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fred_wilson

> The book of Revelation also cites various signs that are metaphorical enough to be applied to just about anything.

If someone plans to, they should first read Revelation 22:18–19.

And Revelations isn’t the only prophetic work. Try Ezekiel.

> It's pointless to cite the Bible to defend a theological position

Understandable, but citing the Bible is fairly important in theology, though it should be done within context.

Sure, Judaism was word of mouth a long time, and that’s great. I personally can’t remember much, so I think referencing text is fine.

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>If someone plans to, they should first read Revelation 22:18–19.

See, that's when you use literal reading. "I'm not adding anything to the text, I'm just interpreting it."

>And Revelations isn’t the only prophetic work. Try Ezekiel.

Ezekiel is clearly about events in our past, though.

>Understandable, but citing the Bible is fairly important in theology, though it should be done within context.

Meh. There's no internally consistent Christian theology that cites the Bible and doesn't involve generous amounts of cherry picking.

Its systematic theology is internally consistent; amazingly consistent given three thousand years across 66 books and dozens of authors. It’s the cherry picking and overemphas that gets one into trouble

>Its systematic theology is internally consistent

It's not. Christian dogma doesn't even obey the law of identity.

are you talking about the trinity?

I'm talking about the divinity of Jesus.

This is a widely researched topic by scholars. Is there something new or relevant you’re making a case for? Or is this purposefully obtuse

LOL, "researched".

>Is there something new or relevant you’re making a case for?

New? Not, not really. It's not at all new that the official position of the church ("Jesus is entirely mortal and entirely divine") is inherently self-contradictory. I mean, what the hell. If I didn't know any better I'd think an atheist came up with it to troll early Christians. Try saying something similar about literally anything else. "The contents of this glass are simultaneously entirely water and entirely mercury." It says nothing good of either the followers or the clergy that that nonsense has been accepted for so long.

It's not inherently self-contradictory for us to say "Jesus revealed Himself as the Son of God and the Son of Man ... how can we properly speak about that?" https://www.newadvent.org/summa/4002.htm#article2 - now that requires a lot of extra distinctions that we don't normally think about when thinking about being and essence, but it's certainly not impossible.

"Mr. Archibald Potterfarthing is at the same time the Chair of the Committee and at the same time its most senior ranking member". Accidents, naturally, but co-existing in the same space-of-being. It turns out that "person" and "nature" are distinct (who knew?) and that it is possible for there to be one person with two natures just as well as there can be one person with two titles. But that presumes you believe the authority of the one who told you this - if not, it's useless to talk about it, because why would you ever need to distinguish person and nature unless you had encountered the reality of Christ? Nothing else we have encountered in the universe has (as far as we are aware) two natures. But nothing else behaves like a singularity either - uniqueness is not a proof of non-existence.

>it is possible for there to be one person with two natures just as well as there can be one person with two titles.

Of course, but that falls apart as soon as you reread the dogma. Jesus is entirely human and entirely divine. He is both things in the same way at the same time. He has to be entirely human for his sacrifice to have any meaning, but he has to entirely divine... I can't remember why. So he could be worshiped?

A man who is both a doctor and a judge isn't entirely either one. There are moments of his day where he is neither presiding over a courtroom nor seeing any patients, and there are parts of his body that are neither judicial nor medical. More importantly, when he passes sentence he doesn't exercise his medical privileges, and when he prescribes medicine he doesn't do it in a judicial capacity. Even if both aspects bleed somewhat into each other, they're still mostly compartmentalized.

None of this can apply to Jesus, if the word "entirely" or "fully" means anything. If he dies, he must simultaneously die like mortals do and live on like deities do. So which is it? Did he die or didn't he?

> He is both things in the same way at the same time

Not quite. He has a divine nature and a human nature. There is only one person, two natures, analogous to one person two job titles. He has both natures, fully.

> Did he die or didn't he?

Having two natures, he can experience things that people without two natures cannot experience. Like the experience of death in His human nature that in no way affected His divine nature (analogous to "experiencing censure as a judge, but still being able to practice medicine"). Fortunately, death isn't a cessation of human nature, merely an interrupting of part of its actuality (that is, an evil). You and I will still possess a human nature after we die. Just as we both would possess a human nature if we lost part of our bodies, we still possess a human nature after we lose our bodies completely in death.

>Not quite. [...] He has both natures, fully.

You're contradicting yourself.

>analogous to "experiencing censure as a judge, but still being able to practice medicine"

That's only possible because, as I said, being a judge is not the totality of a person. If you strip a judge of his title the parts of him that are a person still remain. If you strip a person of their humanity then there's nothing left, because there's nothing of a person that's not human.

A normal person according to Christianity is closer to having two natures in the way you describe, because their body is mortal while their soul isn't. But Jesus' body should be equally as divine as his soul. So then how can it die? If he was just an immortal soul in a mortal body then he was just a regular human.

> So then how can it die? If he was just an immortal soul in a mortal body then he was just a regular human.

He could die in the same way the bush could burn in front of Moses without becoming a burnt object. Divinity is not corrupting or corruptible.

But to be entirely human is to be corrupted by original sin, doomed to judgement and eternal separation from God.

To be entirely divine is to be equal to God, untouched by sin and incorruptible.

These two states cannot coexist within the doctrine itself. Jesus cannot be entirely human and entirely divine any more than matter can be antimatter.

>He could die in the same way the bush could burn in front of Moses without becoming a burnt object.

But that makes it not entirely a bush, or else not entirely a fire. Something other than "a burning bush" is going on there. It looks like that, but it cannot be that.

If Jesus' soul wasn't corrupted by sin like any other mortal human then he wasn't entirely human. If Jesus was entirely human, he cannot also be divine, since God cannot coexist with sin. If Jesus can be both, then original sin is not an immutable transgression and the persistent state of evil and God's eternal judgement are simply arbitrary, and God can make exceptions whenever He likes.

Which is the actual answer because there are instances in the Bible of humans who just ascend to Heaven because God liked them, despite that supposedly being existentially impossible. God simply sometimes bends the rules, He just won't do so for you or I.

Assuming one wants to take all of this seriously and assume the Bible has univocality and try to interpret mythology with logic, which to me always seems like a bad idea.

> But to be entirely human is to be corrupted by original sin, doomed to judgement and eternal separation from God.

This is false, fortunately. "Human" and "sin" are not necessary to each other. Sin is not natural to man. The gift of original justice could not be passed on from Adam to his children because he threw it away. This lack of a gift is what is called "original sin" and its effects include all of the disordered expressions we find ourselves inclined to from birth. But this lack of a gift is not necessary to being human.

Which allows God to take on human nature without being in the state of sin ("like us in all things but sin"), but accepting the punishment for sin (death) to redeem us and offer a new gift of mercy that restores the original gift of justice for those who accept it. Since God is outside of time, He can even give the fruits of that gift "before" that gift is realized in time (Elijah, Mary).

>the bush could burn in front of Moses without becoming a burnt object

A "burning bush that isn't consumed" has at least the excuse of being a literary device. The narrator is describing what he sees in front of him, not describing the process at the physical level, so we can imagine that the bush wasn't literally on fire, but rather surrounded by some mystical flame, or shining, or whatever we can dream up.

The story of Jesus isn't like this. Jesus is supposed to have literally died. There's no possible metaphor there. In Christian theology Jesus is a literal scapegoat; he has to have died, as in his vital processes ending and his soul leaving his body to go to the afterlife. If he didn't do that after being tortured, crucified, and stabbed, then he wasn't fully human.

>Divinity is not corrupting or corruptible.

Exactly. So where's Jesus' uncorrupted, divine, lifeless body? Don't tell me it ascended to heaven, because normal human bodies don't do that.

It's literally a bush that was on fire which did not corrupt. That was the whole point. It's not a literary device.

Jesus did literally die. His soul and body were uncorruptible. That's why he was able to descend to Hell for three days, and why his fully mortal and fully divine body was able to be raised up. Dying is simply the separation of soul from body. Resurrection is the rejoining of those.

Mortal bodies of all will be raised in the Second Coming. It's not as correct to say normal human bodies don't do that, as it is to say normal human bodies don't do that yet.

So to clarify: just as the bush was literally on fire, yet did not combust, Jesus literally died, yet did not decompose.

>It's literally a bush that was on fire which did not corrupt.

How can you know that? From within the canon of the text, all we have is Moses' testimony. How can you be so sure that what he described as a burning bush was literally a burning bush, as in the matter of the bush undergoing rapid oxidation without being consumed?

>It's not as correct to say normal human bodies don't do that, as it is to say normal human bodies don't do that yet.

Sure. I'll accept "they don't do that yet". So since they don't do that yet, and they didn't do that during Jesus' times, if Jesus' body did do that, then his body wasn't fully human.

> A normal person according to Christianity is closer to having two natures in the way you describe, because their body is mortal while their soul isn't.

AH, THERE'S YOUR PROBLEM! Cartesian dualism isn't the best lens to view human nature through and it makes talking about Christ's nature harder than it needs to be. The human person is a being whose nature is body+soul. The separation of the soul and the body at death is an evil brought about by sin. Put another way, death is injurious to human beings, not natural to them. (See https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3164.htm#article1).

Jesus is fully man. His human nature is body+soul. His human soul is immortal, as all human souls are. Unlike other human beings (other than Adam and Eve before they sinned) He was not subject to death as a punishment for sin, but He accepted it on our behalf. When He died, he really died. His soul and His body were separated and for three days He could be spoken of as "not a man". See https://www.newadvent.org/summa/4050.htm#article4 for the details. Follow that up with https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1075.htm#article4 for how that relates to us. One particularly striking quote - "[c]onsequently, to say that Christ was a man during the three days of His death simply and without qualification, is erroneous. Yet it can be said that He was "a dead man" during those three days."

Jesus is also fully God. His divine nature is perfect and unchanging. His divine nature is immutable (not merely immortal) and was not subject to death. Thus Jesus was subject to death in His human nature not in His divine nature.

I'm not going to respond to any arguments that rest on the veracity of mythology (such as the garden of Eden). I'm only interested in the internal consistency of Christian doctrine.

>Jesus is also fully God. His divine nature is perfect and unchanging. His divine nature is immutable (not merely immortal) and was not subject to death. Thus Jesus was subject to death in His human nature not in His divine nature.

This is maddening. Okay, so these are the logical relationships between the terms,

* Jesus is fully God.

* God is immutable.

* Something immutable is also immortal (and by contraposition, something mortal is not immutable).

* Jesus is fully man.

* Jesus is mortal and died.

Correct? None of this is in dispute, I assume, since it's what you said. Alright. To this I answer: if Jesus is mortal then he is not immutable, and if he's not immutable then he's not fully God. If you insist he is God then that's a contradiction by the terms you yourself laid out. The supposed two natures don't matter if they lead to this conclusion.

To give a simple analogy, you can make a sword that's sharp only halfway along its length and is blunt the rest of the way. The statements "the sword is sharp" and "the sword is blunt" are both simultaneously true. What you can't do is make a sword that's both sharp and blunt all throughout its length. You can say, "well, God can do the logically impossible". Fine. But then you're telling me that I'm right, that Christian theology does contain contradictions.

Yep - you're still missing the distinction. Jesus is the person. This person has two natures (we've been working with the "being a judge and a doctor" analogy here and both can be operative together, as when the judge is hearing a case where his knowledge of medicine has bearing on his ability to judge the situation). One nature is immutable, the other is mutable. Nothing contradicts there. "Jesus, in His human nature, changes. God the Son (His divine nature) does not change." But you can make it sound contradictory, just as you could say (if we make "The doctor does not judge, but the judge does" sound contradictory if we say "Susan does not judge but Susan judges!") It is not a logical contradiction for two distinct things to be distinct.

Like I've said more than enough times already, Susan is not wholly a judge nor wholly a doctor. If every part of her was simultaneously judge and doctor in equal parts and completely, then it would be false to say "Susan does not judge in a medical capacity, she judges in a judicial capacity", because she would not be able to compartmentalize those two aspects of her self. Everything she does would be in both capacities, because she is wholly those things.

You are both a eukaryote and three-dimensional. Everything you do is in the capacity of a three-dimensional eukaryote and there's no way for you to momentarily abandon one of those natures while you do something. Not without fundamentally changing what you are.

Jesus' must be equally and inextricably imbued by these natures if he is to be said "wholly" human and divine. More so, in fact, because at least your atoms are not eukaryotic. So if Jesus changes, God the Son also changes, because Jesus is God the Son. They're two names for the same thing. If they're not the same thing, if Jesus does not completely overlap with God the Son, then Jesus is not wholly divine. There are parts of him that are not divine. That's a tenable position, but it's not the position of the church.

Actually, that _is_ the position of the Church, funnily enough. Jesus is both God and man. These natures are distinct in Him, while being entire and wholly what they are (the God-nature is not diminished or changed by admixture and human-nature is not absorbed by the totality of divinity). One person, two natures.

No, that's very much not the position of the church. There are no parts of Jesus that are not divine, nor parts of Jesus that are not human. That's what "wholly" means, and that's where the contradiction stems from. Without necessarily falling into a contradiction, Jesus could be partly divine and partly human, or wholly divine and wholly non-human, or wholly human and wholly non-divine. It's him being both things wholly that is nonsense.

Without distinction, which you're ignoring, you are correct. But "wholly" means several things depending on what you're referring to. You could mean:

1. Everything that is (in the "esse" sense) of Jesus must be both. This seems to be your position. This is also an immediate contradiction since then either God changed or Jesus' humanity always was. Variations of this position (since it has several) have been defined heresy for literally 1,500 years. 2. Jesus is both God and man completely (not "the appearance of man" or "a man apart from God, divinized by God at a later point"). This is the position of the Church.

https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P1J.HTM

> 464 The unique and altogether singular event of the Incarnation of the Son of God does not mean that Jesus Christ is part God and part man, nor does it imply that he is the result of a confused mixture of the divine and the human. He became truly man while remaining truly God. Jesus Christ is true God and true man. During the first centuries, the Church had to defend and clarify this truth of faith against the heresies that falsified it.

> 465 The first heresies denied not so much Christ's divinity as his true humanity (Gnostic Docetism). From apostolic times the Christian faith has insisted on the true incarnation of God's Son "come in the flesh".87 But already in the third century, the Church in a council at Antioch had to affirm against Paul of Samosata that Jesus Christ is Son of God by nature and not by adoption. the first ecumenical council of Nicaea in 325 confessed in its Creed that the Son of God is "begotten, not made, of the same substance (homoousios) as the Father", and condemned Arius, who had affirmed that the Son of God "came to be from things that were not" and that he was "from another substance" than that of the Father.88

> 466 The Nestorian heresy regarded Christ as a human person joined to the divine person of God's Son. Opposing this heresy, St. Cyril of Alexandria and the third ecumenical council, at Ephesus in 431, confessed "that the Word, uniting to himself in his person the flesh animated by a rational soul, became man."89 Christ's humanity has no other subject than the divine person of the Son of God, who assumed it and made it his own, from his conception. For this reason the Council of Ephesus proclaimed in 431 that Mary truly became the Mother of God by the human conception of the Son of God in her womb: "Mother of God, not that the nature of the Word or his divinity received the beginning of its existence from the holy Virgin, but that, since the holy body, animated by a rational soul, which the Word of God united to himself according to the hypostasis, was born from her, the Word is said to be born according to the flesh."90

> 467 The Monophysites affirmed that the human nature had ceased to exist as such in Christ when the divine person of God's Son assumed it. Faced with this heresy, the fourth ecumenical council, at Chalcedon in 451, confessed: Following the holy Fathers, we unanimously teach and confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ: the same perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, the same truly God and truly man, composed of rational soul and body; consubstantial with the Father as to his divinity and consubstantial with us as to his humanity; "like us in all things but sin". He was begotten from the Father before all ages as to his divinity and in these last days, for us and for our salvation, was born as to his humanity of the virgin Mary, the Mother of God.91

And here is the kicker:

> We confess that one and the same Christ, Lord, and only-begotten Son, is to be acknowledged in two natures without confusion, change, division or separation. the distinction between the natures was never abolished by their union, but rather the character proper to each of the two natures was preserved as they came together in one person (prosopon) and one hypostasis.92

>1. Everything that is (in the "esse" sense) of Jesus must be both. This seems to be your position.

>2. Jesus is both God and man completely (not "the appearance of man" or "a man apart from God, divinized by God at a later point"). This is the position of the Church.

Uh huh. And what, in your mind, is effectively the difference between those two statements? Because to me those are two ways of communicating the exact same idea. That is, the exact same state of affairs is properly conveyed by two different sequences of words. Don't answer my question by pasting four paragraphs of sophism. I have no interest in it. All you need to answer is: in what situation would exactly one of those statements be true?

Do you have similar concerns about the three in one resonance structures of nitrate? Or are you cherry picking random laws to fit a preconceived position?

I would have personally gone with the particle-wave duality as an example.

The day the church successfully uses its position on the divinity of Jesus Christ to engineer something rather than letting it remain as an abstract bit of sophistry, I promise I'll shut up about it.

id have you believe instead of just “shutting up”. you’ve avoided answering the fact that analogies exist. I’ll take it that you cannot articulate a reasonable response

>You’re essentially asking for a mathematical proof

Mathematical proofs are internally consistent. Also, yes, mathematics is used in engineering. For example (as if one was needed), GPS is all about geometry.

>Do you deny the existence of Jesus of Nazareth, His divinity, or how the “church” defines it?

I don't have a problem answering this question, but I would like to know what my personal position has to do with anything.

Are you not aware of the Church's science symposiums?

Are you conflating the propositions "members of the church do science" and "the church has based science on theological doctrine"?

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