Autonemesis

Forget the ridiculousness of arguing whether Jesus suffered sufficiently or not. That the blood of the innocent is supposed to atone for the crimes of the guilty, is a barbaric and morally indefensible concept. This is divine justice? Then we should let the DC snipers free. Jesus already cancelled their debt, remember? What could mere humans possibly hope to accomplish by trying them and jailing them, when God has already taken care of it all? There's even a dead kid by their handiwork, so there's even some innocent blood spilt here.

If Justice has already been done in the most ultimate sense, then our court system is a waste of time. In a sense, that we have the hubris to attempt to satisfy Justice ourselves is very irreverent. Placing too much importance on human justice looks like there is little faith in God's ultimate Justice.

diana

XMan,

First, my apologies for oversimplifying your position. I'm afraid it was precisely the "painstaking" part of your posts that I skimmed over, due to sheer exhaustion. I have now had a full night's sleep, and have taken the time to read your posts. BTW, I appreciate your patience.

I understand your basic position to be that Jesus was both "fully" a god and "fully" a man, in the sense of a peanut butter sandwich being comprised of both "fully" bread and "fully" PB. (Nice illustration, by the way.) According to Xn doctrine, man is also both mortal and immortal; it's just that we don't usually say he is "fully" both. But I think the same basic concept applies, and we don't normally argue that, provided the soul does exist, man cannot be both mortal and immortal at the same time. We understand that there are different parts involved.

The place I run into a snag with your explanation, then, is with the "divine nature" part. In it's simplest form, my primary objection here is that this cannot coexist in the same being if that being also has a "human nature." If that being doesn't have a human nature, he is not, IMO, "fully" human.

But Xns generally don't argue that Jesus didn't have a human nature. They argue that it was his human nature that allowed him to be tempted (after all, how does one tempt a divine being?), so he had to have had both.

Is this not defining something as both A and not A at the same time and in the same sense/relationship?

But they don't, I'll warrant, become liable for one another's preexisting crimes.

The very analogy between "taking punishment that is owed others so they won't have to pay" and "paying a monetary debt so others don't have to pay" is faulty.

And regarding Jesus' "losing" anything in his sacrifice (or offering, if you prefer), I'd put forth for your consideration that, considering what he had, being a divine being with eternal life, his losing his mortal life (along with the pain and trial of this world) would be roughly analogous to my misplacing my bunny slippers for a couple of days.

d

Edited to ask: how can a being who is "from everlasting to everlasting" lose time? The concept of "lost" time is only meaningful within the context of mortality.

[ December 03, 2002: Message edited by: diana ]</p>

Xman

Wordling,

I think we're tracking pretty well on the pre-crucifixion bit. You might still find the traditional Christian view problematic insofar as it maintains that Jesus retained both his human and divine natures in the crucifixion and resurrection (it was his human body that was resurrected, after all).

Xman

Diana,

Yes, the Christian doctrine of the hypostatic union is that from his conception Jesus had, and continues to have, both a complete human nature and a complete divine nature, leaving you with your standing objection that this is impossible. I'll try to offer some further explanation if you'll help me out by specifying why it is that you find it difficult to believe that a divine nature can coexist with a human nature in one person.

Your point about debts and crimes is well taken, though perhaps if I used a woman with unpaid civil judgments against her for a wrongful death finding pursuant to a convinction on a first degree murder charge, it might have been a little closer. Ultimately, though, we have to admit that God's economy of justice is not precisely parallel to ours. I offer the illustrations simply as means to gain insight into the biblical economy.

We probably differ in this, but subtitution in criminal matters does not strike me as inherently wrong. Even from a secular perspective, I would find it potentially quite merciful. For example, if my daughter were convicted of a crime she had truly committed and were sentenced accordingly, I would not protest a law that permitted me to receive her sentence so that she might go free. It seems to me that as long as the agrieved party is agreeable to the exchange, it ought to pose no moral problem. In the case of Jesus' sacrifice, God was the agrieved party and he agreed to the substitution.

I would also grant that the "time" factor is not a huge one, in the grand scheme of things. The far more important aspect of Jesus' suffering was the intensity of the suffering he underwent during that limited time period. I had only raised that point in response to the idea that he had actually lost something "permanently," however "minor" it might appear to have been.

winstonjen

Wouldn't that attitude just lead to people commiting more crimes as long as they found someone willing to cop the blame? Criminals go free, innocents are imprisoned or killed, I don't really care if they are related to me - a crook is a crook.

worldling

Xman writes: Your daughter analogy needs to be tweaked in order to accurately refelct the doctrine. She would have to have committed a crime against you for which you yourself would agree to be punished. Plus, you would have to be the legislator who originally created the criminal offense of which your daughter was guilty. And you would have to be the judge. And the (self-) executioner.

Does that sound reasonable to you?

One of your earlier analogies is also inaccurate - the one about it being impossible to repay a debt to oneself. You write:

In this case you have the subject shifting sums of cash to and from various accounts and sources. However, the sum total of his capital remains unchanged, no matter where it is located at any given time. What he does not do is pay back a loan owed to him by a third party. That is what is logically impossible, and that is what you are claiming god does with the atonement.

worldling

Xman writes:
So the whole peanut butter sandwich ascended to heaven? I find that hard to swallow.

Butters

Posted by X-man,

Let's put it this way. A man kills your daughter. Someone agrees to take the punishment for him. Someone else goes to jail or death row, and your daughters killer is allowed to roam free. Sound like justice? Morality is just another thing that gets skewed when you try to follow a book written by ancient goat herders. Gays automaticly go to hell no matter what good lives they lead. Mass murderers repent at the last miniute and go to heaven. Gods "economy of justice" indeed.

Koyaanisqatsi

Well, what do you know? This argument has resurrected me (for the time being).

Everyone seems to be missing several salient points, number one of which is the fact that a "sacrifice" is purely and inherently a symbolic gesture, which in turn means that there is nothing intrinsic in the act itself.

If I slaughter a goat to Yahweh for my salvation, there is nothing about the actual slaughtering of the goat that triggers my salvation. The way it is supposed to work is that God sees what I have sacrificed and is pleased by my offering (the sick f*ck) and then, of his own divine will, grants me anything off the top shelf, because I have proved my love to him (through the senseless murder of an innocent being to an omniscient being who already knew whether or not I loved him the second I was conceived by him to begin with, but why start out logically consistent?).

So there is nothing intrinsically usefull, logically consistent or even relevant about Jesus' death; it is the sacrificial act that is therefore pleasant in God's eyes and used as the barometer for God's wrath to be quelled.

The problem being, of course, that in this scenario, God and Jesus are supposed to be the same thing (I'll get to the crap about the sandwich in a second), so, what you'd have is a being making an entirely irrelevant sacrifical gesture (a symbolic ritual) to itself in order to appease itself to save mankind from itself, which is, of course, at best patently absurd and at worst evidence of collosal mental instability.

Imagine your body (mortal) somehow killing itself as an offering to your soul (immortal) on orders from your soul. Quite a messy, pointless and rather masturbatory, irrelevant act, yes?

If I have the power to grant humanity salvation by will alone, then a symbolic ritual slaying of myself would not only be utterly irrelevant, but an obviously pointless farce, especially since (as the Bible says), Jesus' sacrifice was not according to his own will (whatever the hell that would mean in re: the trinity), but according to God's will.

God is supposedly the one who wished (and orchestrated) that his meat puppet on Earth be killed as a sacrifice to appease his own wrath.

Now, as to the sandwich nonsense. Although a good try, it doesn't wash, because the act of slathering Peanut Butter on Bread transforms both the PB and the Bread into a completely new construct called a sandwich.

Two distinct "entities" (if you will) are transformed into a third and therefore entirely unique, separate "entity."

In other words, you don't have a trinity; you don't have "fully Peanut Butter" and "fully Bread;" you have only "Sandwich."

Get it? A Sandwich can not be "fully Peanut Butter" at the same time that it is "fully Bread" in any substantive (i.e., non-semantics-parlor-games-shuffle) manner. It is only "fully Sandwich," so enough with that.

Now, one other point, lightly touched on in the above, which is the fact that the more logically consistent analogy would be that Jesus' body is the mortal part and Jesus' spirit (claimed to be God) is the immortal part, just as is claimed is the case with all of humanity (only our spirit part can't cause whimsically repeated global genocide).

This means that God was, for all intents and purposes, simply wearing a Jesus suit; driving a Jesus car. It further means that the only thing sacrificed was that suit, an irrelevant and ultimately meaningless action that would in no way effect God.

It would be like Nixon taking off a Nixon mask in order for Ford (who many would argue was Nixon ) to pardon him. To claim that the removal of the mask is what mattered is ludicrous.

Setting aside all of the observations made above, to claim that there was any hardship (or cosmic relevance) at all for God to "sacrifice" his car in order to appease himself is to concede an exceedingly poorly conceived theology unworthy of any further consideration. IMO.

Thus, I remain, still retired.

(sorry, forgot about the UB code as opposed to HTML)

[ December 04, 2002: Message edited by: Koyaanisqatsi-Still Retired ]</p>

livius drusus

Mmmmmmm....Koy. Does a body good. Please, I beg you. Don't retire again yet. The sandwich imagery was almost unbearably hot. Just one trifurcation argument and I will lose control.