Mormon general authority teaches God the Father is resurrected being

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God also apparently lives on a planet called Kolob and has a wifes and children too.
 
gazelam said:
Sorry. Voluntarily taking on an additional nature is change.
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A change in the assumed nature. That’s kind of the whole point of the Incarnation: The Divine Logos who is the second person of the Holy Trinity assumed a human nature and in so doing perfected that nature while in no way altering His divine nature.
 
AlbertDerGrosse said:
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gazelam:
Sorry. Voluntarily taking on an additional nature is change.
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A change in the assumed nature. That’s kind of the whole point of the Incarnation: The Divine Logos who is the second person of the Holy Trinity assumed a human nature and in so doing perfected that nature while in no way altering His divine nature.
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You neglected to mention that the two natures are united in orthodox Christian belief. Before the Incarnation you have Christ with a single divine nature. After the Incarnation you have Christ with two united natures. Going from one nature to two united natures is… change.
 
gazelam said:
You neglected to mention that the two natures are united in orthodox Christian belief.
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The two natures are “united” as in blended into a new amalgam of the two? No, this is not orthodoxy. It’s Monophysitism, which was condemned at the Council of Chalcedon. The two natures of Christ are in a hypostatic union and remain distinct. The unity of the natures doesn’t occur at the level of the substance (ousia) rather the person (hypostasis).

Divinity is perfect, infinite, and immutable. It is impossible to add to, augment, increase, or otherwise alter a perfect, infinite, and immutable nature. When the two natures were hypostatically united in the person of Jesus Christ (not one nature being engulfed by the other nature) the only nature capable of being added to, augmented, increased, or otherwise altered was his humanity. It’s by that very hypostatic union in the incarnation that the humanity in which we are consubstantial with Christ is dignified and deified.
Before the Incarnation you have Christ with a single divine nature. After the Incarnation you have Christ with two united natures. Going from one nature to two united natures is… change.
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No it is not. An increase in quantity of possession is not a change in one’s nature. If you have a dollar and I give you another dollar does that in any way change your nature? Does it even change the nature of the first dollar bill that you have?
 
gazelam said:
Better stated would be “No it is not, according to Trinitarian Christianity”.
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Trinitarian Christianity is as redundant as herbivorous vegetarian. Christianity is by definition trinitarian. It was defined as such 1500 years before Joseph Smith Jr., Ellen G. White, Charles Taze Russell, or any of the other 19th century American cult founders came into the picture repackaging heresies long ago settled.
 
gazelam said:
Where do Latter-day Saints teach that?!?!
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Joseph Smith made it up while translating Egyptian papyri. He said it was a Book of Abraham when, in fact, it was an ancient funeral text. Many unique (non-christian) teachings of the Mormon Church were invented this way.
 
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How can Mormons be Christians if they believe 1) Jesus is “a God” (Book of Mormon) and 2) that the Evil One is the “brother” of Jesus (!😱)?

I’m not a theologian but the last time I looked at a Catholic catechism, it says that there are three Persons in God - +Father, Son and Holy Spirit and that Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary.

By that standard, they are not Christian.
 
Stephen168 said:
As I’ve said before, Mormon apologists will quote a Church Father as if he believed the statement. When in fact, the Church Father is making a statement, and then will explain why the statement is false.
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And they do it with contemporary Catholic/Christian scholars too, as if they believe in Mormonism’s queer doctrines. @gazelam is doing it in this very thread with the Rev. Stanley Jaki, OSB completely misunderstanding his work as an endorsement of creatio ex materia, which it isn’t:
Rev. StanleyJaki OSB:
Genesis 1 is the most newsworthy chapter in the Bible. There can never be more fundamental news than that all depends on God because he made all, indeed the all, or the universe. This news did not come from any of the sages of ancient cultures. Genesis 1 is the most memorable source of that news, though in a way which has been all too often taken for a confrontation with news science seems to provide about the origin of the universe. Legion is the number of exegetes and theologians who in modern scientific times wanted to appear more newsworthy by showing that there is an agreement, a concordance, between the majestic diction of Genesis 1 and the science of the day.

[…]

Just as much of Patristic exegesis of Genesis 1 was a cavorting in metaphorical poetry, much of Scholastic exegesis was an exercise in at times mind-boggling hair-splitting. This was all the more tragic because both the Fathers and the Scholastics offered in the context of their exegesis of Genesis 1 a series of important statements: God is absolutely transcendent; God is absolutely free to create; God is in no need of a pre-existing matter; God creates everything out of nothing; God created only once; God created a fully consistent realm of matter; God created for his own glory; God created man in his own image and as his own steward in the world; and, finally, just as God worked six days and rested on the seventh, so man too should work, but rest on the seventh day. All these statements could only be threatened in a concordist context. For concordism is a radical misunderstanding and as such it can only bring discredit to very sound philosophical and theological doctrines set forth, or intimated, in Genesis 1.

[…]
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Continued below…
 
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Continued from above…
Rev. Stanley Jaki OSB:
[…]

Genesis 1 is certainly unique inasmuch as in the Bible, which for the most part is either narrative or exhortational, it is a particularly didactic treatise, with an almost scholastic touch. The expression “scholastic” was first used in this connection by that memorable Catholic modernist, Alfred Loisy, who certainly wished it to be otherwise. Genesis 1 also combines three messages in a single recital or form, a further proof of the unusual literary mastery it embodies.

One message, and possibly the chief message, is about the respect due to the Sabbath. It is well to recall that the observance of the Sabbath was a standing or falling proposition throughout the Old Testament. It was that observance that set aside the Jewish week from the equally seven-day weeks of neighboring cultures. Throughout the Old Testament, faithfulness to ritual observance was a chief means of preserving the Jewish people as a depository of revelation. This faithfulness was particularly threatened in the Babylonian captivity and through a total lack of Jewish rule in the Holy Land proper at the same time.

[…]

Few words in the entire Bible have been more misunderstood. Etymologically, bara means to cut and to slash. By the time of the Exile the verb bara had been restricted (with three important exceptions) to acts performed by God. Why was the action of cutting or slashing found appropriate to convey a divine action? The answer may seem to be the fact that any divine action should have at least one characteristic that differentiates it from human actions: Unlike humans, who work and perform laboriously, God does everything with supreme ease. It was precisely that ease which the verb bara could readily convey to those for whom Hebrew was still a spoken or a quasi-spoken (in Aramaic times) language.

That touch of ease was eroded in subsequent rabbinical tradition and certainly in Christian theological tradition in which bara became equated with “created” and with “created out of nothing.” The basic meaning of creare was to grow, hardly a word to convey ease. Of course, when God creates, He creates out of nothing. But neither in Genesis 1 nor elsewhere in the Bible can bara be taken in that sense, however sound that sense may be dogmatically, though having no etymological connection with bara.
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Continued below…
 
Continued from above…
Rev. Stanley Jaki OSB:
[…]

In order to do etymological justice to bara, without doing theological injustice to it, it may be best to see it as a means of conveying an action of God who does something with the greatest ease, as if with a flourish. This English idiom is all the more appropriate because it implies a slashing motion with one’s hand and arm. In other words, one should read verse 1 in Genesis 1 as “In the beginning God made with the greatest ease, as if with a flourish, the heaven and earth, or the entire totality of things.” For “heaven and earth” means, as will be seen shortly, precisely that totality.
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TLDR:

Jaki is not arguing that creation ex nihilo is false or a concoction of the Early Church Fathers. He’s arguing against concordism as a school of thought that tries to shoe horn the natural sciences into the narrative. He posits that the didactic thrust of Genesis 1 is to set the Jews apart as a unique people (namely by their observance of the Sabbath) and to convey that God’s creative power is not laborious.

Whether you agree or disagree with Jaki’s conclusions about the etymology of the Hebrew bara (which seems to be @gazelam’s main obsession here) he quite emphatically affirms the theological conclusion that God created the totality of all things.
 
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