It’s amazing how many people don’t recognize this! I think Augustine’s original sin concept and then Calvin’s legalist attitude makes people see punishment where there are just consequences.
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what divine penalty do you think of? Physical death is not a penalty for anything but an unavoidable part of reality. After all, the material reality is bound to a time based order. It is how you define your “self” that makes all the transition
what was the science bit you wanted to talk about?
St. Roymond: I like this.
Marvin, thanks so much for the welcome. I would guess many of us think, related to punishment, that “the wages of sin is death.” Physical death? Spiritual death, while embodied, and/or after physical decease – in “hell”/separation from God?
Just realized that the word “eternal,” as humans use it, refers to time. Is eternity a human, space-and-time-related concept, or is it a perpetual “now?” I am confusing myself LOL!
St. Roymond: Your comment reminds me of what I read yesterday about George MacDonald saying that Jesus came not to save us from divine punishment for sin, but to save us from sin itself.
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As I understand it, if you live outside of time eternity would be an instant.
Richard
I take my view from my older brother the mathematician and computer specialist who applied math to describe God: we will be living in additional dimensions, one of which is likely to be a new time (-like) dimension, so out experience of things may be so different from what we can imagine now that “confusing” is by far too mild a term.
It’s annoying because when he was talking about it I could follow it and grasp the wonderful difference he spoke of, but it’s one of those things that makes sense while listening but once apart making sense of it fails
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St. Roymond: I understand that annoyance at losing the particulars. Most of the time, I have to be satisfied with a high-level concept like a new dimension…for me – not a math-oriented person – this “feels right” and appeals to the imagination.
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What is our punishment for sin? To God our physical death is not a problem, nor punishment. after all it brings us back to the metaphysical realm where we can be one with God again. That is what we can get to in Jesus if we let him live in us so that we can live in him.
To sell us the afterlife as living self separate from God appeal to that original sin, the wish to be a “self” separate from God for eternity? Are we not shown in Jesus to give up the self as in “thy will be done” and become therefore part of God as in his hands executing his will? What is it that makes us wish to spend eternity s our self, perhaps ideally with better looks and an idealised body? Is this the sin phantasy we need curing of?
The “metaphysical realm” is right here, we don’t have to wait for it – that’s what the Kingdom of God is about, not something eventually but something we can be members of right now.
Though we don’t go “back to . . . be one with God again” since we never were until surrendering to Christ.
Two different selves, neither of which is “part of God”. As much as we need to die to our present selves we should look forward to the selves we are already, in Christ, becoming.
Indeed, this seems to be the way God acts, as the episode of the woman caught in adultery (John 8:10-11) shows:
Then Jesus stood up again and said to the woman, “Where are your accusers? Didn’t even one of them condemn you?” “No, Lord,” she said. And Jesus said, “Neither do I. Go and sin no more.”
Jesus shows first that he loves us and wants not condemn us. Nonetheless thereafter he prompts us “sin no more”.
For this reason, after the first sin God let us on earth submitted to death, illness, and the tendency to sin (the “state of corruption” or “fallen state” we presently are).
Amazingly, God uses even the tendency to sin to save us from sin itself!
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Antoine, this is hopeful and positive…thank you.
I love this thought from George MacDonald as, for me, it shifts the emphasis from guilt and punishment to grace, healing, growth, love, and possibility. It helps us to look to Love, from God and for ourselves and others. It evokes expansion and abundant life rather than stark limitation and “transaction” to appease an angry deity, which is what a lot of Christian theology and practice are perceived as in the popular mind, and sadly in the minds of many of us believers. I struggle so with mainstream expressions of “original sin,” feeling they are simplistic and reductive, and that it’s an easy explanation for unwholeness and evil – very great mysteries.
For me, George MacDonald’s thought even helps me think in terms of perfection as mature love (i.e., “Be ye therefore perfect…”), and not as what humans know as total moral correctness.
I was thrilled to find this thought, with an emphasis I personally very much need in order to be able to continue in active relationship with a God.
Thanks again, Antoine. Wishing you blessings and health this Advent and Christmas season.
One of the Fathers noted that we should greet temptation as a gift because it is always an opportunity – or even a message! – to turn towards God. The same could be said of all kinds of trials, an idea that fits with the opening of the letter of James.
Another commented that falling deeper into some sin can also be a gift because though merely dabbling in some sin may not prompt us to see our need for God, getting in deep can wake us up – with the warning, of course, not to deliberately venture into sin in hopes of this happening.
I’ve heard original sin invoked as an excuse for sinful habits! That’s in a way surprising since in many ways Augustine recognized the pastoral implications of ideas and adjusted things; how he failed to see how devastating the idea of original sin could be is a mystery to me – I can only guess it is related to Manichaean beliefs that colored his Christian thinking.
Oh, yes! “Perfect” in the New Testament tends to be a translation of a word better rendered as “complete”, as with all the parts in place (even if they’re not all working quite right yet). That takes the focus off sin and onto being like Christ.
I second that!
St. Roymond: Thank you for your thoughtful replies! They give me good things to mull over. It’s wonderful to meet people here who also seem to be seeking a new-ish understanding of some of the tenets of their faith tradition.
As I’ve gotten a bit older, I’m longing to feel more comfortable in my own skin and be able to voice honest questions and doubts and wrestle with them. Often, I don’t experience my place of worship as welcoming this and others in the pews as terribly interested.
I came across a quote today from Isaac Newton’s Principia, and I love it. He said, in a discussion of gravity apparently acting at vast distances, that he “…feigned no hypothesis.” I think I’ll start using this in reference to matters theological!
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Excellent quote Virginia!
On the basis of new scientific evidence from cosmology, we are now developing a more accurate description of gravity on the basis of general relativity.
Similarly, new scientific evidence about evolutionary mechanisms help us to a deeper understanding of the Genesis narratives. And the other way around, the deeper understanding of Genesis helps us to better understand why evolution works “the way it works” (i.e.: by eliminating intermediate varieties to produce the distinct species we observe today).
The discussion of the astounding correspondence between evolution and Genesis is at the core of this thread!
To you and all the readers here I warmly wish a very happy Christmas Eve!
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Antoine, Thank you for your message. I am already learning and look forward to a new year of much more. Even the word “relativity” scares me a little LOL. This is a good thing. I wish you a merry and blessed Christmas season!
to spend an eternity in hell when dying may be minutes in the eyes of the onlooker. When your ability to receive optical and acoustical input seizes you loose the concept of time, mainly because you free up the capacity of your brain from all those scanning activities. thus your worries and bothers can run much faster thus changing your perception of time. a bit like in a dream where you can experience the content of hours, days or even month or years in the seconds or minutes that make up your dream phase. I can testify to that from my own time in intensive care fearing at some point that I would suffer a lung embolism from a displaced feeding tube stuck in my lung instead. I don’t know to this day how my wife picked that up, but an eternity is a relative concept.
what is death? what is life? To me life is the ability to move matter or energy by will. in lower organisms the will is just encoded in the nucleic acid until with humans it became free. death is when the self is disconnected from past eternity and therefore from eternity. if your soul stays linked to eternity by being under the authority of the eternal God you cant die.
Forgotten to add my Christmas wishes first time round, so here they are, may we all ponder over the question as to why this child of Mary was without sin. If we understand sin to be the human want for selfness it makes our desire for eternal selfness problematic
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Nonetheless, this “reality bound to time” and involving physical death as "an unavoidable part”, it is undoubtedly God’s creation!
So the question arises of why does God submit us humans to the sufferings linked to illness and death.
The answer in my theological-biological explanation is this:
God does this to move us to realize that we are weak and need God’s help to reach eternal divine life!