To bear God’s image. Represent his rule on earth. Bring about a more just, righteous, and compassionate world for all to flourish in.
Are you serious? The group of individuals that make the whole we call “humanity.”
As a group created cultures and societies submitted to God’s way.
“Fallen” is a conventional term that means not ideal, selfish, damaged by wrong choices. You know this.
I don’t know what this means.
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
62
Glad to hear it. Then who?
Could God have not chosen humans and not chosen to reveal himself? Looks like up until Jesus at least we did the choosing.
So prior to Jesus at best, He speculatively showed His hand on the banks of the Tigris as a Michelangelo sculptor and at Belshazzar’s Feast as a stonemason and the like?
As above.
Bit of a tall order isn’t it? Of the transcendent being. Expecting mud people to do that above and beyond their natural, evolved capabilities? See under Fallen below.
Yep. Quite serious. It seems both an oxymoron and redundant phraseology.
How?
“Oh wearisome condition of humanity! / Born under one law, to another bound: / Vainly begot, and yet forbidden vanity; / Created sick, commanded to be sound.” Fulke Greville (I could see his house from mine).
“We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes.” Gene Roddenberry
Apparently humanity had an offer from God to do better than we naturally could. How’s that offer worked out for Him? For us? Are we doing better than we could have done if He hadn’t offered?
No one. This is a discussion forum. People say what they think and other people say what they think. I don’t feel like your questions are usually aimed at clarifying anyone’s ideas, they are meant to show the other person’s ideas are not acceptable to you. Fine. I am aiming to explain my thoughts, not get you to agree they are good thoughts.
I believe it is a fact that God has and does reveal himself to humans. So, no, this hypothetical goes against my concept of reality.
I don’t know what this means.
I don’t see how that is relevant. As a parent I give tall orders to my children all the time. Sometimes they surprise me. Plus, I am not a Calvinist and I do not believe humans are incapable of the good they are called to. I believe they corporately and individually choose evil.
Then we use English differently because in my dialect humanity can be a collective noun that refers to all the people in the world. I just checked several online dictionaries, and that definition is there. “Corporate humanity” specifies that you are using the collective sense, not some other sense like “kindness” or “state of being that is not animal”
We don’t have any examples do we? I believe it is hypothetically possible and our entire concept of society in the New Creation is based on a vision of human culture submitted to God.
Not a theologian. I think humans evolved. I don’t think they were engineered by God to be broken.
Humanity was also offered divine guidance to do better than they “naturally” could, and they rejected that. I personally think the entire trajectory of history has been altered by God’s self-revelation and chosen people, and that we are indeed doing better as corporate humanity than we would have been doing if there was no Israel and no Jesus and no church.
I think the whole notion of arguing about what religious terms must logically mean from a point of view indifferent or hostile to how those are actually used by those within the tradition is pretty obtuse.
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
65
I couldn’t agree more.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
66
As in I admire your having a go.
My lovely leader asked me to stay for the Bible study last night and I very quickly wished I hadn’t. It was on Ruth 1. And was used to justify God’s dealings with Israel and her neighbours. But it wasn’t racist at all apparently. Sigh. And Naomi must have done something wrong… I was able to precipitate a summons from home, give my apologies and leave.
Our resurrection bodies will be like Jesus resurrection body; not limited to space-time (he appears suddenly and disappeared suddenly).
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
68
Jesus is a tad different. We aren’t God incarnate. We haven’t the faintest idea how transcendent existence could possibly be realised. I can’t imagine it in any way. Nature at our level makes sense. Supernature doesn’t.
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
69
One at a time.
I have no idea what choice is and what good we were called to when or how and declined. Evil emerges synergistically in all of our groupings, systems, institutions from our individual weakness and ignorance. All of which we are helplessly partaking of here.
I’m fine with humanity. But I’d love to see a dictionary entry for corporate humanity. Humanity does what history records at every scale. Which is a very mixed bag with no universal will whatsoever.
And no, we have no group created cultures and societies submitted to God’s way, whatever that is, and, of course, never will. We will not, can not achieve equality of outcome.
No. A critic. Of those who still believe such a bizarre story.
So after hundreds of thousands of years an offer was made to a Canaanite tribe? When exactly? In history? How? In what cultural milieu? That was superior to The Councils of Wisdom? And I agree on Jesus of course. But He could easily have been completely natural.
1 John 3:2. New International Version
2 Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.
Our resurrection bodies will be like Jesus’ resurrection body, but not like his godliness.
Not that existent reality is restricted in any way by what does or doesn’t make sense to us but for what little difference it makes that is pretty much what makes sense to me too.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
74
I find this incredibly strange Christy. I know what humanity means. Everybody and/or their range of responses. As my first class Rogerian psychologist says for all individual human weakness and ignorance, ‘Common humanity, Martin. Common humanity’. Humanity does not have a corporate moral responsibility. Corporate guilt. Nobody ever had a representative experience of God, let alone an accountable one, prior to Jesus. Nor since. And that does not deny or diminish the power of the Incarnation. Never mind.
Jesus makes every sense regardless of the story, i.e. the complete fiction, of God and Israel, bar a few prophets from the C8th BCE yearning back effectively. The novel of Jesus is… was… easily written with all good will. I still yearn for it to be true. It may be. I.e. the greatest possible hope.
And you have a problem as YECists do, if your faith - as opposed to His of course - is dependent on any of the OT being true about God interacting with Israel in any meaningful way beyond yearning. The complete myth of the cycle of Israel’s enslavement and liberation, Israel’s failure and worse to live up to Killer YHWH’s fully justified expectations according to the very moving early C6th BCE allegory in Ezekiel 16.
Agree to disagree. You discount the entire Old Testament. Most of us don’t. The Old Testament is the story of individuals and groups tasked to represent God on earth.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
76
Sorry, it’s up to you to substantiate the entity, whatever it is. Like free will, I haven’t the faintest idea what it is. Can you point to it in action?
That’s its story. Its claim. Not any God I recognise in Christ. So chronologically, in history, in reality, who was the first individual tasked to represent God on earth? After hundreds of thousands of years of culture.
I have no idea what “substantiate the entity” means. I don’t see how it is all debatable that humans as a group are morally accountable for their group actions. For example, human societies have a corporate moral responsibility to enact laws that protect vulnerable people from exploitation. The people of WW2 era Germany are morally accountable for allowing the Holocaust. American is morally accountable for the effects of chattel slavery.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
78
Agreed on those state cultural, societal entities, but the ultimate entity of humanity? What is that responsible for?
PS And the situations those nation state cultures found themselves in is horribly deterministic. That moral responsibility is seen in hindsight. It didn’t exist in imperial Britain for two hundred years, which includes the first hundred years of America. It wasn’t preached during that period, and more, and worse the Anglophone Protestant churches opposed it.
(PPS And is Killer YHWH God in Christ gentle Jesus meek and mild?)
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
80
Not Job? And of course Moses isn’t a historical figure. He’s a mythical, legendary one whose story is told about a thousand years after it is set. About the same for Le Morte d’Arthur.