RE: Theists: How can predetermined fate and free will coexist?
December 18, 2016 at 5:30 pm
(This post was last modified: December 18, 2016 at 5:39 pm by Ignorant.)
(December 17, 2016 at 7:03 pm)Tonus Wrote: What I meant is that our ability to empathize means that we can relate to the suffering of others even if we do not share it. In your example re:Syria, I may decide to travel there to help out and I may be moved by what I see, but my desire to help was triggered by empathy even though I was seeing their plight through a very narrow lens and from a much more comfortable perspective. I didn't have to suffer with them in order to be moved to help them. [1]
But this implies that the ordeal he went through wasn't necessary. [2]
If he were to immediately eliminate all pain and suffering, I would know that he was compassionate and merciful. [3]
But that's something that separates him from those of us made in his image. See, it's not just that God could easily fix things in a second with a wave of his hand. It's what his time as Jesus represents if we simply shift the perspective slightly. Imagine that God has become frustrated. His creation --both heavenly and earthly-- rebels against him and ruins his initial set up for humanity on Earth. He strips perfection from them and watches as they continue to do what is wrong and hurt one another and follow false gods and so on. So he masquerades as a human for a short time and lives a perfect life as if to mock humanity by showing them how easy it is. [4] He arranges for a brutal and savage experience of torture that ends with his execution... only to return three days later, refreshed and ready to return to his role as the most powerful being in all of existence. [5]
He is eternal. Thirty-three years isn't even the blink of an eye for him, much less three days of suffering that ends with him becoming God again and able to visit the most horrific torments on the people who hurt his temporary physical body. And they're going to suffer forever. [6] God is different from us in every possible way. [7] How would such a small sample make any difference in what he could do for us if he was truly compassionate? [8] Why would he have to experience all of the suffering that ever happened in order to decide that imperfect humans were in a really bad state? [9] And why go through any of that in order to fix it? [10]
Would I really be getting a share of his divinity? [11] I might end up as an eternal soul in heaven, but that's about where the similarities would end, isn't it? [12] I think it's the mormons who claim that after death each of us gets a planet of our own to fiddle with. That strikes me as an example of God becoming man so that I could become a god. [13] Otherwise it seems pretty lopsided, and I think we'd all have been happier if God had just fixed things when they first went wrong. [14]
1) Exactly. Do you think I am suggesting that it is not similar with god? God knows our suffering, and so he decides to save us.
"I have witnessed the affliction of my people in Egypt and have heard their cry of complaint against their slave drivers, so I know well what they are suffering. Therefore I have come down to rescue them from the hands of the Egyptians and lead them out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey." -Exodus 3:7-8
2) It wasn't necessary. It was gratuitous, merciful, magnanimous, etc.
3) If you knew it was god who did it, sure.
4) Did it look that easy? In fact, it looked like a failure of a life... ending in a humiliating execution.
5) Exactly! He promises you that your own suffering and death, in whatever form they take, will be followed by a similar refreshed return. If you believe that promise, and live in that reality, your refreshed return will include a share in the divine refreshment, a share in the life of the most powerful being in all of existence. He did it all to reveal what awaits us all. He revealed the true reality. If you live according to that reality, you receive divine life (typically called eternal life). If you don't live according to that revealed reality, you won't receive divine life.
6) Says who?
7) Yes, he is completely transcendent to humanity. BUT, then he united a human nature to his divine nature... becoming like us in every way except actually committing sin.
8) Because in that tiny blink of a half a day of torment, every single torment in creation was visited upon him. Now, through those sufferings, we have a connection with the divine. "The Spirit itself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if only we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him" -Romans 8:17
In other words, God's transcendent compassion became accessible through Christ's human and concrete compassion which he endured with humanity on the cross. It is no longer an abstract and disembodied concept of god's compassion that humanity must grasp at through philosophy or the old covenant. Instead, Christ's own human compassion concretely communicates god's compassion through the suffering of the cross. "God in heaven doesn't seem to care if I suffer" is answered by the cross. Not only does he care, he became a man to suffer with you, and to show you what awaits you in the resurrection, i.e. the divine and eternal life.
9) He already knew that we were in a bad state before Christ. It was exactly because he knew this that he sent his Son into the world as a human. His knowledge of our tragedy is why he came to save us from it.
10) To show us that his transcendence does not mean that he is far from us when we suffer. He is close to us always, and especially when we suffer and sin. So close in fact, that he endures that suffering and the effects of those sins himself.
11) YES!
12) NO! God's divinity will actually participate in your humanity, giving you a share of his life within and through your own. You will become "like" Jesus, who is fundamentally a divine person united to a human nature. You will be a fundamentally human person united to the divine nature.
13) Like almost all heresies, the Mormon teaching takes a Catholic one, and distorts or reduces or misinterprets it.
14) That's the good news. He's fixed things, and that fix has spilled over into our reality. For whatever reason (I honestly don't know why), he fixed the spiritual aspect first, and we wait for the physical fix. "We ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, we also groan within ourselves as we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies." -Romans 8:23
We are caught in the tension between the final fixing of everything at the end (the resurrection of the body and renewal of all things), and that same final fixing being partially given to us even now. It's what Christians call eschatology. It's both "here" and "not yet".
