) they were traditionally thought authoritative, or (b) they were thought to have been written by authoritative people such as the apostles. Quality has nothing to do with it and I'm not sure how it could be measured anyway. Besides which, the canonical books don't seem to me to be higher quality than non-canonical ones. Are the books of Kings, for example, higher quality than the books of Maccabees? Not that I can tell. 2 Maccabees is much more entertaining than most indisputably canonical books (not that that's saying much).

And would you agree that there was valid (Even if incorrect) reasoning for removal of the Apocrypha besides "We don't like whats in it?" Because Catholics seem to think that's the reason they were removed.

I don't know what you mean by "valid but incorrect" reasoning. There certainly were reasons other than doctrinal. The deuterocanonical books (we are talking here about the Old Testament apocrypha such as the books of Maccabees) were always considered deuterocanonical, that is, not fully canonical, because the Jews did not regard them as canonical (they were excluded from the canon at Jamnia in the late first century CE). The church fathers and the medieval theologians alike regarded them in this way. What the Reformers did was insist that they're not] canonical (rather than leave them in this happy middling state) and remove them from the Old Testament proper, putting them into the Apocrypha. There was no particular doctrinal reason to do this since there is no particular doctrinal issue that rests upon these books.

Luther famously relegated Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation to an appendix as well, disparaging James in particular. But note that although he objected to James on doctrinal grounds, the actual reason for removing the book from the canon was its supposed non-apostolic authorship. Luther thought that because James disagrees with Paul (and the rest of the Bible), this proves that James could not really have been written by an apostle, and therefore it does not belong in the canon. So it wasn't simply a matter of excluding anything that Luther didn't agree with.

I'm curious -- do you recall if they had an explanation, then, for the rather surprising lack of condemnation from Jesus in the Gospels for the soldiers he encountered? I'm thinking particularly of Luke; in Luke 3:14 he's given a golden opportunity to tell them to stop soldiering, or refuse to kill people, or refuse promotion, or whatever, but instead basically tells them to not abuse their position. (And this is in the context of avoiding being metaphorically tossed in a fire by God.) Jesus is also pretty happy with a Roman centurion in Luke 7. There's also references to a "devout soldier" of some kind who is an attendant of Cornelius in Acts 10:7.

So wait -- is this just a Luke thing, after all? Maybe he was an army doctor....but even if this pro-army view is an idiosyncrasy of this particular author, both Luke and Acts were part of the fairly early canon, and were seen as authoritative, weren't they? So that leaves the question of how the early Christians dealt with them. Did they just say the absence of condemnation doesn't imply there was none? That seems like the simplest explanation, but it seems a bit odd that they'd think Jesus told them the surface issue but ignored the fundamental problem they had.

The simple answer to that is that I don't know. I've tried searching for these references in Tertullian, who was the most outspoken proponent of the view that no Christian should ever be a soldier, and he seems never to mention them. So it seems those verses just never came up in this context, surprisingly.

I have a book on situation ethics on my bookshelf (which I never finished). Your summary of it is quite interesting because I'm really not very aware of its history. How well did it fare in theological/philosophical circles? It doesn't seem to have gone very far.

I have a friend -- well, a semi-friend/acquaintance -- who has attempted to construct a similar-sounding system of ethics around just acting loving all the time, as determined by the Fruits of the Spirit. My response, which she never quite gets around to genuinely responding to, is that there are implicit ethical propositions in what you interpret to be loving or spiritually virtuous in a given situation. (For instance: is it loving to give a drug addict more drugs? On the one hand, it makes him happier. On the other, it feeds their physically unhealthy addiction. We'd generally say this is a bad thing, and immoral. But to say that it's unloving is to implicitly argue that happiness is significantly less important than physical and mental health. I think that's a generally sound principle, but it's a value that's not found within any sort of "law of love.") I don't see how any system of ethics based off of love can avoid a significant listing of fundamental values, and definitions of those values, through which love is expressed. But that makes it increasingly sound like more orthodox ethical systems, and less different.

Did that make sense, at all? I realize that was rather clumsily expressed, but I hope it was clear enough. Are you aware of any objections to situational ethics along these lines and the general responses? (I can't imagine my objection is particularly novel.)

Unfortunately I don't know enough about the subject to answer these - I'm not an ethicist. I don't think that situation ethics made a great splash long-term. I suspect that objections like the one you articulate could be one of the reasons for that, as it seems to me that this is a very good objection. It's all very well to say that we should act in a way that reflects some basic principle such as love, but that doesn't necessarily give us guidance on which action does reflect that principle. I suppose the answer is that if we have internalised the principle sufficiently then we will have enough insight to know which is the right action. But then the position is really just a version of virtue ethics rather than a distinct kind of ethics.

What're some good (entertaining or detailed) books on Christian demonology, ones on demonology and the demons themselves? It's just so fascinating.

The best one I know is Demons and the making of the monk by David Brakke, which is on the desert fathers (who were really very interested in demons) and is a good starting point for the subject, I think, at least as far as ancient Christianity goes. I'm not sure what there is on later Christianity though.

Made current by the Stephen Hawking quote, what is your view on theorizing on the existence/non existence of an afterlife?
Let me say that i ask out of my own general thoughts on the subject, according to which it seems rather impossible to actually imagine non-existence.

But we certainly don't exist at some points. I didn't exist before I was conceived. So I don't see any reason to suppose that I can't cease to exist after I die. Yes, it's very hard to imagine non-existence; but the fact of my previous non-existence proves that it's possible, so it could be just as possible after my death as it was before my conception.

Most people seem to liken it to sleep, but we know from psychology that sleep is nothing of the sort, instead being a very important part of existence where most of the human mind is working very rapidly.

I don't think people liken non-existence to sleep, though. Sleep is normally used as an illustration of the survival of the soul in a non-conscious state, perhaps as an interim state before being "awakened" at the time of resurrection, as in the traditional Christian view.

And even though sleep is obviously not non-existence, it could still be the case that dreamless, deep sleep is phenomenologically similar to non-existence. So I can't imagine what it would be like to cease to exist; but then I can't really imagine what it would be like to cease to be conscious either, even though I do it frequently. The point is that failure to imagine what it's like doesn't mean it's impossible or even that I don't do it already.

Then there is the (popular with non philosophers who dabble the question) argument that the brain, itself a material form, is what causes all of the psychical manifestations. But this is both obvious and irrelevant in my opinion, since those manifestations exist on a purely psychical plane as well, and in fact are recognized primarily as such. To say that, for example, a mental connection is attributed to the material differentiation in the mind is like claiming that the lines a child makes in the sand are attributed to the sand itself; at the same time partly true, since the sand can have lines formed in it, but partly false as well since it does not take into consideration the agent behind the action.

I don't quite follow your argument. In the analogy of the child drawing in the sand, there's a distinction between the medium in which the lines are drawn (the sand) and the agent who draws them (the child). Are you saying that the same thing is true with the mind - that the forms of our thoughts etc. are in the brain, but that there is a distinct agent which puts them there? Are you saying that this is how it actually is, or just that it's a possibility? If the latter, I would agree that it's a possibility. It is true that although our mental states are directly correlated with brain states, this does not prove that our mental states are caused by brain states, let alone that they are identical with brain states. However, brain states do seem to be necessary for mental states, given that people with damaged brains lack the corresponding mental states. So if we're going to posit some kind of non-physical agent which causes brain states and mental states alike, we would need to have a very good reason for it, since it's hard to see what such a hypothesis explains.

Again there is a question of whether one thinks (or actually is like that) that the mind itself controls the developments, or an independent to a degree agent. Surely free will exists in various levels in different people, and probably not utterly in anyone, however the mere existence of a degree of free will seems to show that something qualitatively distinct from the rest of the mind is in control, no matter what kind of control that is and if it can degenerate.

I'm not sure what you mean by that. Are you saying that free will is a component of the mind which is distinct from the rest of it? If so, what's the value of saying that rather than saying that free will is a property or faculty of the mind as a whole, which is the usual way of thinking of it? And why is this question relevant to that of life after death?

Was Catholic Ethics always non-consequentialist?

I think so, as far as I can tell. Explicitly consequentialist ethics only developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so obviously by then the Catholic Church had had a long time to become extremely convinced of non-consequentialist ethics and attack any alternatives that emerged.

How did the Church Fathers stand on Paedobaptism?

They didn't address it before the end of the second century, so it seems not to have been practised before that time. After it, they mostly seem to approve of it. Cyprian approves of it and so does Origen, who regards it as an apostolic practice. Tertullian thinks it's not a very good idea but he doesn't unequivocally condemn it.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=10535467&postcount=439

For the last 2 pages, no Catholics have been able to answer this question, so I'm curious if you can.

I'm glad it's been answered, but I'm still unaure which question you were actually talking about.

 

[Arakhor]

You might know the answer to this. Someone brought up recently that Sola Scriptura isn't actually mentioned in the Bible. If the Bible is supposed to be the sole guide to salvation, how is this any more justifiable than the Catholic or Orthodox model?

 

[Kyriakos]

But we certainly don't exist at some points. I didn't exist before I was conceived. So I don't see any reason to suppose that I can't cease to exist after I die. Yes, it's very hard to imagine non-existence; but the fact of my previous non-existence proves that it's possible, so it could be just as possible after my death as it was before my conception.



I don't think people liken non-existence to sleep, though. Sleep is normally used as an illustration of the survival of the soul in a non-conscious state, perhaps as an interim state before being "awakened" at the time of resurrection, as in the traditional Christian view.

And even though sleep is obviously not non-existence, it could still be the case that dreamless, deep sleep is phenomenologically similar to non-existence. So I can't imagine what it would be like to cease to exist; but then I can't really imagine what it would be like to cease to be conscious either, even though I do it frequently. The point is that failure to imagine what it's like doesn't mean it's impossible or even that I don't do it already.



I don't quite follow your argument. In the analogy of the child drawing in the sand, there's a distinction between the medium in which the lines are drawn (the sand) and the agent who draws them (the child). Are you saying that the same thing is true with the mind - that the forms of our thoughts etc. are in the brain, but that there is a distinct agent which puts them there? Are you saying that this is how it actually is, or just that it's a possibility? If the latter, I would agree that it's a possibility. It is true that although our mental states are directly correlated with brain states, this does not prove that our mental states are caused by brain states, let alone that they are identical with brain states. However, brain states do seem to be necessary for mental states, given that people with damaged brains lack the corresponding mental states. So if we're going to posit some kind of non-physical agent which causes brain states and mental states alike, we would need to have a very good reason for it, since it's hard to see what such a hypothesis explains.



I'm not sure what you mean by that. Are you saying that free will is a component of the mind which is distinct from the rest of it? If so, what's the value of saying that rather than saying that free will is a property or faculty of the mind as a whole, which is the usual way of thinking of it? And why is this question relevant to that of life after death?

Interesting that you should refer to a dreamless deep sleep as a state you cannot imagine while being conscious. There exists an orthodox monk saying, which can be translated to "if you die before you die you will not die when you die" Surely it is quite mystical and not very obvious what it means, and therefore one can attribute all sorts of states to it, but personally i always thought it could be argued to have to do with states of loss of most of consciousness. For example automatic writing is one such state known in the realm of fiction authors (religious authors too possibly), and during it consciousness is very diminished.
If taken to an extreme it can be, in theory, leading to a complete annihilation of consciousness, which i cannot personally imagine, but i am of the view that it will not result in death. Maybe it will result in some sort of brain cancer/malady, and there have been cases of people who lost important faculties of their mind.

As for free will and its supposed relevance to the subject of an afterlife, it seems to me that the faculties of the mind which are more complicated are those which enable the control of others, less complicated ones. And free will does seem to be above everything else, since it can be said to enable control of all else. There is the church saying "ask and you shall be given" which has been many times used by authors to refer to mental developments. It does seem to be a case of focused free will, which leads to sometimes groundbreaking changes in one's sense of his own mental world.
My point about it was centered on the view that such a delicate mechanism/function seems to be the result of more than mere chance. Perhaps such a biological plan can be attributed even to some sort of underlying significance of man.

As for the allegory of the child drawing lines on the sand, i meant it as the child and the sand being more connected than they are as objects in the external world. I agree that the brain is not something neutral in mental development, i am in fact of the view that it corresponds to it, perhaps utterly. However, as in the case of the child drawing the lines, also in the case of the brain one is increasing one's mental pathways consciously, something which possibly cannot be readily attributed to the brain requiring such an effect. Surely evolution secured a myriad of brain functions already, but the never-ending expansion of them is the work of a free agent in my view.

 

[GhostWriter16]

Surely not, because the criteria for inclusion in the canon have nothing to do with "quality"; books were included in the canon because (a) they were traditionally thought authoritative, or (b) they were thought to have been written by authoritative people such as the apostles. Quality has nothing to do with it and I'm not sure how it could be measured anyway. Besides which, the canonical books don't seem to me to be higher quality than non-canonical ones. Are the books of Kings, for example, higher quality than the books of Maccabees? Not that I can tell. 2 Maccabees is much more entertaining than most indisputably canonical books (not that that's saying much).

This makes sense I suppose.

I don't know what you mean by "valid but incorrect" reasoning. There certainly were reasons other than doctrinal. The deuterocanonical books (we are talking here about the Old Testament apocrypha such as the books of Maccabees) were always considered deuterocanonical, that is, not fully canonical, because the Jews did not regard them as canonical (they were excluded from the canon at Jamnia in the late first century CE). The church fathers and the medieval theologians alike regarded them in this way. What the Reformers did was insist that they're not] canonical (rather than leave them in this happy middling state) and remove them from the Old Testament proper, putting them into the Apocrypha. There was no particular doctrinal reason to do this since there is no particular doctrinal issue that rests upon these books.

If Scripture is supposed to be God-breathed, then how could it be "In the middle" in any way?

Also, don't the Catholics now see them as fully valid? If so, why?

Luther famously relegated Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation to an appendix as well, disparaging James in particular. But note that although he objected to James on doctrinal grounds, the actual reason for removing the book from the canon was its supposed non-apostolic authorship. Luther thought that because James disagrees with Paul (and the rest of the Bible), this proves that James could not really have been written by an apostle, and therefore it does not belong in the canon. So it wasn't simply a matter of excluding anything that Luther didn't agree with.

OK, that makes sense. Do you believe James contradicts Paul in the famous "Faith without works is dead" statement or do you think the two can be reconciled?

They didn't address it before the end of the second century, so it seems not to have been practised before that time. After it, they mostly seem to approve of it. Cyprian approves of it and so does Origen, who regards it as an apostolic practice. Tertullian thinks it's not a very good idea but he doesn't unequivocally condemn it.

Don't you think that it took 2 centuries to add it is a good reason not to do it?

I'm glad it's been answered, but I'm still unaure which question you were actually talking about.

Oh, sorry.

I meant the last one. About Augustine's exclusivist theology, and how it is reconciled with modern Vatican II theology.

 

[civ_king]

You might know the answer to this. Someone brought up recently that Sola Scriptura isn't actually mentioned in the Bible. If the Bible is supposed to be the sole guide to salvation, how is this any more justifiable than the Catholic or Orthodox model?

Here is a quick summary of why Sola Scriptura works

In the sense that it is turtles all the way down.

Doesn't deutrocanonical just mean that it is also canonical (but in a secondary sense)?

 

[GhostWriter16]

Catholicism doesn't work by the same token, its "Scripture is true because tradition says so and tradition is true because the Scripture says so" and that's no better than what we claim.

 

[Eran of Arcadia]

Actually, I wouldn't consider sola scriptura to be circular reasoning at all.

For it to be circular reasoning, it would have to be a doctrine that is actually supported by, or mentioned in, the Bible.

 

[Arakhor]

But if Catholic tradition is no better than Sola Scriptura, how can the latter be the obvious will of God?

 

[Plotinus]

You might know the answer to this. Someone brought up recently that Sola Scriptura isn't actually mentioned in the Bible. If the Bible is supposed to be the sole guide to salvation, how is this any more justifiable than the Catholic or Orthodox model?

Well, quite. As Eran rightly says, sola scriptura isn't circular reasoning - it's inconsistent reasoning. If you believe only what's in the Bible, and one of your beliefs is "I should believe only what's in the Bible", and that belief is not found in the Bible, then your beliefs are inconsistent (or your actions are inconsistent with your beliefs). Obviously people who believe in sola scriptura typically think that the principle is found in the Bible, and cite that as a reason to believe it - and that is circular reasoning. So whether it's in the Bible or not, there's a logical problem with the reasoning if not with the belief itself.

As for free will and its supposed relevance to the subject of an afterlife, it seems to me that the faculties of the mind which are more complicated are those which enable the control of others, less complicated ones. And free will does seem to be above everything else, since it can be said to enable control of all else.

But "free will" isn't normally considered something that does anything at all. It's a property that the mind has (if it has it at all). When I do something freely, it's not the case that my free will has done it - I have done it, through the exercising of my free will.

Even if free will were a faculty which literally controls others, I don't see that that would make it necessarily more complicated. On the contrary, it might be perfectly simple. A steering wheel determines which direction the car goes in, but the steering wheel is not the most complicated part of the car.

My point about it was centered on the view that such a delicate mechanism/function seems to be the result of more than mere chance. Perhaps such a biological plan can be attributed even to some sort of underlying significance of man.

But what does "chance" have to do with it? The whole organism is the result of more than mere chance, because there is more to evolution than chance - we are the way that we are because we have evolved through the operation of the law of natural selection, which produces complicated beings like us precisely because it is not mere chance. I don't really see why free will - supposing we have it at all - is any harder to explain on that picture than anything else. And even if there were something special about free will which couldn't be explained by reference to the normal physical explanations for the rest of us, why would that have any bearing on life after death? Perhaps we have free will because God caused us to have it, and it didn't evolve naturally at all, but still, that doesn't mean it survives our death or that there is anything to us that can survive death.

As for the allegory of the child drawing lines on the sand, i meant it as the child and the sand being more connected than they are as objects in the external world. I agree that the brain is not something neutral in mental development, i am in fact of the view that it corresponds to it, perhaps utterly. However, as in the case of the child drawing the lines, also in the case of the brain one is increasing one's mental pathways consciously, something which possibly cannot be readily attributed to the brain requiring such an effect. Surely evolution secured a myriad of brain functions already, but the never-ending expansion of them is the work of a free agent in my view.

Can't a brain be a free agent, though? Or can't free agency be explained purely physiologically, at least in theory? An agent can make changes to itself: for example, I can freely decide to learn something with the aim of changing how knowledgeable I am. That can be true whether I am a purely physical being or not.

If Scripture is supposed to be God-breathed, then how could it be "In the middle" in any way?

Who says "God-breathed" must be an all-or-nothing affair? In the secular sphere we talk about things being "inspired", which is the same thing - an inspired poem, an inspired political idea, an inspired bit of football. Inspiration just means a certain genius. That could come in degrees.

Also, don't the Catholics now see them as fully valid? If so, why?

They're not "valid" (you over-use that word!), they're "canonical". They've always been canonical, just deuterocanonical. Obviously since the Council of Trent the stress has been on their canonicity rather than on the deutero- nature of that canonicity, over and against the Protestant view that they're not canonical in any sense.

OK, that makes sense. Do you believe James contradicts Paul in the famous "Faith without works is dead" statement or do you think the two can be reconciled?

It's impossible to say since there's no agreement on what Paul even meant when he opposed faith and works. The new interpretation of Paul is that he didn't mean to oppose them as rival means of obtaining salvation, but as rival ways of distinguishing who will be saved. So he's not saying that people will be saved because they have faith (as opposed to because they do works). He's saying that the people who will be saved are those people who have faith (as opposed to those people who do works) - but he's not saying that it's the faith (as opposed to works) that saves them. If that's so, then Paul's emphasis on faith rather than works would be compatible with the view that works save, and therefore compatible with what James says. Basically, if you can find a way to understand the two authors as using either "faith" or "works" (or indeed both) with different meanings, then there's no reason why they can't be seen as agreeing. But for that to be an intellectually respectable view, you'd have to have good reason from their own writings to suppose that they intend the meanings in question - you couldn't just do it because you want to make them agree!

Don't you think that it took 2 centuries to add it is a good reason not to do it?

No. It took a lot more centuries than that to develop Protestant fundamentalism, but some people still do it!

Catholicism doesn't work by the same token, its "Scripture is true because tradition says so and tradition is true because the Scripture says so" and that's no better than what we claim.

That is indeed circular reasoning, but it's not Catholic reasoning.

 

[GhostWriter16]

No. It took a lot more centuries than that to develop Protestant fundamentalism, but some people still do it!

Obviously Protestantism didn't exist, because the Catholic Church hadn't fallen into heresy (From the Protestant viewpoint) yet.