There is no way a person having a seizure could be considered responsible for their actions. Your whole scenario fails.
Whether you look at it from the legalistic point of view, or the relational one, it is still a case of how the separation (or guilt) occurred. Original sin claims that we are automatically separated from God from the word go which makes any sort of relationship problematic
However you look at it, Original Sin is fallacious. It overrules God’s creation. It makes man superior to God with the power to undo His work…The alternative would be that God deliberately made us sinful which makes Him no better than those who create a problem just to be able to provide the cure for it.
You appear to believe that “a person who has a seizure” can distinguish between “a seizure that they are involuntarily responsible for due to their neurological condition” and “a seizure that a person who is ‘possessed by a demon’ is involuntarily responsible for” and that any Tom, Dick, or Harry themselves can observe the seizure and know the difference.
I have no idea where the two of you are coming from or how you jump to such ludicrous conclusions.
In general terms, a seizure would be considered involuntary and as such is beyond the control of the person involved so any consequences during a seizure are likewise beyond the responsibility of the person involved.
Now if you wish to declare sin as being outside human responsibility then the whole process of forgiveness for sin loses its integrity. It becomes something mechanical like refueling a car with no moral or religious value.
Sin is an inevitable consequence of creation which God accounted for. It has nothing to do with Adam or any other human being in terms of existence. At best Adam is just the first sinner (except Eve got there 1st and the Devil had been at it for millennia)
Being of Reformed inclination, there’s a distinction between moral, civil, and ceremonial laws (plus dietary and physical), the moral laws being ‘laws of love’, but not exclusively (some of the others could be considered laws of love, for health reasons, for instance). Interestingly, male circumcision is beneficial to both male and female, for both health and pleasure reasons (speaking of relational ; - ). It’s been over half a century since I’ve read it, but this goes into some detail: None of These Diseases (the prohibition of pork, for example, and trichinosis).
And there are more ‘rules’ than that in the New Testament, and they are all ‘laws of love’.
Not according to the insurance company that provided student insurance for that university.
Here’s slightly different situation to ponder: five guys are carrying a piano from a truck to a stage. Halfway to the stage, one of the guys’ muscles give out and he can’t support the piano any longer, so it tilts, so two more guys can’t support it, and the piano crashes down, which ruins the piano and injures the two guys who were determined to try to keep carrying it.
Is it not the fault of the guy whose muscles gave out that the piano is a total loss and two guys are in the hospital?
My claim is that the selfish instincts are encoded in the human genome and become biologically transmitted by DNA replication, along with death and illness.
These selfish instincts were of the same type as those at work
These selfish instincts were nullified by the “original grace” God bestowed to the first humans, when God made them in the image of God and ordered them to eternal life.
After the first sin God let humans on earth devoid of “original grace” and, as a consequence, the selfish bodily instincts polluted the spiritual powers and became “inclination to sin”(concupiscence).
Thus, since the first sin, “inclination to sin” (NOT sin!) is biologically transmitted by DNA replication, along with selfish instincts, illness and death,
You will find that sin is so impossible to define that there is no single Biblical definition
The nearest is 1 John 3:4
4Everyone who sins breaks the law; in fact, sin is lawlessness
But that is simplistic and probably insufficient.
So my statement stands, on pure logic and observation.
Sin has no substance nor form. It cannot be biologically defined or created by Genetics or any other biological process, nor can it be transmitted that way.
Centuries of Christian thought disagrees, though I suspect that your definition of grace is closer to that of Rome, in which case you have a point. In fact historically “original grace” can be traced back to the third century, well before Augustine warped our thinking with his notion of original sin – IIRC it was one of the eastern Gregories who spoke of the grace given humankind in the Garden, and it may have been him who spoke of the grace God showed Adam and Eve just by walking and talking with them!
Mightn’t we consider creation itself and us in it as the original grace? The enabling of a familial relationship with our Father and elder Brother, grace upon unending grace (not to mention providence ; - ).
Gregory of Nyssa referred to the bestowal of the image of God as being a matter of grace; that might be what I was thinking of; I think he also extends it to the act of creating humans in the first place as an act of grace.
There’s the one I was thinking of above.
Pondering, the only comment about grace I can recall from Gregory of Nazianzus is about baptism, so I’m going to guess it was the first Gregory I had in mind . . . .
unless I’m getting my Fathers confused, which is not unlikely.
I comment on the “first thing” you take issue with.
You claim:
This amount to state:
God ordered Creation to bring about the body of Jesus Christ (which defines the human body) and thereby humankind.
God ordered humankind to share eternal life by freely accepting God’s love.
As this was Creation’s main aim, God considered from the very beginning the possibility that human beings sin, and in His mercy decided that, in such a case, God will give them opportunity to repent and grace to restore the relationship with Him.
From this it follows that God ordered creation on the basis of the possibility that humans sin.
I would be thankful to know whether you may share this conclusion.
I assume that God’s Son would also have become flesh if humanity had not sinned (very much in agreement with the great Greek Father Irenaeus!).
So, Jesus was God’s Plan in any case, and it is confusing to speak about “Plan B”:
From the perspective of “a God outside time”, Christ “is the image of the invisible God” and “the firstborn over all creation” (Col 1:15f), and “the Lamb who was slain from the creation of the world” (Revelation 13:8) as well.
God ordered creation in such a way that it is suitable for both: the possibility that humans sin, and the alternative possibility that humans do NOT sin.
Accordingly:
On the one hand, God ordered creation since the very beginning for the possibility of sin (i.e.: as if sin had already happened), and therefore submitted creation to mechanisms that would bring illness, death, along with concupiscence (inclination to sin coming from the selfish urges encoded in the sapiens genome) for humans after the Fall.
On the other hand, when God created humankind in His image, God endowed the first humans with grace to overpower such mechanisms, and therefore these first humans ordered to eternal life were in a state as if sin had not yet happened, i.e.: free from illness, death, and concupiscence, in agreement with:
“[God’s] grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time ” (2 Timothy 1:9).