So Jesus can’t save. Can’t fix our broken ‘choice’ mechanism. How very oxymoronically Evangelical.
I make a sharper division than that – the difference between humans and homo sapiens. It is part of the meaning of the word “humanity” which is considerable more than just a genetic criterion and biology, which is what the term homo sapiens is all about. Part of this distinction is the very different rates of development of body and mind. Ideas can spread so much faster than genetics that it like an instant in time by comparison to biological evolutionary developments (thousands of years compared to millions of years).
That points to a degree of dismissiveness with regards to Genesis which I don’t agree with. I would call that part of scripture by the name revelation.
Words often have specialized meanings in different fields according to what they study. This “morally accountable” is not part of my theology, but for those in which this is important it seems reasonable to me that this would be a part of their use of the word “human” in their theology. At least I don’t see any moral accountability apart from capability – they always go hand in hand.
Why does he wait until whenever it is you think he is waiting? Why did he let it get broken in the first place?
I think of it as more Arminian than Evangelical. Jesus isn’t going to force anyone to be saved against their will.
I’ve no idea what will is, free or otherwise. We so vastly, grandiosely overstate our significance as individuals and the random play of nurture on our evolved, genetic, pre-wired natures that make us ephemerally, transiently yet stubbornly us. In my mother’s severe, terminal dementia, to her dying breath, she was still my mother, she still had the same personality. As the Roman church says, we have disordered passions. Through no fault of our own and therefore anybody else’s. Jesus HAS to fix that. That’s His job. Faithfulness. We’re all saved by it. Not by some tupenny-ha’penny belief in Him. It doesn’t matter what attitude we have in the resurrection. He’ll fix it. In dialogue. With inexorable love. I want my feeble, malconditioned will, my disordered passions fixed please. I don’t care what that takes, what I lose (sex drive, identity for a start) to gain that.
Then God isn’t accountable to fix anyone.
I don’t understand you.
Does anyone else fail to understand that conclusion or its rationality, given Klax’s apparent assertion that accountability is meaningless?
Little children don’t do any such thing, and if we are childlike before God, we don’t.
…not only because of the vastness of the size of the universe, but also because of the vastness of its antiquity.
But a loved little child believes their father when told they are important to him (and how much more should beloved children of God).
You are brilliantly summarizing the teaching concerning Original Sin of the Council of Trent!
Today we know that the “disordered passions” we have, are ingrained in the evolved selfish urges we inherit trough evolution. The reason why these urges become “disordered passions” or “sinful propensities” in us, is that we lack the spiritual strength to fix them.
Here you get it wrong!
In fact, the lack of the divine grace and the resulting “feeble and malconditioned will” to fix our “disordered passions” was caused by the first sin in human history. This first sin, although not a fault of our own, was clearly the fault of the first sinners. Notice however that each of my sins would have the same consequences, if it had been the first sin in human history.
Jesus HAS ALREADY fixed that. By dying in the Cross for us, he set up the possibility that each human being receives the divine grace necessary to fix the “disordered passions” luring within our heart. In particular, in Baptism we receive a seed of this grace, that we are called to nurture during our life.
So, Jesus did and does His job. But you and me have to do OUR job as well! i.e. to struggle for living like Jesus Christ did (actually to become Jesus Christ himself). To achieve this, you and me have to pray God and carry our cross, by uniting our own sufferings with those of Christ, and by helping suffering people to carry their cross, as for instance you did by caring for your mother with severe, terminal dementia.
This is a very good way to pray to Jesus! I will incorporate this prayer into my daily life.
If you pray this way during your life, you can be sure, that Jesus will reward your efforts, and fix your “feeble, malconditionned will”, your “disordered passions”, already before you die. So, at the resurrection you will be fit to enter the kingdom of heaven. When Jesus will ask you: “Klax, do you love me”, you will answer “Yes Lord, you know that I love you”. And “when the saints go marching in”, you will be “in that number”.
By contrast, if during our earthly life we dismiss again and again Jesus’ love, then at the resurrection we will not want at all to confess: “Yes Lord, you know that I love you”. And against this our definite will there is nothing Jesus can do: We would choose our own damnation.
So, I fully agree to Christy when she states:
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I think here you are stating a most important rule of biblical interpretation:
“For the biblical audience ” (today or in past times) the universal prohibition of homicide in Genesis 9:3,5-6, refers to human populations showing the full suite of features of the humans living at the “audience’s” time, and obviously aware of being accountable toward God and the human community.
Now, we are taught by evolutionary science (not by revelation) that this “full suite of features” is the result of a complex process “between >300 ka and 12 ka”, and so it can be considered well established only after 12,000 BP.
Additionally, we have historical evidence (cuneiform tablets) for the presence of clear accountability relationships within populations by about 5,300 BP.
In summary, from the available evidence we can conclude that:
By 5,300 BP there are humans (possibly a little population in ANE) who are accountable toward God for killing each other because “humankind is made by God in the image of God”. And at some point after this time it is fitting to conclude that ALL humans on earth share on such an accountability: The explosion of civilizations evidences spreading of accountability relationship over the whole planet.
This argument is tricky!
It can certainly be used to go back in time to dating God’s creation of humankind around 700,000 BP, and so making it possible that today’s humanity descend from “a single couple of image bearers”.
I wonder whether this is your motivation! But whatever it is, the price you pay is high:
if there is NO definite line based on God’s action that distinguishes human from other hominins, then you are blurring the boundaries between humans and animals, calling the very term “human” into question”, and getting rid of the prohibition of homicide according to Genesis 9:3, 5-6, after all.
I conclusion, the sure way to interpret Genesis is to assume (as you suggest) that by “humankind” God intended what the “biblical audience” of all times has understood.
And it is really astonishing that thanks science we can know that the term “humankind” designates exactly the same kind of living beings for the readers and listeners of the Bible today, as it did for those of ancient times: The distinct biological human species that homo sapiens came to be by around 12,000 BP.
Even though I do not go to Klax’s extremes, I would agree as far as saying that many treatments of accountability has all the flavor of an ad-hoc Band-Aid on a theology which is fundamentally flawed. Accountability is naturally and logically dictated by capability.
I think these arguments are forced and problematic. I’m fine with admitting that Scripture simply does not map neatly onto human evolutionary history.
When we are talking about evolutionary history, it is simply a fact that the line is blurred. Species evolve as populations. Changes are very gradual and happen over many generations. I do not believe that there was ever a generation of human children that were so fundamentally different from their parents in capacities that the children were humans and the parents were animals.
I also don’t agree that the prohibition against homicide is some sort of fundamental marker of human morality and accountability to God and image-bearing-ness.
Sure. But as people who know more about natural history, we can certainly talk about humans that the biblical audience knew nothing about, and we can affirm their humanity, whether it was emerging or fully established. We just can’t make retro-active judgments about this population being “image of God” humans and that population being “pre-image of God” humans. I don’t really know why anyone feels the need to make those designations anyway.
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Yes, if by “capability” you also intend that humans can achieve to enter the kingdom of heaven with the help of Jesus Christ’s grace.
Indeed, only if human beings are called and ordered by God to become like God in heaven, can they be accountable to God for sinning, and in particular for killing other human beings.
In that sense, I fully agree to your statement that:
In any case, “capability” should not be reduced to “mental-algorithmic capabilities”. Otherwise you would equate humans to “artificial intelligence (AI) devices”.
Humans are called to eternal life in God, whereas AI-devices aren’t (even if AI-devices become one day mentally more “capable” than humans).
Accordingly, humans are morally accountable toward God for their actions, whereas AI-devices aren’t.
“morally accountable” is important in the theology of Genesis 9:3, 5-6, and so it is a part of Genesis’ use of the word “human”, very much in agreement with your claim.
Christy, I would be thankful if you could explain more in detail what do you mean by this claim, as it seems you are contradicting Revelation.
Indeed, in Genesis 9:5-6 “the prohibition against homicide” appears definitely tightly united with “accountability to God” and “image-bearing-ness”:
God definitely establishes that “ from each human being, too, I will demand an accounting for the life of another human being” (Genesis 9:5), and the reason is: “for in the image of God has God made mankind (Genesis 9:6).
It’s the reason, not the cause. I don’t see how God giving it as a reason for a command puts a line in history establishing image of God where there wasn’t before. I don’t read it as humans now being in the image of God caused God to prohibit murder.
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Thanks Christy for this clarification.
Thus, I get the impression we find common ground in the following statement:
The explicit and universal prohibition of murder in Genesis 9:5-6 entails that since this very moment the whole population of homo sapiens is submitted to this prohibition, so that each human being is accountable to God for killing another human being.
If we agree in this, the further question arises:
Before the universal prohibition of murder in Genesis 9:5-6, could it be that only one segment of homo sapiens was submitted to God’s prohibition of killing each other?
My answer is YES:
Before the flood, only a little population in ANE was submitted to God’s prohibition of murder, the population Cain and Abel in Genesis 4 belonged to, which increased to become the population around Noah in Genesis 5-6.
Millions of homo sapiens in other parts of the world (America, Tasmania, etc.) were not accountable to God for killing each other, the same way as today lions are not accountable for killing the cubs of other lions, or chimps for killing each other.
I would be thankful for your answer to this question .
I don’t the Scripture answers those questions definitively and it is just speculation.
In my mind, there are two issues, morality and sin and what the Bible is typically interested in.
I think that humans developed the capacity for moral reasoning and established communities where human life was valued and murder was considered immoral long before our hypothetical Cain and Abel and long before God revealed anything to the ancient Near East about being the “image of God.” I would think of the capacity to value life and see the taking of life as something you are guilty of as general revelation, the law being written on their heart, etc. Were they accountable before God? Well, yes in some sense we are accountable before God for acting on the moral light available to us. If you know the good you ought to do and don’t do it, you sin according to James.
But I think “sin” is more than just general immorality in the context of God’s covenental relationships with humans, whether we are talking about the Israelite ancestors pictured by the family of Adam and Eve or Noah or Abraham or David. In these cases with sin we aren’t talking about violating some inborn moral awareness. God revealed specific commands and made promises and humans violated the terms of the relationship. Righteousness is described with reference to keeping God’s commands and right relationship with him in light of his holiness, not in terms of general morality and respecting the value of other human life. I think it is this former kind of sin/righteousness that is usually in view in the Bible, not general wickedness or moral uprightness.
The Bible is the story of God’s dealings with Israel. God’s dealings with people groups outside the covenant isn’t of interest unless it is a foil for establishing Israel’s identity. So when we ask these questions I think we need to keep in mind the Bible isn’t a theological treatise on the origin of universal human sin and moral accountability. It’s a story of a specific group at a specific time and it addresses the issues and questions they found most relevant.
If I understand well you are claiming that we Christians should not consider the Old Testament as part of God’s revelation for the whole humankind but rather keep in mind that the Torah is basically a theologico-poltical constitution of the ancient people and state of Israel.
Come again? No. These aren’t mutually exclusive things. There is no reason why God’s revelation for all humankind cannot be revealed through the lens of an ancient people and the state of Israel. But we need to remember the lens when we try to discern the universal truths about God’s character and the universal nature of humanity. We also need to remember that we bring our own lenses when we come to the Bible looking for answers and sometimes it is the case that God did not see fit to reveal the specific answers we are looking for when he revealed himself to Israel.