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buffalo
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Better. Just remove the if.
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drpmjhess
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Jesus deliberately withheld all his scientific knowledge from his disciples.
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Gottle_of_Geer
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Then
- incest cannot be intrinsically evil
- so maybe other activities which are described as IE, aren’t;
- in which case the Catholic doctrine regarding homosexuality or abortion may very well be wrong
- which means the CC can be in error in its moral teaching
To say that Cain, Seth & their siblings married one another is to justify homosexual practice & to deny the infallibility of the Church - unless either - Catholic teaching is subject to error
or - Genesis 4 is in error
or - the story is a myth, rather than a record of facts implying facts about the marital arrangements of the first human generations
It’s doctrinally suicidal - & completely unnecessary - to treat this narrative as though it were actual fact: it’s no more historical than “The Hobbit” or a script for an episode in Star Trek. The difference is, that no one requires Catholics to believe in the reality of fire-breathing dragons or of Kahless, the founder of Klingon civilisation - whereas Catholics are required to believe in the historical reality of Adam & Eve: even though this implies the impossibility that Hebrew is the most ancient of all languages.
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Gottle_of_Geer
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That’s illogical 
There can be a first sin without an Adam & Eve - people to commit it are needed, not people who go by those exact names. All a God-sent Saviour from sin needs, is sin or a sin from which to save - the mechanics of how it came about, are unimportant. What is important, is that He has done something about it.
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buffalo
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Sure, just as your current knowledge and capacity are limited so too the Disciples. What point would it serve to show the Apostle’s an airplane of the future or a television set? And what point would it be for some futuristic machine to be shown to you that you cannot comprehend? So “deliberately withheld” does not make sense in the cynical way you use it.
One advantage they had you do not - they were enlightened by the Holy Spirit and directly taught by Jesus.
We should be careful to not limit what Jesus shared with the Apostles. He could have revealed so much more than we know.
And John, trying to put his visions into words of his time. It will be real interesting to actually see what he saw.
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buffalo
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Incest between siblings is not intrinsically evil.
How does this justify homosexuality?
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Gottle_of_Geer
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The OP didn’t deny His Divinity - he never even mentioned it. That does does not imply disbelief in it.
Jesus can perfectly well be finite as man, & yet be God Incarnate. “The man Jesus of Nazareth is God Incarnate” does not imply “This self-same Jesus is omniscient”.An omniscient Jesus is not truly a man; He is not God-with-us, if before His Passion He is not subject to all the limitations we are, sin excepted. He asked questions, such as “Who do men say I am ?” - so His knowledge was not unlimited. To say He was omniscient is not only to ignore the gospels, but to deny that He was truly man - it is equivalent to saying He was God play-acting at being a man
. A Jesus like that is no Mediator, because He knows only the Life of God - but He has no practical knowledge of what it is to be a human being. For practical purposes, such a Jesus has nothing in common with us 
.A Jesus Who is not omniscient until after the Passion is both humanly credible, & AFAICS in accord both with the Gospels & the analogy of faith.
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buffalo
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Hypostatic UnionThe OP didn’t deny His Divinity - he never even mentioned it. That does does not imply disbelief in it.
Jesus can perfectly well be finite as man, & yet be God Incarnate. “The man Jesus of Nazareth is God Incarnate” does not imply “This self-same Jesus is omniscient”.
An omniscient Jesus is not truly a man; He is not God-with-us, if before His Passion He is not subject to all the limitations we are, sin excepted. He asked questions, such as “Who do men say I am ?” - so His knowledge was not unlimited. To say He was omniscient is not only to ignore the gospels, but to deny that He was truly man - it is equivalent to saying He was God play-acting at being a man
A Jesus Who is not omniscient until after the Passion is both humanly credible, & AFAICS in accord both with the Gospels & the analogy of faith.
then read
The Incarnation
then
Knowledge of Jesus Christ
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Gottle_of_Geer
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The latter is called intrinsically evil - how is incest not intrinsically evil ? But if incest is intrinsically evil - & what else can it be ? - yet is not always sinful, it follows that neither is homosexual practice always sinful. Therefore, homosexual practice is sometimes not sinful. Therefore, it can sometimes be morally right. Or if incest is sometimes morally tolerable - why are not abortion, & homosexual practice, sometimes morally tolerable ? If God can “change His Mind” as to the permissibility of incest - then the Church, which is not greater than God, nor His equal, but His servant, can change its mind about the permissibility of abortion, & homosexual practice.
Incest is a mortal sin - was it necessary to commit a series of mortal sins to propagate the race
? That is a horrid idea. But if it is not wrong for the first humans to commit all those mortal sins, how is the equally mortal sin of homosexual practice wrong now ? Situation ethics provides a way out - but situation ethics is not allowed to Catholics. AFAICS, the very idea that incest was not sinful for the first humans but is now, is an example of situation ethics.To hold that the first generations of humans married their siblings is a notion of enormous destructive power. It would be completely unnecessary to bother arguing with it, if only people did not hang on to the completely unjustified idea that Genesis 2 to 11 is a sort of inspired, Biblical, historical & inerrant equivalent of parts of “Dallas”
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Gottle_of_Geer
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Thanks, but I have a degree in Theology - as well as copies of Ott, Denzinger, & many other books of the same kind. Your post doesn’t attempt to show what (if anything) is wrong in mine - this is a pity. If a notion about the knowledge of Christ falsifies the very Incarnation it seeks to safeguard, then it does, & it is not wrong to say so.
It’s one thing for those without means of obtaining knowledge of antiquity to make theological statements or to favour theological propositions or to teach doctrines that are incompatible with the facts about it. It is another matter entirely for those statements, propositions & doctrines to be put forward or taught as binding on consciences, once antiquity - or anything else - is much better understood. If the study of antiquity makes clear that Hebrew is not the oldest of languages, & if Genesis 1 to 11 requires it to be the oldest of languages, then Genesis 1 to 11 is not to be preferred. As Genesis 1 to 11 is not an account of really historical facts, but is a theological myth, the problem does not arise. Truth is more important than any sacred cow.And now, a present for you
: THE 24 THOMISTIC THESES
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Chelsea111
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I have heard opinions that the story of Creation may be just that - a story. That God created the world is true, but Adam and Eve may have been just a story to prove a point, like some of the others in the Old Testament.
Is this completely wrong? In that case, are all Old Testament stories completely real?
And then: One of my LDS friends commented to me that she admires Eve, and that biting the apple wasn’t a sin - that she somehow figured out the Lord’s plan. I was mortified - and told her that she is saying that she admires the devil. But by the end, we had come to an impasse. She stubbornly sticks to her arguments. One was about how without pain there’s no joy, so Eve had to bring sin into the world so that we could all know joy, and have an all time better life.
Is this completely wrong? In that case, are all Old Testament stories completely real?
And then: One of my LDS friends commented to me that she admires Eve, and that biting the apple wasn’t a sin - that she somehow figured out the Lord’s plan. I was mortified - and told her that she is saying that she admires the devil. But by the end, we had come to an impasse. She stubbornly sticks to her arguments. One was about how without pain there’s no joy, so Eve had to bring sin into the world so that we could all know joy, and have an all time better life.
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buffalo
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Arguing that God allowed incest from a pure gene pool and then jumping to homosexual relations is absurd.The latter is called intrinsically evil - how is incest not intrinsically evil ? But if incest is intrinsically evil - & what else can it be ? - yet is not always sinful, it follows that neither is homosexual practice always sinful. Therefore, homosexual practice is sometimes not sinful. Therefore, it can sometimes be morally right. Or if incest is sometimes morally tolerable - why are not abortion, & homosexual practice, sometimes morally tolerable ? If God can “change His Mind” as to the permissibility of incest - then the Church, which is not greater than God, nor His equal, but His servant, can change its mind about the permissibility of abortion, & homosexual practice.
Incest is a mortal sin - was it necessary to commit a series of mortal sins to propagate the race
To hold that the first generations of humans married their siblings is a notion of enormous destructive power. It would be completely unnecessary to bother arguing with it, if only people did not hang on to the completely unjustified idea that Genesis 2 to 11 is a sort of inspired, Biblical, historical & inerrant equivalent of parts of “Dallas”
The arrogance that compels these arguments is one of enormous destructive power. Again trying to reconcile antiquity with a modern worldview and to project this onto God is erroneous. He does not have to fit our definitions.
And by the way, who else would the first one’s marry? I can only imagine your next argument.
Incest is a mortal sin - so you would advance the argument that Adam and Eve’s children were turning away from God by obeying His command to go forth and multiply. Now defying God in that case would be a mortal sin.
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buffalo
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I have seen plenty of nonsense being spouted by persons with degrees in theology. But, I do challenge you to take a look again at the three links.Thanks, but I have a degree in Theology - as well as copies of Ott, Denzinger, & many other books of the same kind. Your post doesn’t attempt to show what (if anything) is wrong in mine - this is a pity. If a notion about the knowledge of Christ falsifies the very Incarnation it seeks to safeguard, then it does, & it is not wrong to say so.
It’s one thing for those without means of obtaining knowledge of antiquity to make theological statements or to favour theological propositions or to teach doctrines that are incompatible with the facts about it. It is another matter entirely for those statements, propositions & doctrines to be put forward or taught as binding on consciences, once antiquity - or anything else - is much better understood. If the study of antiquity makes clear that Hebrew is not the oldest of languages, & if Genesis 1 to 11 requires it to be the oldest of languages, then Genesis 1 to 11 is not to be preferred. As Genesis 1 to 11 is not an account of really historical facts, but is a theological myth, the problem does not arise. Truth is more important than any sacred cow.
And now, a present for you
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drpmjhess
Guest
It’s not cynical; you said Jesus the man was omniscient – which makes no neurological sense – so I said in that case he withheld (deliberately) the objects of his omniscience from his disciples.
Neurologically your claim is absurd. No human brain (the only brain Jesus had, since God doesn’t have a brain) could contain the vocabulary and grammatical rules of all 100,000 human languages, every phrase from every book not yet printed, every detail in every field of scientific knowledge not yet discovered, the complete history of Medieval and Renaissance art which had not yet even been produced, etc.
You must rethink omniscience and what it means to ascribe it to a human, which as Christians we must believe Jesus was. The omniscience of the risen Logos is a different matter.
Petrus
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drpmjhess
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Chelsea111, the stories of the creation and fall, first murder and Noah’s flood, are wonderful cosmogonic and etiological myths. They are true in their timeless expression of foundational truths about how the world is good, God loves the world and humanity, humans are morally responsible, etc. They are not recounting of literal history of evolution, which we know existed for 4.5 billion years before “Adam” and “Eve” and the talking serpent.
That does not mean that the whole of Genesis is myth; there are legendary aspects as well, and elements of Hebrew experience read back into Genesis, which was written later than other scriptural books.
Petrus
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drpmjhess
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Gottle, I agree with you almost entirely, except that I would modify your comparison of the Genesis myth with the Hobbit. Much though I love the latter story, I would not claim that Tolkien was spiritually inspired; I believe the scribes who wrote down the Hebrew oral traditions about creation were so inspired.
Looking just at the first nine books of Genesis, the scribes have taken existing myth for Ancient Near Eastern contexts and conferred upon it a moral understanding not found in the texts of their Sumerian neighbors. I read the Hebrew Scripture as a diary of an emerging people’s changing relationship with God. Considering that monotheism was not fully developed until the Babylonian exile, and was then read back into pericopes composed centuries earlier, we have a remarkable testament to Hebrew theological and spiritual development.
Petrus
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buffalo
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The Human Knowledge of Christ
…It is easy to see that ascribing positive ignorance and error to Christ’s human mind leads to a neo-Nestorianism. Imputing ignorance and error to Christ as Man tends to rupture the hypostatic union of Christ’s Divine and human natures.
Among the theological errors of the modernists condemned by Lamentabili (1907) issued by the Holy Office during the reign of Pope St. Pius X were these propositions concerning the knowledge of Christ:
- It is impossible to reconcile the obvious meaning of the Gospel texts with the teaching of our theologians about the consciousness and the infallible knowledge of Jesus Christ.
- It is evident to any unprejudiced person either that Jesus taught erroneously about the proximity of the Messianic Coming, or else that a major portion of His teaching contained in the Synoptic Gospels is not authentic.
- It is impossible for a critical exegete to attribute unlimited knowledge to Christ, unless he makes a supposition that is inconceivable historically and repugnant to moral sense: namely, that as man Christ had God’s knowledge and yet was unwilling to communicate so many things to His disciples and to posterity.
- Christ did not always have the consciousness of His Messianic dignity.20
In the motu proprio Praestantia (November 18, 1907) St. Pius X confirmed Lamentabili together with his encyclical Pascendi thereby strengthening their magisterial import.21
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buffalo
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A Grievous Distortion of The 'Catechism of the Catholic Church’
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“Classical Christology teaches, and the Magisterium also, that, long before Easter, Jesus enjoyed in His human intelligence a three-fold knowledge: acquired, infused, and beatific. The first kind came to Him, as it does to other men, from the exercise of His senses and His reason; the second was immediately communicated to His human soul by His Divine Person; and the third gave Him immediate knowledge of His Father.”
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“Classical Christology teaches, and the Magisterium also, that, long before Easter, Jesus enjoyed in His human intelligence a three-fold knowledge: acquired, infused, and beatific. The first kind came to Him, as it does to other men, from the exercise of His senses and His reason; the second was immediately communicated to His human soul by His Divine Person; and the third gave Him immediate knowledge of His Father.”
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PeterK
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I am always amazed at trajectory of the Genesis/creation-vs-evolution/literal-vs-symbolic discussions. This time the divine/human nature of Jesus weighed in on the debate. These threads never disappoint. 
Peter
Peter
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DLC
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You tell your friend that Adam And Eve were real people because that is what is recorded in the bible by God Himself. You have to wonder though if your friend are just trying argue with you though. Can you defend the inspiration of the Bible. If you can go for it. Your friend will either believe it or not. Another thing to try is share with the Gospel, 1cor 15: 1-4; Eph 2:8-9; John 3:16-19.
Your frinds may need to be saved by faith alone in Christ.
Your frinds may need to be saved by faith alone in Christ.
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