Eckart was a heretic? Interesting! Looking it up doesn’t confirm this. There were objections to some of his teachings because of fear they might be misunderstood. But Rome issued a denial that he was a heretic.
Yes the same word is used in the earlier English Tyndale translation. But since Eckart precedes the first translation of the Bible into English, the origin of the word is not the Bible but Eckart.
If you resort to German, only the Wulfia version is earlier and the word “Godhead” isn’t found there. And I don’t think Luther’s use of the German word Godheit is the same at all. It means divinity. The German word for head is “kopf” and the suffix -heit is used for the state or quality of something like the English suffix -ness (so God-ness would be the correct translation of Godheit).
The real question is whether He could show Himself to them any way but His physical body.
What it occurred to me that you’re up against here is that nowhere in the heresy-rampant first half dozen centuries of the church does the idea that Jesus stopped being human show up – regardless of the heresy, all were in agreement that being human is now part of the identity of the Second Person of the Trinity. As Paul puts it, our Mediator right now is “the man Christ Jesus”, and no one doubted that. He died as a man, that same body arose transformed yet still a man; He interacted as a man with various disciples; and He ascended as a man – and on top of that He promised He would eat and drink with them in the Kingdom, something a human body does.
Where is the old physical body? It’s still there, just “elevated” (‘to a new plane’, a New Ager might put it). Jesus didn’t say He would raise a new Temple, He said He would raise the one He had – the Temple of His body. And that’s what Paul tells us is true, that our Mediator in heaven is “the man Christ Jesus”.
It’s the kinsman-redeemer relationship expressed in a couple of places, primarily popping up in Ruth. It may not be fully fleshed out in the scriptures, but other ancient writings make it clear, as do later rabbis.
“Form” here is a technical philosophical term, and it means that He actually fully became a servant, not that He was playing a part. You’re still treating it as though Jesus’ humanity was like a set of clothes, not something He really was.
You’re reading things into the text that just aren’t there. The entirety of the New Testament rests on the truth that it is a man in heaven who is our advocate now, one of us now – “the man Christ Jesus”.
Reading in? The Greek for “this” means “this”, and the inspired writer plainly says that He was speaking of His body. If He didn’t raise up the same body He had on the Cross, then the Resurrection is meaningless and we won’t be raised. The resurrection of Lazarus is the illustration of what our Resurrection will be – our physical bodies, alive again, except this time made incorruptible as Paul says, “This corruptible must take on the incorruptible” – this body doesn’t go away, it takes on a new status, a new condition, indeed one that makes it more our body that ours ever has been on this Earth.
The root meaning of ἀλλάσσω (allasso) is “to make something other than it is”. “Alter” and “change” are thus primary choices unless context forces otherwise (possibly Romans 1:23) and we have to say “exchange”. If it was intended to say “replace” I would have expected perhaps διαλλάσσω (diallasso) or more likely καταλλάσσω (katallasso) with its force of trading one thing for another, e.g. coins.
No, he redeemed her for life – that’s what redemption is.
I’m thinking there’s a difference in worldview going on here: you seem to chop everything into discreet events and/or transactions. But the ancient writers didn’t think that way; they thought in offices (in the old, old meaning of the term) and relationships.
We’re also tripping over two meanings of “redeem” and “redeemer”. One meaning is buying something back for one’s self, reclaiming/rescuing it; the other is buying back not for one’s self but for the one being rescued. When Boaz acted on the relationship of redeemer (kinsman-redeemer, to be technical) and bought the land that had been Elimelech’s, Boaz didn’t get the land – Naomi and Ruth did! In fact by redeeming the land Boaz had to marry Ruth both because she ‘came with the land’ and because it was now his task to produce a son in place of the sons she and Naomi didn’t have; not his son, either, legally, because he was providing an heir for Elimelech.
Where does it say the Word stopped being flesh? Obviously He did not since Paul says that our Mediator right now is “the man Christ Jesus” [ἄνθρωπος Χριστὸς Ἰησοῦς].
I would see this as being at complete odds with the idea of an evolutionary process.
I do not think it is theologically consistent to make the claim that we evolved to have blood and then in some fashion, our ultimate theological goal is to achieve enlightenment without any.
This is one of the reasons why i am a YEC…God created us a living beings with living souls. The arrival of, or should i say corruption of, sin and the plan of salvation has nothing to do with a changing of Gods creation (which was very obviously physical) into a spiritual being. We are not God, nor will we ever be deity. We were created as we are, the difference is that sin corrupted a perfect creation (that is biblical btw) and so we are far from the perfection of our original design.
I see the above dilemma as being one of the fundamental tragedies of TEism…it cannot reconcile that problem. If you make the claim we evolved, then salvation is unnecessary…because we are essentially already on a path to self enlightenment anyway…who needs a Saviour that died a physical death at the hands of His creation, very specifically for the sins of His creation!
When the bible talks of redemption, it also talks of restoration…if you think rather simply and logically about restoration, is that something that usually involves a knockdown? Obviously not, it is all about restoring something back to its original. What we see post-Garden of Eden (or post sin if you like), is but a shadow of the original, Gods aim is to restore it back to the Garden of Eden state…the difference being that in the future, our Creator will make our home His. He will dwell among us…this earth will become the place of God’s throne in the future. That was not the case in the Garden of Eden. This is one reason why early writers seemed to make the claim that the earth was the center of the universe…theologically, it is exactly that and it absolutely will be in the future.
I see the second coming of Christ as a twofold process, redeeming us back to God (re-establishing that connection/link that was severed when Adam and Eve were ejected from the Garden and therefore God), and restoration of the corrupted back to the uncorrupted (we regain the bodies that Adam and Eve had originally and same with everything else throughout the universe that sin has touched or influenced.
I know the bible talks about future mankind being even more perfect than the past, i suggest that this idea actually explained quite well in the parable of the prodical son. How much more value has something when it is lost and then found!
While he was still a long way off, his father caught sight of him, and was filled with compassion. He ran to his son, embraced him and kissed him. His son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you; I no longer deserve to be called your son.’ But his father ordered his servants, ‘Quickly bring the finest robe and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Take the fattened calf and slaughter it. Then let us celebrate with a feast, because this son of mine was dead, and has come to life again; he was lost, and has been found.’ Then the celebration began. — Luke 15:20-24
The Chalcedonian Definition is quite understandable, what it isn’t is explanatory: it doesn’t set out the arguments that led to the “four withouts”. If you read about everything that led up to the Council and the discussions during, the Definition reads a bit like the summary conclusions of a rather rambling but incisive research paper.
Everything up to “acknowledged” is just a summary of what the scriptures teach. Then the “four withouts” merely list four things that are errors about how there are two natures in Jesus, and all they do is defend the earlier statement “truly God and truly man”.
There aren’t “2 completely different human nature” – I think you don’t want the word “human” in there.
What Nestorians end up doing is chopping Jesus in two and opening the door wide to the divine nature abandoning the human at the Crucifixion, which actually would mean there was no redemption since one man cannot die for another’s sins; ergo what Paul says, that “Christ died”, while speaking of Christ as both man and God.
How can there be two wills and two minds? All we can do is what the Council did: list things that cannot be true about this union in order to protect the key statement that Jesus is truly God and truly man.
Part of the problem is that “person” is a poor translation of the Greek “πρόσωπον” (PRO-soe-pon), which originally meant “face” but took on deeper meaning in philosophy; in Christological and Trinitarian discussions it has more substance to it (contrary to Modalism) and is sometimes used interchangeably with “ὑπόστασις” (hih-POS-ta-sis) which means the fundamental reality of a thing, what it truly is, but only in discussing Christology – in Trinitarian terms, each Person is a distinct hypostasis.
At any rate, the human will and the divine will in Christ are in harmony, as are the human mind and the divine mind.
[I find it interesting that when I start explaining how the “two wills” and “two minds” are in harmony my mind immediately marshals arguments that Christ is one, while when I am explaining the unity in Christ my mind immediately jumps to defend the two natures. I find in that perhaps an echo of the issues the Council struggled with since the two sides were facing different heresies and so leaned to put the unity of Christ ahead or the duality. Then I’m drawn to the formula used by Cyril of Alexandria, the one Word enfleshed, i.e. the one Incarnate Word, because it holds both emphases in tension without an attempt to explain.
Kenotic theology has always straddled the boundary of heresy, often crossing it. In the variety where the idea is that Jesus as God “gave up” some of His divine attributes, it’s crossed into heresy because without those divine attributes Jesus isn’t truly God; when in the variety that holds that He “gave up the use” temporarily, it tip-toes back across the line. Again I’ll turn to Cyril but also the Cappadocians and resolve the matter by saying that this self-emptying was a willed, ongoing action of grace so that Jesus was fully in possession of all His divine attributes but continually as an act of gracious will set aside their use for our sake.
I had to look up “neo-Apollinarianism”, and I found this from W. L. Craig:
“The idea is that the immaterial, divine Logos is the soul of Jesus of Nazareth”
There’s no “neo” about that, except that it’s worse than Appolinarius ever held – and its flat-out heresy because it throws out part of what it is to be human! It turns Jesus into a sort of play-human, where He’s really just the Word and happens to be wearing a human body.
But again Cyril comes to the rescue by making it clear that the non-use of different attributes at different times was a gracious act of the will made for our sakes. That doesn’t lock Jesus into any specific “mode” that He is subject to, it has Him actively deciding that for our sake He will do things this way one time, another way a different time.
That’s how the Council arrived at their decision, though it mostly boiled down to making sure that the truth of the Incarnation, that the truly-God Son became truly-human “for the sake of us and our salvation”, is well-guarded.
My response was (initially) to point out how the terms are described in the Oxford dictionary. I understand that theological discussions require a more rigid understanding; the discussion is on Jesus and His humanity, and on this, my comment is that He was, as a human being without sin. This humanity should be discussed in some detail (would it be retained? or would it be the attributes that the Holy Spirit works in all Christians, would thus be what we all would aspire to.
Regarding your comments, I would differ slightly on ‘the breath of life’ in that it also means God granted or imparts spiritual life, so mankind became a living soul or spirit.
“And man became a living soul (nephesh)”. So Old Testament soul = “body with the breath of life”.
Though equating the human spirit with God’s breath may be problematic here, since “spirit” (רוּחַ) doesn’t appear in the verse, or for that matter in the entire passage.
It doesn’t fit well with this, either; the “spirit in man” and “the breath of the Almighty” are two distinct items.
For what it’s worth, the word for “man” isn’t the same as in the Genesis passage, either; this time it’s “אֱנוֹשׁ” (enosh [long o]), which has the interesting status of being the name of a son of Seth (which is related to ‘shitt’ [it should be a single “t” on the end but the site won’t let me type that!], which means “put”). It appears more often in poetry, and it has a tendency to mean “man” in the abstract or collective rather than the single versus total meaning of “adam”. So where in Greek a writer might say, “A certain man”, in Hebrew he would just say “Enosh”. So this statement has a bit of a dual meaning; man as mankind or some random man.
Also for what it’s worth the indefinite article “it” is an artifact of translation; this reads just as well as “surely [there is] spirit in man” (wondering why the version you quoted doesn’t include the “surely” part!).
Here endeth the digression.
Making “breath” mean “word” is quite a stretch. It’s basically the same word as for a puff of wind.
I can’t find anything indicating Rome issued any such denial. Pope John condemned a bunch of Eckhart’s “Sentences” as heretical, and the ecclesiastical court ruled against him (an interesting little morality play there; his own order was worried about his teaching and was looking into it until other authorities got the Franciscans investigating him, at which point the Dominicans made an about-face and endeavored to defend him). His appeal to the pope from the verdict went into limbo when he died, though the papal commissions affirmed much of what that court had said (though less than a majority, IIRC). So the pope only condemned the teachings that had been judged heretical without condemning Eckhart, on the presumption that Eckhart had recanted the items the papal commissions condemned, even though it’s uncertain whether the news of the commissions’ decisions even reached him. It may be the most uncertain status in ecclesiastical history, so how you view Eckhart depends on whether you think he actually recanted. I suppose I ought to give him the benefit of the doubt, though.
As for the word itself, it’s found in Old English that preceded Eckhart, and as I noted already I doubt Eckhart even wrote anything in English; all his extant works are in German or Latin. Given that he didn’t even write in English, claiming he is the origin of the word is extremely strange because it is baseless. Indeedm if you go to his works, the word he actually used was in fact " Gotheit.
But that’s where it seems to me the charge of heresy has good grounds, since it seems he taught that Gotheit was the source of the Trinity – something I’m not really able to check on since I last used German in grad school some four decades ago.
At any rate, it turns out he isn’t responsible for “Godhead”, which was being used in Old English well over a century before he wrote – and in fact before scholars draw the line between Old English and early modern English the word was starting to split into the two terms I used previously, “Godhead” referring to the deity as a unity, and “Godhood” referring to the status of being deity.
Because Jesus was not a man before the incarnation, but God. Man was not part of His nature before incarnation. When Jesus became Man, what did he do? He has to put on or add another nature to His Godly nature. It is of course a logical thinking to think that God who put on a human nature can also take it off. He is God after all.
1 Corinthians 15:50 I tell you this, brothers: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.
The word stopped being flesh when Jesus rules as the King in the kingdom of God. While the glorious body of Jesus is a mystery to us, we know that it is not made from flesh and blood. But as Christy said above, man is still man no matter what kind of body he has. She has a point there.
Here it gets very interesting. When I read kenotic christology, then the discussion become mute. At what point that Jesus is truly God. Is Jesus still truly God when He laid aside those divine attributes? Could Jesus do that and still be truly God? Who could say? Isn’t that what Kenosis (self emptying) in Phil 2 all about? What does it mean that Jesus emptied Himself?
I don’t agree with this view myself, but I won’t say that it is heresy because Craig is still within the boundary of truly God and truly man. (within that boundary, one can have different interpretation of what is possible. it is not classical christology, but it is not heresy)