Category: Christian Doctrine

The Ultimate Paradox of Divine Creation

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This entry continues the line of thought in Is Classical Theism a Type of Idealism?

God freely creates beings that are both (i) wholly dependent on God’s creative activity at every moment for their existence, and yet (ii) beings in their own own right, not merely intentional objects of the divine mind. The extreme case of this is God’s free creation of finite minds, finite subjects, finite unities of consciousness and self-consciousness, finite centers of inviolable inwardness, finite free agents, finite yet autonomous free agents with the power to refuse their own good, their own happiness, and to defy the nature of reality. God creates potential rebels. He creates Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus. He creates Lucifer the light bearer who, blinded by his own light, refuses to acknowledge the source of his light, and would be that source himself even though the project of becoming the source of his own light is doomed to failure, and he knows it, but pursues it anyway. He creates Lucifer who became the father of all perversity. The “Father of lights” (James 1:17) creates the father of lies.

God creates and sustains, moment by moment, other minds, like unto his own, made in his image, who are yet radically other in their inwardness and freedom. He creates subjects who exist in their own right and not merely as objects of divine thought. How is this conceivable?

Aquinas on Angels and Human Souls: Examination of a Passage in De Ente et Essentia

I found a passage in De Ente et Essentia that is relevant to my claim that Thomas is not a hylomorphist with respect to  the human soul but a substance-dualist. Here is the passage in the Armand Maurer translation. The numbers in brackets are my interpolation. My commentary follows.

[1] This is why among these substances [created intellectual substances] we do not find a multitude of individuals in the same species . . . except in the case of the human soul because of the body to which it is united. [2] And even though the individuation of the soul depends on the body as for the occasion of its beginning, because it acquires its individuated  being only in the body of which it is the actuality, it is not necessary that the individuation cease when the body is removed.  [3] Because the soul has a separate being, once the soul has acquired its individuated being by having been made the form of a particular body, that being always remains individuated. [4]  That is why Avicenna says that the individuation and multiplication of souls depends on the body as regards its beginning but not as regards its end. (On Being and Essence, 2nd rev. ed, 1968, The Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, pp. 62-63.)

Commentary

Ad [1].  Created intellectual substances are either angels or human souls. Angels, of which there are many, are wholly immaterial. They are nonetheless composite beings in that they do not exist in virtue of their  essence (quiddity) but receive their existence from God.  Since there is no matter-form (hylomorphic) composition in them, what makes them many cannot be matter.  And so each is a species unto itself. Their numerical difference is a difference in species.

Human beings, by contrast, all belong to the same species where the genus is animal, the species is human, and the specific difference is rationality. “Man is a rational animal.” The numerical difference of human beings among themselves is therefore not a difference grounded in a difference of species but a difference grounded in a difference in designated matter (materia signata).

Ad [2]. We are then told that a human soul first begins to exist when it acquires a body.  Human souls do not pre-exist their embodiment. This is because the human soul is individuated — made to be an individual soul — by its acquisition of a body.  Before Socrates acquired a body, there was no individual Socrates. Socrates cannot exist in reality except as an individual human being  and he cannot exist as an individual human being without a material body. It is embodiment that brings about his individuation. So far, so good.

Now comes the crucial inference:  because the human soul acquires its individuated being (existence) in the material body of which the soul is the actuality, it is not necessary  that the individuation cease when the body is removed. Why not?

Ad [3]. The reason is because the soul’s individuation brings it about that the soul is  a separate being. Unfortunately, Aquinas appears to be equivocating on ‘separate.’ No doubt the individuation of  the soul of Socrates bring it about that his soul is separate from Plato’s soul in the sense of numerically different from Plato’s soul.  But that is not to say that the soul of either is separate in the sense of  existing without a body either before or after death.

I now explain the two senses of ‘separate.’

The cat is on the mat. The cat is separate from the mat, and the mat from the cat.  That is equivalent to saying that cat and mat are numerically different.  But neither is separate from designated matter. So ‘separate’ has these two different senses. Separation in the first sense is a symmetrical dyadic relation. It is existence-entailing on both ends: if x is separate from y, then x, y both exist.  Separation in the second sense is not a relation at all. A separate substance such as an angel is not separated from anything.  There is no parcel of designated matter that the angel Gabriel has to be separate from to be a separate substance.

So it looks as if Thomas is equivocating on ‘separate.’ One hesitates to tax such a great thinker with the fallacy of equivocation.  But even if  Thomas is not equivocating on ‘separate,’ his argument remains puzzling.  Angels are separate substances: although not self-subsistent like God, they subsist without matter.  They are individual in themselves, as forms.  They need no individuation ab extra. They are already, logically speaking, individuals.  Socrates does need individuation ab extra, and it comes from matter.  Before he began to exist, he was nothing in reality: he was not a subsistent individual form that acquired a body.  He became an individual only when a certain soul-body/ form-matter composite came to be. How then can the soul or form of that composite continue to exist when the composite is no more? This is impossible on Aristotelian hylomorphism, according to which the ‘principles’ of a hylomorphic compound substance are not themselves substances but non-independent ontological ‘parts’ or constituents of the substance of which they are the constituents.

Is Aquinas telling us that when Socrates died he became an angel? I reckon  not. (That would be quite the metabasis eis allo genos!) Not even the doctor angelicus became an angel at death. He is however telling us that when the philosopher  died he became a separate intellectual substance, and thus like an angel in that respect.   Bear in mind that for Thomas, an incomplete substance is a substance. An incomplete substance is logically capable of independent existence: it is not an accident of a substance nor a ‘principle’ of a substance.

So, while Socrates post-mortem is no angel, sensu stricto, he is a separate intellectual substance, a substance that exists in reality on its own without matter. How exactly, given that for humans, as opposed to angels, (designated) matter is the principium individuationis?

The Aquinate line seems to be that the individuation that human souls acquire from matter before death remains with those souls after death. But what is the argument for this surprising thesis?  The only argument I discern  in the above text is this:

a) Designated matter individuates human souls;
b) Such individuation by designated matter makes of the soul a separate substance;
c) A separate substance does not depend on matter for its subsistence; ergo,
d) A human soul once individuated is forever after a separate substance.

But what reason do we have to accept (b)?   No reason at all on a strictly hylomorphic approach.  In fact, such an approach rules out (b). The form or soul of a living substance such as Socrates is merely a ‘principle’ of this compound sublunary substance — as I have stated many times already.  These principles are not themselves substances. So they cannot exist on their own. Hence they cannot exist without matter. On strict hylomorphism, the soul of Socrates cannot continue to exist upon the dissolution of his body.

Everything falls into place, however, once you see that Aquinas is not a hylomorphic monist, but a substance-dualist.  He simply presupposes the truth of (b).  This presupposition is logical ‘fallout’ from  Christianity as he understands it.

A Buddhist Scholar Swims the Tiber

Dmitri writes,

Hope all is well. I am reading yet another book of a convert to Catholicism. This one is written by a British professor Paul Williams who is a scholar of Buddhism. Besides the interesting personal story the book contains a few interesting arguments with a few fundamental Buddhist conceptions such as rebirth. Williams states that his return to Christianity and conversion to Catholicism was rational and in part based on the incoherence of the Buddhist concept of rebirth. There is a short chapter dedicated to this topic at the end of the book that can be read standalone. An online religious community shared a copy of Williams’ book  if you would want to preview before deciding whether it is worth your time and money.
Great to hear from you, my friend. Conversions (22 entries) and deconversions fascinate me. I ‘ve read a bit of the pdf you’ve kindly sent: the book is engaging from the start. Amazon wants 79 USD which is a bit steep. I’ll read more. These days, the problem’s not lack of loot but of space. Italian frugality has paid off. And while books can burn in a fire, they are less fragile all things considered than online materials.

After what I said yesterday about the left-ward transmogrification unto insipidity of the RCC, a process that began with Vatican II (1962-1965), as Dr. Caiati documents in a comment below, it is somewhat strange that anyone should still want to swim the Tiber. Buddhism has its problems, but Christianity does not? Is Williams serious?

Buddhism, Suffering, and One Reason I am not a Buddhist 

People convert and deconvert to and from the strangest things:

Harry Binswanger’s Conversion

Son of Atheist Neo-Positivist David Stove Converts to Catholicism

Sometimes the apple falls very far from the tree.

The Stove ‘Dilemma’ and the Lewis ‘Trilemma’

 

Resist Not the Evil-Doer?

Steven Nemes weighs in on Matt. 5:38-42 in his Substack entry, When should Christians not resist an evildoer?

He makes some of  the same points I have made over the years, most recently, here at Substack: Morality Private and Public.

But he also makes good points that didn’t occur to me.

Mind-Body Dualism in Aquinas and Descartes: How Do They Differ?

Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle, views the soul as the form of the body. Anima forma corporis. Roughly, soul is to body as form is to matter. So to understand the soul-body relation, we must first understand the form-matter relation.  Henry Veatch points out that "Matter and form are not beings so much as they are principles of being." (Henry B. Veatch, "To Gustav Bergmann: A Humble Petition and Advice" in M. S. Gram and E. D. Klemke, eds. The Ontological Turn: Studies in the Philosophy of Gustav Bergmann , University of Iowa Press, 1974, pp. 65-85, p. 80)  'Principles' in this scholastic usage are not  propositions.  They are ontological factors (as I would put it) invoked in the analysis of primary substances, but they are not themselves primary substances. They cannot exist on their own.  Let me explain.

Who is the Enemy? More on Carl Schmitt

Commenter Ben wrote:

Neighbors are familiar, local. This is in direct contrast to the sort of pablum about being a "citizen of the world" and preferring the plight of the universal faceless stranger over what you owe to your own countrymen . . .

That's right. I'll add that while we are enjoined to love our neighbors, we are also commanded to love our enemies (MT 5:44 and Luke 6:27). Are these enemies familiar and local too and not, say, Iranian Islamists? Do the verses mentioned rule out hating foreigners who pose an existential threat to us? Or do they permit it?

Carl Schmitt has something to say on the question in The Concept of the Political (expanded ed., tr. G. Schwab, U. of Chicago Press, 2007, 28-29):

The enemy is not merely any competitor or just any partner of a conflict in general. He is also not the private adversary whom one hates. An enemy exists only when, at least potentially, one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity. The enemy is solely the public enemy, because everything that has a relationship to such a collectivity of men, particularly to a whole nation, becomes public by virtue of such a relationship. The enemy is hostis, not inimicus in the broader sense; polemios, not ecthros. As German and other languages do not distinguish between the private and political enemy, many misconceptions and falsifications are possible. The often quoted “Love your enemies” (Matt. 5:44; Luke 6:27) reads “diligite inimicos vestros,” agapate tous ecthrous, and not diligite hostes vestros.

No mention is made of the political enemy. Never in the thousand-year struggle between Christians and Moslems did it occur to a Christian to surrender rather than defend Europe out of love toward the Saracens or Turks. The enemy in the political sense need not be hated personally, and in the private sphere only does it make sense to love one’s enemy, i.e., one’s adversary. The Bible quotation touches the political antithesis even less than it intends to dissolve, for example, the antithesis of good and evil or beautiful and ugly. It certainly does not mean that one should love and support the enemies of one’s own people.

What is Schmitt telling us?  The criterion of the political sphere is the Freund-Feind, friend-enemy distinction. (26) But who is the enemy? The main point made above, as I understand it, is that the political enemy is a public enemy who may or may not be in addition a private adversary whom one hates.  Suppose you are I are Trump supporters who hate each other.  That would be a case of political friendship but personal enmity.  Or it may be that you and I are on the same side politically and love each other. That would be a case of both political and personal friendship. (I assume that love includes friendship but not conversely.) A third possibility is realized in many marriages: the partners love each other on the personal plane but are on opposite sides of a political divide. (James Carville and Mary Matalin?)

Now consider Luke 6:27: "But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you (KJV)."  Who are the enemies referred to in this verse? Not political/public enemies, but private enemies, according to Schmitt.  The verse therefore allows the hating, and presumably also the killing, of foreign and domestic enemies who pose an existential threat to us, where an existential threat is one not merely to our biological life, but to our way of life.

Is that right?

“My Kingdom is not of this World”

Thus Jesus to Pilate at John 18:36. 

What does 'this world' refer to?  In the "Our Father"  we pray: "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." Reading these two texts side-by-side one might conclude that God's kingdom is to be realized on earth and not in a purely spiritual realm, and that therefore  'this world' at John 18:36 refers to this age of the earthly realm and not to the earthly realm as such.

Yes or no?

If Someone is Walking is He Necessarily Walking?

This article defends the modal collapse objection to the doctrine of divine simplicity.  Brian Bosse asked me about this. Here is my answer. Put on your thinking caps, boys and girls. (Hey Joe, who was it who used to say that back at STS, Sr. Ann Miriam in the first grade?)

Substack latest.

Notes on R. C. Sproul, Does God Exist? Part II

Part I is here. Sproul thinks he can prove that the God of the Christian Bible exists from reason alone.  By 'prove' he means establish with objective certainty. 

He begins by listing four possible explanations of reality as we encounter it.  I take him to mean by 'reality' the world as given to the senses.

1) Reality is an illusion.
2) Reality creates itself.
3) Reality is self-existent.
4) Reality is created by something distinct from it that is self-existent, God.

Sproul considers these the only four possibilities. His strategy is to refute the first three, thereby establishing (4). Pressed for time, I will be brief.  I will simply dismiss (1) as beneath refutation.

As for (2), nothing can create itself, if 'x creates x' means x causes x to exist. Why not? Well, for anything to do any causing it must already exist.  'Already' can be taken either logically or temporally or both. But nothing is or can be either temporally or logically prior to itself.  It is therefore impossible that anything create itself.  It is a necessarily true law of metaphysica generalis that nothing can create itself.  

But isn't God classically characterized as causa sui? He is indeed. But what that means is not that he causes himself to exist, but that he is not caused by another to exist. As I like to put it, the sense of causa sui is privative, not positive. It is built into the very concept God that God would not be God if he were caused by another to exist; that is not to say, however, that he causes himself to exist. To say that God is causa sui is equivalent to saying that he exists of metaphysical necessity.

By the way, don't confuse the concept God with God. That would be like confusing the concept chair with what you are presumably now sitting on.  Are you sitting on a concept?

As for (3), this pantheistic possibility is worth consideration, but I must move on. The idea is that Reality does not cause itself to exist, nor does it just happen to exist; it necessarily exists.

Sproul affirms (4) and he thinks he can prove it beyond the shadow of a doubt. By 'reality,' he means "reality as we encounter it." (p. 9)  That includes mainly, if not wholly, the people and things disclosed by inner and outer sense experience.  

But are those four the only (epistemic) possibilities? Why couldn't the reality we encounter just exist as a factum brutum, a brute fact?  By 'brute fact' I mean an obtaining or existing state of affairs that exists without cause or reason.  

Sproul needs to explain why the cosmos, physical world, nature cannot just exist. Why must it have an efficient cause or a reason/purpose (final cause)?  Why can't its existence  be a brute fact?  That is a (fifth) epistemic possibility he does not, as far as I can see, consider.

Back to Inerrancy: A Note on Vanhoozer

I have been doing my level best as time permits to get up to speed on inerrancy as understood by evangelical Protestants. I have a long way to go. Today I preach on a text from Kevin J. Vanhoozer.  I will examine just one sentence of his in his contribution to Five Views of Biblical Inerrancy, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2013, p. 202, "God does not contradict himself, despite surface textual appearances to the contrary (Isa. 45:19)."

This compound sentence conveys two thoughts:

a) God does not contradict himself.

and 

b) Some Biblical texts appear to show that God does contradict himself, but in every case this is a mere appearance.

Ad (a). This is true, and presumably true by definition. Nevertheless, there is a question one could raise, but pursuing it here would lead us off track. The  question concerns God's relation to the law of noncontradiction (LNC).  Is he subject to it as to a norm external to himself? Must he abide by it? If yes, that would appear to limit God's sovereignty and his power. If he is all-powerful, does he have the power to make LNC false? See here. I raise this issue only to set it aside (for now); so please no comments on this issue. For present purposes, (a) stands fast.

Ad (b). What I write here is not verbatim the same as what Vanhoozer wrote in his second clause.  What justifies my "in every case"?  It is justified by Vanhoozer's definition of inerrancy on p. 202:

. . . inerrancy means that God's authoritative word is wholly true and trustworthy in everything  it claims about what was, what is, and what will be. (emphasis in original)

Vanhoozer appears to be reasoning along the following lines. Since God does not contradict himself, and since God is wholly truthful and trustworthy in everything he communicates to us in the Scripture, the Scripture cannot contain any contradictory passages or any false claims.  From this follows that any appearance of contradiction is a mere or false appearance, and any appearance of falsehood is a mere or false appearance.  And so what some of us see as errors, are not really errors, but mere "difficulties." (202)

Thus the Bible is wholly inerrant, inerrant in everything it claims, and not merely in its soteriological claims, that is, its claims regarding what is needed for salvation!

Now why don't I accept this? 

Well, Vanhoozer appears to be confusing the Word of God = the Logos = the Second Person of the Trinity with the Word of God in a second sense of the term, namely, the Scripture. I argued in an earlier post that they cannot be one and the same, and this for a very simple reason: the Word in the first sense is co-eternal with the Father and thus eternal. The Word in the second sense is not eternal inasmuch as it had an origin in time.  So at best it is sempiternal. 

What's more, the Word in the first sense is metaphysically necessary; it is as metaphysically necessary as the First Person of the Trinity. But the Scripture is metaphysically contingent, which is to say: there is no necessity that it exists. It would not have existed had God not created anything.  The divine aseity ensures that God has no need to create. Had he not created us humans, we would not have fallen, and would be in no need of 'salvific info.'  God revealed himself to us in Scripture. No 'us,' no revelation to us. It takes two to tango, as Trump recently reminded us, echoing Ronnie Raygun (as lefties call him).

If you disagree with what I have just argued, then you would be saying that the Scripture pre-exists its being written down.  That may be so in Islam (I am not quite sure), but it is surely not so in Christianity.

But there is more to my argument, namely, that communication from God to man is via ancient human authors, who are finite and fallible and riven with tribal and cultural biases, even if they are our superiors in wisdom and discernment.  This is why one cannot validly infer the inerrancy of Scripture from the inerrancy of God. No doubt God is wholly veracious, infallible, omniscient, and inerrant. But how do you get from that proposition to the proposition that the Scripture contains no errors about anything soteriological or non-soteriological? You need an auxiliary premise to the effect that the authors of the scriptural texts,  who received the divine messages, were somehow able to put them into the words of ancient languages and in such a way that the divine meaning was perfectly captured and expressed. I see no reason to believe that. In fact, given  what we know about human beings, I see every reason not to believe it.

Vito Caiati correctly pointed out that in Christianity God reveals himself in the man Jesus of Nazareth. True. But that is irrelevant to the inerrancy question. Here's why.  The doctrine of inerrancy states that the Bible, the whole Bible, OT and NT, is inerrant, either in all its claims or in all its soteriological claims. So the fact, if it is a fact, that "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us," — the Second Person of the Trinity, mind you, not the Bible! — and that the Incarnate Word was encountered by the apostles and disciples of Jesus and written about by them, is irrelevant to the question whether the Bible as a whole is inerrant.

Biblical Inerrancy and Verbal Plenary Inspiration

Recent discussions with Calvinist friends led to the topic of Biblical inerrancy.  I've always looked askance at it, but one of the friends, Brian, assures me that Scripture is inerrant in every particular, and nor merely with respect to faith and morals. How is that possible? 

I tend to think about inerrancy and related topics under the umbrella of the following assumptions. 

A1) The triune God of the Christian Bible exists.

A2) Said God reveals himself to man.

A3) One of the ways he reveals himself to man is via Scripture. 

A4) Scripture exists in the form of different texts written at different times by different ancient human authors.

A5) Scripture does not pre-exist its being written down, but comes into existence in time and over time when the various human authors write down their texts in human languages, Hebrew for example.

A6) These authors write under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit such that the content or gist (spirit) of what they write derives from the Holy Spirit (der Heilige Geist) and is not merely excogitated (thought up or made up) by the authors. (I am not suggesting an etymological connection between the English 'gist' and the German 'Geist' or the English 'ghost.' There is no such connection as far as I know.) Thus these ancient human authors, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, mediate God's message to man. Without their mediation, no message would get through from God to the rest of us who merely read (and understand) the scriptural texts either in their original form or in translations and transcriptions, but did not write (author)  these texts.  The authors of these texts are conduits of the divine message. They are the receivers of the divine transmission which the rest of us receive at a second remove. 

Being finite and fallible mortals, limited by their languages and cultures and tribal affiliations, these 'receivers,' despite their operation under the Spirit's inspiration, add human 'noise' to the divine 'signal.'   It is to be expected that the signal-to-noise ratio will vary from author to author and thus from text to text, and that the over-all signal-to-noise ratio in the New Testament will be more favorable than that in the Old.

(A7) Scripture is not the same as the Word (Logos) of God (verbum dei) referred to in the prologue to the Gospel of John: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God . . . ." The Word or Logos is co-eternal with the Father; Scripture is not. They cannot be the same because the former is metaphysically necessary while the latter is metaphysically contingent.  Scripture might never have come into existence. And as I said, it came to exist in time over time. Scriptural revelation is revelation to humanity; humanity consists of human creatures; there is no necessity that God, being a se and wholly self-sufficient, create anything; hence there is no necessity that humanity exist and that scriptural revelation exist.  God cannot reveal himself to man if there is no man to reveal himself to.

The Bible, therefore, cannot be identical to the Word of God, if 'Word of God' refers to the Second Person of the Trinity. For again, the Second Person is co-eternal with the First Person, but the Bible, i.e., Scripture, is not co-eternal with any of the Persons. It is not eternal at all.  It exists in time, but not at every time.  Scripture does not eternally exist, nor does it always exist. So we can't even say that the Scripture is omnitemporal, i.e., sempiternal.  

Some will bristle at the above at insist that the Bible is [stamp the foot, pound the podium] the Word of God!  You may say that but then you are using 'Word of God' in an altered sense to refer to the Scripture which, inspired by the Holy Spirit and expressive of the divine Logos, is written down by men who, finite and fallible and culture-bound as they are, not to mention suffering from the noetic consequences of sin, add their 'noise' and filtration and limitation to the divine 'signal,' so that the end result is at best derivative from, but not identical to, the divine Logos, or Word of God in the original sense.  

Finally, would it not be absurd to suppose that He Who Is, He whose name is Being itself,  (Exodus 3:14) thinks in Hebrew from all eternity and composed Scripture in Hebrew from all eternity and handed a bit of it to Moses on Mount Sinai? Hebrew is a human language; no Hebrews, no Hebrew language; the existence of the latter presupposes the existence of the former.  There is no necessity that humans, or any creatures at all, exist and so no necessity that human languages exist; God, however, is from all eternity noesis noeseos, thought thinking itself without need of any human language.

Now if we think about scriptural revelation along the above lines, then one cannot reasonably expect Scripture to be inerrant in every particular, as my Calvinist friend  Brian says it is.  Why not? Well, the 'receivers' are crappy so that, even if the divine Transmitter and his transmission are pure and impeccable, distortion and noise will be introduced by the lousy 'receivers.' The ancient authors each received a truly divine message, but then each had to express it in his own way with his own words as he understood the words of his native human tongue.  Cultural and tribal biases may be expected to creep in, not to mention distortions and limitations of a syntactic and semantic type: human languages are not equal in their expressive capacities.  A Calvinist should have no trouble adding to the mix by chalking up some of the noise and distortion to the "noetic consequences of sin."  

Verbal Plenary Inspiration?

So I am wondering whether Brian, who tells me that Scripture is inerrant in every particular, and thus in every historical detail it reports, subscribes to the doctrine of verbal plenary inspiration. Five Views of Biblical Inerrancy, Zondervan, 2013:

Verbal plenary inspiration means that the text we have is verbatim the text God inspired, down to the very terminology and syntax. It is not that God gave human authors a general impression or message that they then communicated in their own words and according to their own understanding. Rather God accommodated his message to each author's style and understanding, even as such did not interfere with the content. (p. 19)

According to Norman Geisler, " . . . the locus of meaning (and truth)  for an evangelical is in the text, not in the mind of the author behind the text. It is the graphai that are inspired,  not the author's intentions behind them." (18-19)

If that is Brian's view, then I understand how he could could hold that view that Scripture is inerrant in every particular.  If not, how would he reply to my sketch above of the mechanics of  Scriptural revelation?

Your move, Brian.

How Christian is the Doctrine of Hell?

The traditional doctrine of hell appears to be a consequence of two assumptions, the first  of which is arguably unbiblical.

Geddes MacGregor: ". . . the doctrine of hell, with its attendant horrors, is intended as the logical development of the notion that, since man is intrinsically immortal, and some men turn out badly, they cannot enjoy the presence of God." (Reincarnation in Christianity, Quest Books, 1978, 121)

1) We are naturally, and intrinsically, immortal.

2) Some of us, by our evil behavior, have freely and forever excluded  ourselves from the divine presence.

MacGregor: "Having permanently deprived themselves of the capacity to enjoy that presence [the presence of God] , they must forever endure the sense of its loss, the poena damni, as the medieval theologians called it." (Ibid.)

Therefore

3) There must be some state or condition, some 'place,' for these immortal souls, and that 'place' is hell. They will remain there either for all eternity or else everlastingly.

According to MacGregor, premise (1) is false because it has no foundation in biblical teaching. (Ibid.) St. Paul, says MacGregor, subscribes to conditional immortality.  This is "immortality that is dependent on one's being 'raised up' to victory over death through the resurrection of Christ." (op. cit., 119)   It follows that the medieval doctrine of hell  is un-Christian.

The choice we face is not between heaven and hell but between heaven and utter extinction which, for MacGregor, is worse than everlasting torment.

Two issues: Would extinction of the  person be worse than everlasting torment? That is not my sense of things. I would prefer extinction, for Epicurean reasons. The other issue is whether the Pauline texts and the rest of the Bible support conditional immortality.  I have no fixed opinion on that question.  

Could a Jew Pray the “Our Father”?

I return an affirmative answer at Substack.

It dawned on me a while back that there is nothing specifically Christian about the content of the Pater Noster. Its origin of course is Christian. When his disciples asked him how they should pray, Jesus taught them the prayer. (Mt 6:9-13) If you carefully read the prayer below you will see that there is no mention in it of anything specifically Christian: no mention of Jesus as the Son of God, no mention of the Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us (the Incarnation), no mention of the Resurrection, nothing that could be construed as even implicitly Trinitarian. So I thought to myself: a believing (non-Christian) Jew could pray this prayer, and could do so in good faith. There is nothing at the strictly doctrinal level that could prevent him. Or is there?

Read the rest.