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fhansen
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This is what I’m asking about. Do you have an understanding of how “death generates in us the passions”?
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grannymh
Guest
While it is true that Adam started out with *mastery of self (CCC , 377) *which is harmony within known as “original justice” (CCC, 376; CCC, 384)),
his human nature made it possible to choose a lessor good by freely and willingly choosing to disobey God’s commandment. (CCC, 397-398) As the first human creature in the Garden, Adam is dependent on his Creator and subject to the laws of creation and to the moral norms that govern the use of freedom. (CCC, 396)
Original Sin caused the “death” of Adam’s soul in that it no longer was sharing in God’s divine life. In turn, because of this, Adam lost his inner harmony of original justice.(CCC, 379) Adam also lost the unearned gift of immortality.
(CCC 374-376; CCC, 415-419)
It is not exactly that death generated the passions in Adam, because the passions, if you prefer that word, were already there. What died was Adam’s mastery of self which resulted in the inordinate, unreasonable misuse of what was already there. This is known as the triple concupiscence. (CCC, 377; CCC, 2514; CCC, 400)
As an aid for understanding the above.
**CCC, 1730 **God created man a rational being, conferring on him the dignity of a person who can initiate and control his own actions. “God willed that man should be ‘left in the hand of his own counsel,’ so that he might of his own accord seek his Creator and freely attain his full and blessed perfection by cleaving to him.”
Man is rational and therefore like God; he is created with free will and is master over his acts.
**CCC, 1731 **Freedom is the power, rooted in reason and will, to act or not to act, to do this or that, and so to perform deliberate actions on one’s own responsibility. By free will one shapes one’s own life. Human freedom is a force for growth and maturity in truth and goodness; it attains its perfection when directed toward God, our beatitude.
**CCC, 1731 **Freedom is the power, rooted in reason and will, to act or not to act, to do this or that, and so to perform deliberate actions on one’s own responsibility. By free will one shapes one’s own life. Human freedom is a force for growth and maturity in truth and goodness; it attains its perfection when directed toward God, our beatitude.
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fhansen
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Thank you, granny. But if I understand correctly, one EO teaching is that the specter of physical death drives man to disordered passions/desires. Our sin is caused by this single reality that all men inherited from Adam rather than by an unjust state of our souls which would likewise be inherited.
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grannymh
Guest
The reason I put the final sentence in bold is that both approaches fall short of human nature, Adam’s and ours, as taught by the Catholic Church. It is important to recognize that even though Adam lost his inner harmony of original justice, he did not lose the capability of returning to a *mastery of self *in various degrees. In other words, Adam did not lose his intellect and free will which are essential elements of human nature as taught by Catholicism. Currently, when we sin, we have the Catholic Sacrament of Reconciliation, which provides grace for our future when we again face the temptations involved with concupiscence. The graces provided by the seven Sacraments are meant to strengthen us daily.
Going back to post 768, it probably would have been better to put CCC, 1730 & 1731 at the beginning so that readers would recognize their importance. The presence of concupiscence within us and our bodily death are trumped by the “freedom” taught in these two paragraphs.
St. Paul is a good example of standing firm against the “specter of physical death.” Being faithful to Jesus Christ overcomes our concupiscence.
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OneSheep
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I patiently anticipate your response to my counterpoint, which is included in post #721. Be brave, Glamorous Granny. You have the freedom to respond to the post or not, but I think it would add to your voice if you could respond.
forums.catholic-questions.org/showpost.php?p=11420780&postcount=721
We are masters over our acts, true. The problem is that our mastery is guided by the content of our minds, and we are born ignorant. In addition, our conscience blinds us.
I will clarify that last sentence on my next post.
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vames
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We remember Theophilus: Adam was neither immortal, nor mortal, but just free to choose between the “things of life” (listening to God) and the “things of death” (listening to the devil). So when he chose to listen to the devil, he defined the human nature according to the law of death: people being born in spiritual death and subjected to mortality. For Adam, death came *after *his sin; for his descendants, death comes *before *everything else: before their personal sins and before the Laws (of Moses) that will define and punish their personal sins. The same Romans 5 says: “13. sin was indeed in the world before the law, but sin is not reckoned when there is no law. 14. Yet death exercised dominion from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sins were not like the transgression of Adam, who is a type of the one who was to come”.
So, like I said before, death comes first. On the one hand, when one is spiritually dead, the outcome is weakness before sin, because spiritual death means blindness, hardening of heart. On the other hand, when one realizes that he is mortal, he becomes egoistic, he’s in a hurry to accumulate things and goes to great lenghts to avoid losing time, possessions, the love of other people. The instinct of survival and everything that it entails, including the sins committed in its name, can exist only in an mortal being. To this I should add what Vladimir Lossky called “angelism and babelism”: the frustration brought by mortality leads some people to deceive themselves, either by thinking they can find salvation and deify themselves by their own powers or by seeking refuge in any pleasure that can help them forget death.
The bishop Theodoret of Cyrus (a blessed one in the EO) has this commentary on Romans 5: “The mortal condition requires many supports - food, drink, clothing, housing, and a variety of skills - and the need for such supplies often incites the passions to excess and thus involved sin”. After the Law (of Moses and then Jesus) was given, these sins became punishable on their own: “The condition of death prevails over all humanity, then, because all have sinned. So each person stands under sentence of death, not on account of the sin of the first parent, but through each one’s own transgression”.
Paul says “by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners”. John Chrysostom asked: “How would it follow that from his disobedience another would become a sinner? For at this rate a man of this sort will not even deserve punishment, if, that is, it was not from his own self that he became a sinner. What then does the word “sinners” mean here? To me it seems to mean liable to punishment and condemned to death”. The same idea in Cyril of Alexandria: “Surely the soul caught up in sin shall die. We have become sinners in just this sense through the disobedience of Adam”.
Paul described himself as “sold under sin”, says Chrysostom, “because with death (he means) the throng of passions also came in. For when the body had become mortal, it was henceforth a necessary thing for it to receive concupiscence, and anger, and pain, and all the other passions, which required a great deal of wisdom to prevent their flooding us, and sinking reason in the depth of sin. For in themselves they were not sin, but, when their extravagancy was unbridled, it wrought this effect”.
In this sense, if for Adam sin became death, for us the general law of death became the general law of sin: “Then many became sinners, not because they transgressed with Adam - they were not yet alive - but because they shared his nature and thus became subject to the law of sin in it. For just as in Adam human nature was ruined by corruption through disobedience and was invaded by the passions, so this same nature was afterward restored and liberated in Christ” (Cyril).
The ECF felt the need to come with this explanation because they wanted to reconcile God’s righteousness (Parents shall not be put to death for their children, nor the children for their parents…) with Paul’s sentence “by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners”. So God didn’t blame unborn people as “sinners” for a sin that they didn’t commit; we only became sinners because the punishment for Adam’s sin was death (which was also a merciful, medicinal punishment, as we remember), and we are born in this death.
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vames
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Uh, I didn’t say that Orthodoxy isn’t dualistic at this point, because both understandings of the AS/OS have Paul at their root, and Paul’s thinking is dualistic. The OS has the offended God on one side and a man who has to pay, to satisfy the divine justice on the other side. The AS has God on one side, who is the source of life, the devil who is the agent of death on the other side and the man in between, who has to regain his lost life. The OS is the cause and the pattern of all offenses towards God, so even after Jesus “satisfied the divine justice”, our sins always need particular acts of “satisfying the divine justice”, in this life and in the other, which explains the necessity of purgatory, which is absent from Orthodoxy. The AS is the cause and the pattern of all bodily and spiritual death and corruption, so when Jesus heals the human nature by “recapitulating” human existence, defeats the devil and the death by his own death and reunites man with God (spiritual life) and body with soul (bodily life), man regains access to life and can begin the process of theosis, aka unification with the energies of God.
The impression of non-dualism at this point is the result of the particular way of approaching the AS. The OS and our sins are approached by a rational mindset, which means that you have to see things clearly classified and opposed: the perfect control of Adam over his “flesh” / our disobedient “flesh”, infinite offense / infinite satisfaction, mortal / venial sin, XX prayers or penances / indulgences of XX days or years in purgatory etc. The AS and our sins are approached by an archaic mindset, which means that you will have to see things in all their prophetic and poetic meaning. Death and Devil are truly cosmic forces which can overlap and submit each other, not concepts which can easily find their logical opposites. “Through the devil’s envy death entered the world” (Wisdom 2) and “He that has the power of death, that is to say, the devil” (Heb 2) are quoted by St Athanasius when he explained how Jesus defeats Death and Devil. Let’s see how it works.
St Athanasius: “The air is the sphere of the devil, the enemy of our race who, having fallen from heaven, endeavors with the other evil spirits who shared in his disobedience both to keep souls from the truth and to hinder the progress of those who are trying to follow it. The apostle [Paul] refers to this when he says, “According to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that now worketh in the sons of disobedience.”[Eph 2:2] But the Lord came to overthrow the devil and to purify the air and to make “a way” for us up to heaven, as the apostle says, “through the veil, that is to say, His flesh.”[Heb 10:20] This had to be done through death, and by what other kind of death could it be done, save by a death in the air, that is, on the cross?”
What did Paul say in Eph 2? My Catholic Bible has the following note: “According to the mindset of the times of St Paul, the powers of the air are evil spirits localized in the intermediary zone between heaven and earth, who control “the world of darkness” (Eph 6:12)”. Likewise in Col 1:13: “[God] has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son”. And “that devil who of old wickedly exulted in death, now that the pains of death are loosed, he alone it is who remains truly dead”.
That’s why St Athanasius treats Death like a personified cosmic enemy of man, again alluding to Paul: "Death has become like a tyrant who has been completely conquered by the legitimate monarch; bound hand and foot the passers-by sneer at him, hitting him and abusing him, no longer afraid of his cruelty and rage, because of the king who has conquered him. So has death been conquered and branded for what it is by the Savior on the cross. It is bound hand and foot, all who are in Christ trample it as they pass and as witnesses to Him deride it, scoffing and saying, “O Death, where is thy victory? O Grave, where is thy sting?[Cor 15:55]”. The old representations of the Crucifixion had a skull at the base of the cross: this is Death defeated. And there is a legend that Adam was buried on the Golgotha (=place of the skull).
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grannymh
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My first response to post 721 is human nature per se. (CCC, 355-421; CCC, 1730-1731; CCC, Glossary, Conscience, page 872; CCC, Glossary, Sanctifying Grace, page 898; CCC, Glossary, Mortal Sin, page 889)
My second response to post 721 is that God as Creator can determine human creature conditions. ( First line plus last paragraph of the Creed professed at the Sunday Holy Sacrifice of the Mass)
My response to this comment and others from post 721.
"And this is a bit confusing. If you personally retain no one’s sins, then you do not retain the sins of the unrepentant either. So, God retains sins that you do not? "
is this simple statement – I am not the goddess granny.
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OneSheep
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I have been thinking about the whole aspect of “harsh” vs “less harsh” interpretations, and I have a theory as to why it behooves theology to take the “most harsh” interpretation.
Several years ago in my area, there was a man on a large motorcycle who was driving dangerously fast, and rounding a corner struck a 12-year-old boy. Police arriving at the scene found the driver, who had taken his pistol and committed suicide. The boy was severely injured, but not dead, and eventually recovered. Everyone concluded that the man was his own prosecutor, judge, and executioner.
What is the conscience? When we are wee children, the first voice that guides our behaviors is “I want that, I want that.” among other voices such as “that hurts”. As we get older, a deeper voice develops, one that guides our behaviors. It is a voice that says “doing that is bad” and “if you do this, you are a bad person” (I am using “bad” here, as you know, to mean any negative). It is the conscience, and the conscience is a gift from God that guides our behaviors.
The conscience is a somewhat separate circuit in the human. The man probably saw his sin, and immediately felt guilty. The man did not decide to feel guilty, it was his conscience that created the reaction.
But what else does the conscience do? Here, I take the position that the conscience includes other subsequent reactions. The conscience triggers the drive to punish what we see as wrongdoing. In order to punish, inflict harm in any way as a reprimand, the conscience has to “shut off” empathy. It is extremely difficult to enact punishment if we are feeling, simultaneously, a desire to embrace with sympathy. So, the conscience blinds the man to his own value, he immediately sees himself as less than dirt, depraved,worthy of the worst of consequences, death itself. The man doesn’t decide that he is worthless, it is an automatic reaction tied up with the self-resentment.
So, the way I am looking at it, the conscience includes the prosecutor, judge, and executioner, and this is the “voice” we hear within. Jesus, of course shows us a deeper voice, but the voice of the conscience is still to be valued as a guide, over-zealous it may be.
Original Sin must reflect such workings of the conscience, such “worst case scenario”, in order to truly capture its severity. To present “Original Sin Lite” is a sugar-coating.
So really, no “modification” of the OS doctrine is necessary, other than the explanation that the whole doctrine reflects the workings of God As Equated With Conscience, the voice inside that guides our “goodness”, but that there is yet a deeper voice, the voice of Unconditional Love and Forgiveness, which Jesus showed us from the cross.
You did mention, early on, the idea that forgiveness, also, is part of our conscience, an informed conscience. I don’t know. Perhaps this is the “new law” that Jesus and His followers allude to. What I do know is that my own conscience does not react when I fail to forgive. My conscience says “that person is bad”, and leaves it at that. Understanding, whether eventual or purposeful, gives some awareness to relieve the conscience, but to me such a decision to forgive is a matter of will, not an automatic reaction like the workings of our conscience.
I am currently reading about reconciliation behavior in chimpanzees, and find that such behavior is more fear-driven, but I have more to read.
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fhansen
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And yet we’re told that we’re punishable due to the sin made virtually inevitable by the death which we didn’t merit on our own.
I think the differences in Catholic theology still boil down to a matter of emphasis in the end. From either perspective we’re still responsible, held accountable to one degree or another; for our turning back to God, with His help. Perhaps there’s been a bit too much emphasis in Catholicism on our unworthiness or the degree or nature of our injustice at times, but both schools of thought are pointing to an injustice either way-more a difference in scale rather than a difference in kind. Other differences stemming from the wests focus on philosophy and reason, ironically an eastern development originally, as well as juridical terminology and concepts regarding the Atonement employed by some theologians (as well as the bible for that matter), tend to give the appearance of theological differences where much is actually the same beneath the rhetoric. Just my opinion, tho. I do think we can benefit greatly by including or tending towards more of the easts “human” approach, however.
Thank you very much for the quotes and your explanations BTW. They were right on target and I finally have a better grasp on the matter. It’s not easy to find very full explanations for the manner in which death is said to influence human behavior-or how the concepts of AS and OS might truly differ, mainly due to misinterpretation of Rom 5:12. Gonna chew on it for awhile.
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simpleas
Guest
Are we really attacking God by asking and answering questions?The problem here is that a bunch of facts have been omitted like rain falling through an umbrella with holes.
1.The cliché of the “perfect” Adam misses the fact of “image”.
3.While everyone knows that babies do not come from the man’s rib,
- The mantra that the first Genesis chapter is not a science handbook misses the fact that an extremely unique decomposing anatomy exists as the pinnacle of the material universe.
the fact that human nature needed a secure beginning is overlooked.
For centuries since Pentecost, the Catholic Deposit of Faith has been guarded by the Holy Spirit which means that brilliant humans cannot alter the events at the beginning of human history. In the 21st century, brilliant humans can teach the wrong perceptions of those true events. These people are not necessarily wolves in sheep’s clothing. Often, because of their desire to be up-to-date with modern culture, people will yield to misinterpretations of both Divinity and humanity and then add their own evaluations to account for their own feelings.
- While the Garden was a great place to live, the fact is that the Kingdom of God is not reached by using GPS.
In other words, the current attack on God because He is so mean seems plausible because the original facts of Original Sin have been set aside.
If someone wants to understand Catholic teaching on human origin and human nature, then one needs to recognize and include basic original Catholic facts which, by the way, have not changed.
Perhaps it is time to discuss the facts referred to in the above four points. For example, when one examines “image”, then one can determine how perfect the cliché perfect really is according to Catholic Church teachings.
Note: “missing facts” is not an either - or situation. It is a both - and situation.
Adam was made in the image of God, and God is perfection, to me anyway, so what i’m i missing here?
Ps. I wouldn’t trust gps to get me anywhere!
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grannymh
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Are we really attacking God by asking and answering questions?
Adam was made in the image of God, and God is perfection, to me anyway, so what i’m i missing here?
Ps. I wouldn’t trust gps to get me anywhere!
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grannymh
Guest
My apology, but I do not know which questions and their answers you are referring to.
Human nature’s spiritual soul is a possibility. Another possibility is the difference between an uncreated transcendent Pure Spirit and a mortal anatomy. Or maybe it is the difference between sharing in God’s divine life and being a second god.
Then there is the simple possibility that humans have to eat in order to stay alive.
Ps. I wouldn’t trust gps to get me anywhere!
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OneSheep
Guest
First of all, thank you for responding. I appreciate your efforts, and I enjoy discussing these issues.
1857 For a sin to be mortal, three conditions must together be met: "Mortal sin is sin whose object is grave matter and which is also committed with full knowledge and deliberate consent
The first and the third condition make sense, the second is the problem. Unless you are an Omniscient Glamorous Granny, the rest of us only sin out of ignorance and blindness.
Either a) give a counterexample to the assertion that all sin involves ignorance or blindness. Please elaborate.
or b) If you agree with me that all sin involves ignorance or blindness, then how could “mortal sin” ever occur? Again, please elaborate.
Your answer:
To me, your best answer to this might be “I don’t know what sins God retains”, which is a very understandable, careful answer.
Hmmm. I’m not sure which CCC you are applying to which question, so I will number the questions. You did a great job with them when I numbered last time. Perhaps rather than citing the numbers, you could write in the pertinent answers?
1857 For a sin to be mortal, three conditions must together be met: "Mortal sin is sin whose object is grave matter and which is also committed with full knowledge and deliberate consent
The first and the third condition make sense, the second is the problem. Unless you are an Omniscient Glamorous Granny, the rest of us only sin out of ignorance and blindness.
Either a) give a counterexample to the assertion that all sin involves ignorance or blindness. Please elaborate.
or b) If you agree with me that all sin involves ignorance or blindness, then how could “mortal sin” ever occur? Again, please elaborate.
- By what means can we assume that Jesus from the cross only forgave those who were sorry? Do you have something from the CCC that says this?
- In the story of the adulterous woman, she says no words of repentance, nor does Jesus ask her to repent until after He forgives her. Jesus calls us to love our enemies, He does not call us to only forgive enemies who are sorry. In fact, only the most bitter of us will continue to hold something against those who show sorrow and repentance. Do you see that the challenge is not to simply forgive those who want to be forgiven, which comes naturally from a satisfied conscience, but to forgive everyone we hold something against, as it states in Mark11:25? Please support your answer.
- If you personally retain no one’s sins, then you do not retain the sins of the unrepentant either.
Your answer:
I’d like you to take another shot at this question. You will not find the answer in the CCC. Of course you are not the goddess granny, you are the glamorous granny. But what I asked was if you are saying that God retains sins that you do not.
To me, your best answer to this might be “I don’t know what sins God retains”, which is a very understandable, careful answer.
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grannymh
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I am sorry that I did not meet your expectations. We are simply not on the same page.
That being the case, instead of replying to your individual questions, I will continue to do my own posting. Most likely, you may find some “answers” within these posts.
Thank you sincerely for sharing your personal views.
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vames
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Because you said “the current attack on God because He is so mean seems plausible because the original facts of Original Sin have been set aside”
Nobody here has “attacked God because He is so mean”. On the contrary, we try to find out the best arguments that He is good. The very question that originates this thread, “Why are we held accountable for something someone did 1000s of years ago?”, wasn’t answered in the text of Genesis 2-3, but in the different interpretations of Genesis 2-3 that have developed throughout the history of Christianism, most of them by using St Paul’s Epistle to Romans, which in itself is an interpretation of Genesis 2-3, as a starting point. The understanding included in the CCC is not the only one that has been developed and not the only one allowed in Catholicism. To say that the CCC has the absolute, definitive monopoly over the mind of God is to say that all the saints and blessed ones who had different understandings about Genesis 2-3 were unenlightened by the Holy Spirit and that trying to explore what they have said is a waste of time or an attempt to “attack God”, as long as we already have the CCC. Others have “sola Scriptura”, but we don’t have “solus CCC”.
On the other hand, the reality is that often the CCC is ignored or misrepresented or people don’t know how to read it or just pick certain paragraphs and disregard the rest (yes, that’s me). So your posts are very useful, here and in other threads; again, thanks for your patience!
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vames
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Man’s responsibility is huge and the East doesn’t attempt to diminish the importance of sin and struggle against sin. But death and all the hardships of life are explained as medicinal punishments and works of divine mercy that challenge us, not as results of divine offense that should be paid for. So they say: we are not born indebted (and God demands payment), but captive (and God frees us).
Eastern as in Greek/Hellenistic
because you will find within Orthodoxy the opinion that Eastern Orthodoxy is more prone to the Western tendency to philosophize and to define everything by rational dogmas, while Oriental Orthodoxy (Syriac) historically has been more immune and has managed to conserve better its archaic and mystical way of thinking, closer to the spirit of Scripture.What JPII said about the Church that has to breathe with both lungs (East and West) is totally true.
Some years ago, Roman Catholics like me were officially taught that all the unbaptized infants go to limbo. Some centuries ago, other Roman Catholics were taught that all the unbaptized infants go to hell. Nowadays, the CCC says that “the Church can only entrust them to the mercy of God”. This is an Eastern understanding. Likewise, the emphasis on God’s mercy by promoting the Divine Mercy devotion is an Eastern thing (when I first found out about it, I thought it was an Orthodox import, because the Lord’s prayer and Trisagion are used in the Eastern Churches).
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vames
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What about the force of fear? (not that you mentioned chimpanzees LOL, but people happen to commit suicide out of fear of punishment) Surely, guilt and shame and fear are connected, but becoming aware of the violation of a moral standard can be separated of getting frightened of punishment. Are you sure that the driver who committed suicide was moved by guilt? It takes a shorter time and effort to process fear than guilt, because guilt means to evaluate/value your victim and the morality of your action (I killed someone… it is a 12-year-old-boy… I killed an innocent child, only because I’m addicted to the pleasure of driving fast… I’m not worthy to live anymore!), while fear is to focus on yourself and what could happen to you (I killed someone… I’ll be publicly shamed and spend XX years in jail… such life isn’t worth living!)
I guess you can successfully describe both OS and AS (and also the Protestant understandings) in terms of “punishing drive”. The AS shifts the blame to the devil more than the OS; that’s why I said that this kind of thinking is efficient, because it spares people both the risk of blaming God for punishing them too hard and the risk of blaming man for being too wicked and unworthy. That’s why at the end of the day only the deadly devil is killed and we can hate and fear the devil as much as we like, while managing to preserve our empathy, trust and hope in God and man: the devil is the ultimate scapegoat.
But the OS is also efficient, because establishes a more direct relationship between God and man, so even if you blame yourself for doing something so bad that you can’t repair it anymore and your thirst for self-punishment can’t be satisfied no matter what you do, you get a vicarious satisfaction by knowing that God can separate the part of you that deserves to be destroyed, can separate your sins from the rest of your being, like in a “bad bank”, and can allow you to continue your existence (love the sinner, hate the sin). That’s why at the end of the day only those who are totally and irevocably immersed in sin are really punished, others gladly suffer purification until their sins are paid for and those who reach heaven right after death and are beatified and fully preserve our empathy, trust and hope in God and man.
Forgiveness can be part of an informed conscience IMO because you cannot forgive if you pay attention only to the bad deed or only to the wrongdoer. When you talk about the path proposed by Augustine (trying to empathize with the other and understand or guess his initial good intentions instead of condemning him for his bad deed), you process the facts, look at the man and his circumstances, exercise judgment (discernment) and the tension between your innate + learned rulebook and the new knowledge that you acquire this way allows you to deepen your conscience.
When you forgive a woman who had an abortion instead of decreeing that all women who have abortions are ***, you exercise your discernment, intuition, understanding, based on the awareness that a woman is a real person capable of moral choices (not a dog) and on the awareness that an abortion is a bad thing. Is the real person beneath or beyond my conscience? Is my conscience doomed to behave so mechanically that it can’t process anything else than “all women who have abortions are ***”?
If you say:
conscience = knowing right from wrong = rulebook = automatic reaction = punishing drive = empathy shut off = the superficial voice within = teaching by fear
vs.
will = deciding to act = later effort = forgiveness = empathy shut on = the deeper voice within = teaching by love,
then it means that forgiveness can be only a painful effort that is always done against and despite your conscience, so your conscience won’t shut up and will make you wonder whether you have in fact merely denied or stretched your rulebook for the sake of feeling good about yourself.
On the other hand, you can skip your rulebook (which continues to exist) and skip the process of discernment etc. for the sake of the wrongdoer, when your pity is stronger than your anger.
But if forgiveness were just a matter of feeling (my compassion comes before looking at my rulebook) or will (my decision to let go of grudges comes after looking at my rulebook), then I’d be encouraged to separate “the sin from the sinner” and my conscience from the rest of my being in an artificial way. The sinner separates himself from the sin when he repents and asks you to forgive him. Easy: at that moment, both of you love the sinner and hate the sin. But when he is solidary with his sin, immersed, unseparated, how can you really forgive him if you don’t look at his whole being, with your whole being?
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vames
Guest
(posting in a hurry) *Jesus Prayer, or the “Prayer of the heart”.
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grannymh
Guest
Correct. The facts of Original Sin include the fact that God is good as the Creator. He is so good that he gave to human creatures the opportunity (created in the image of God) to share in His divine life on earth and in heaven. As God is master over His acts, likewise, He created the human person to be the “master over her or his acts” via the faculties (rational intellect and free will) of the God-created spiritual soul.Because you said “the current attack on God because He is so mean seems plausible because the original facts of Original Sin have been set aside”
If God is believed to be good at the time of the real Original Sin, there would be no reason for this comment. “On the contrary, we try to find out the best arguments that He is good.”
If God is believed to be good at the time of the real Original Sin, what kind of belief is making people upset about that Original Sin?
Obviously, the assumption is that God was bad at the time of the real Original Sin, so it is up to interpreters of Genesis 2-3, to find the best arguments for His goodness. When holding people “accountable” for something someone did at the beginning of human history is not evidence of a good God; therefore God must be …
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