I am now an individual called to become someone and have a name forever, one person in union with the Son of God.
You are now an individual called to become someone and have a name forever, one person in union with the Son of God.
Accordingly, we are now brothers called by Jesus to love and respect each other; it is by loving us as Jesus loved us, that we as individual selves can reach out to others and become Christ himself.
According to your view:
We are sons of God already now.
But then, how is it that you take pleasure in insulting me?
In either case (according to my view and according to your view), by insulting me now you are contradicting Jesus’ teaching, and apparently the Guidelines of the BioLogos Forum!
You take me too seriously. I do get mildly perturbed at your repetitious insistence on relative minutia and your own personal glossary, though. Yes, you are presumably my brother in Christ, and that means, incidentally, that you are someone now, unless you want to rewrite the rest of the English language, too.
The questions remind me of some saying from quite a while ago. Neighbors by the first birth and brothers or sisters by the second birth.
Also as to your disagreement, Paul’s language about seeds and plants seemed fitting to describe what we are now as conscious and self-determining persons (or individuals) versus what we will be.
One writer I follow a little, spoke of the transformation as opening your eyes to high definition television for the first time.
I had in mind the 1 Corinthians 15 passage. I also thought there was mention of how with seeing the seed, it is not immediately apparent what the plant will look like. But I’m not finding that now. I might be mixing it up with another passage.
“So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable.”
So will it be with the resurrection of the dead: What is sown is perishable; it is raised imperishable. It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.
To become “someone” in eternal life, i.e.: one person with the Person of God the Son, I have to treat each human individual on earth as if she/he is already now Jesus Christ.
Therefore, it holds that humans have to live now according to the commandment: “As I have loved you, so you also should love one another.” (John 13:34)
For all the others I have already now the status of being someone and the dignity of a person.
However, only after the last judgement I "will be raised imperishable, in glory, a spiritual body”, will be someone and have a name forever.
Yes. Each individual in purgatory will with certainty become one person with the Person of God the Son, and in this sense is your brother in Christ more than I am.
I think it’s going to be something when the whole discussion about moral facts is muted by the contradiction of treating other people like they don’t exist, when you believe they do. Or that’s it’s wrong to love what is not supremely valuable, as if it was.
With your work in physics, what do you think about Aquinas’ view regarding the rational possibility for the world to not have a beginning in time, and how this fits with a world that begins in the present?
Matthew 5: 44-45 But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.
Matthew 25: 40 The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’
Luke 6:37-38 Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.
Your comment leads me to realize something I was not fully aware till now:
While I dwell on earth, Jesus Christ commands me to love the others for what they are called to become, i.e.: Jesus Christ himself, and not for what I may think they are.
We become Jesus Christ by treating the others as if they are Jesus Christ already now!
This is a great comment too!
I will answer it with pleasure in a coming post.
This one to one identity you are speaking of is troubling for me. We do not worship others as Jesus was worshipped.
And we prove ourselves to be his disciples, and are Christ like in doing so. Thankfully we do not become him. If it were not for his unique sacrifice, what hope could we have in this life of ever having anything we earnestly desire.
This guy in the reformed world, who is the son of a controversial figure, made a really poignant comment about how in literature the hero is the one who suffers tragically, and those who stand next to the hero can often receive his reward.
Thank you for the thoughtful comments, and I look forward to reading your thoughts on knowing the world.
Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God; so he got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist. After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples’ feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped around him. […]
When he had finished washing their feet, he put on his clothes and returned to his place. “Do you understand what I have done for you?” he asked them. “You call me ‘Teacher’ and ‘Lord,’ and rightly so, for that is what I am. Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you.
While I cannot recall a specific example right now, I remember as a young believer watching RC Sproul’s theology lectures and he would say occasionally somethings can be distinguished but not separated. And so I think what you are describing is something that should be separated, but is also similar.
On the one hand, Aquinas (following Aristotle) acknowledged the possibility “for the world to not have a beginning in time”.
On the other hand, Aquinas argued that the existence of the visible world requires “a first uncaused cause”. His argument can be summarized as follows:
An event we observe in space now at time (0), say event A(0), is the effect of some cause existing before at time (-1), say A(-1); and A(-1) is the effect of A(-2), and this the effect of A(-3), and so on. But assuming an infinite chain of causes in time to explain the there is something now amounts to say that something comes from nothing, which is absurd. Hence, there must be a first uncaused cause, a being itself subsisting ( ipsum esse subsistens ).
So, according to Aquinas there must be a first uncaused cause, even if there is no beginning of the world in time.
This conclusion implicitly assumes that this “first uncaused cause” is beyond space and time, and acts into space and time from outside it.
With the emergence of deterministic classical physics, the notion of causality reduced to refer to causal chains within space and time. And thus Aquinas notion of a “first uncaused cause” became misunderstood, and “the resulting misunderstood notion” was demolished by Kant in his “Critique of pure reason”.
How is the situation in the light of today’s physics?
Quantum physics has bestowed us the following important insight:
Not all what matters for physical reality is contained in the space-time.
This insight comes out from theorems on quantum nonlocality and quantum contextually, and has been upheld by many experiments in the last four decades, in particular by experiments with so called “entangled particles” demonstrating violation of “Bell inequalities”.
This means that no physical phenomenon can be explained by invoking exclusively causal chains within the space-time. So we must assume authorship coming from outside the space-time.
Additionally, we are taught by general relativity that the space-time itself has a beginning, the so called “Big-Bang”. And to avoid absurdities (“singularities”), at this point we must invoke quantum indeterminacy and conclude that the “Big-Bang” comes from outside the space-time.
In summary, in the light of quantum physics Aquinas’ notion of a “first uncaused cause”:
Acquires a much clearer meaning;
Appears to be also the cause causing the beginning of space-time itself.
The unobservability of an uncaused cause or a ‘singularity’ that can affect change without changing, should fit nicely with the observed phenomena as we presently see it.
The immediate effect of an uncaused cause would also appear to come from nothing.
And so as this occurs in the present and in the appearance of the past, there is a question about how its action so encompasses us.
I know Augustine touches on the rational possibility of solipsism, which is a profound evidence of our fallen nature, but I’m not sure what the history of it is before him.
These are the first ideas I gathered from reading your thoughtful and kind reply, but I’ll probably reread it a few more times and respond again.
Happy Easter to you as well and anyone else reading!
I like to say that things apparently pop into existence all the time, and the philosophical question is whether it was caused by something else that popped into existence, to which the same question applies, or it was caused by something that doesn’t pop into existence or it just popped into existence without cause.
Those are the only possible statements.
I have not spent a lot time with Aquinas, but I think the question is whether the immediate effect of the uncaused cause occurs in the present. That’s how I understand the possibility of a world that does not have a beginning in time.
Had Kant considered the contradiction of positing the existence of nothing, we may have been given a variation of the CPR we now have.
Admittedly, I struggle with the notion of uneventful time beginning or empty space expanding.
But if space-time begins with the object-event, then it seems to beg the question.
I fully agree to your statement that “solipsism is a profound evidence of our fallen nature.”
“Solipsism” amounts to the decision of remaining alone forever, and this is nothing other than the very signature of sin.
It’s important to remember that ‘original sin’ in us is not a positive reality; it is the lack of original grace.
God created the first human beings in the image of God by transforming “non-personal evolved homo sapiens creatures” into personal human beings, i.e.: by calling them to beatific vision, ordering them to love and respect each other, and making them accountable toward God and the others.
These “non-personal evolved homo sapiens creatures” were submitted to the evolutionary mechanisms ruling the non-personal animal world, specially death and selfish Darwinian tendencies.
By means of original grace God endowed the original human beings with complete control of such tendencies and decay processes like ageing, illness and death.
In other words, “entropy did not affect human personal life prior to the fall”.
The fall entailed the loss of original grace, and then humankind became submitted to death, and the selfish evolutionary mechanisms prevailed and became concupiscence (“the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life”). This “state of lack of original grace” is the “state of original sin”.
To be born in “the state of original sin” means to be born with “the propensity to solipsism”. This is actually what Nietzsche’s “big discovery” is all about, as Thomas Hürlimann suggests in Nietzsches Regenschirm: He discovered that he was an in-dividual, a lone self, anxious, and always unhappy, drawn by animal selfish mechanisms to build illusory homes; God was dead, he died in Nietzsche; Nietzsche became a living dead, an earthly eternity, an existence in emptiness.
Jesus Christ brought us the grace to overcome solipsism: He showed us how to reach out to others by unfolding relationships of love, become a person in union with Him, the person of God the Son.