The Incarnation (Thomists vs. Scotists)

[Aelred_Minor]

Interesting Thoughts !!!

But if the above as you describe would have taken place #1. The Divine Plan of Redemption would never have taken place. #2. We wouldn’t be in this world speaking about it right now.

Right, which is why God permitted it to happen another way. Still, we shouldn’t dismiss the sense in which God really did wish the best upon the world and had a plan of sorts of how it “should” go, if free creatures never chose to sin.

All things past, present, future have been all Ordained by God who reigns inside and outside the (“human”) understanding of time.

Be careful about how you phrase that. I doubt it’s what you mean, but it could be construed as saying God ordains evil as though it were good. God neither creates evil nor wills it in and of itself. He wills it in a permissive manner, allowing it to come to pass through the free decisions of free creatures in order to bring about an otherwise logically impossible greater good out of it.

 

[centurionguard]

Right, which is why God permitted it to happen another way. Still, we shouldn’t dismiss the sense in which God really did wish the best upon the world and had a plan of sorts of how it “should” go, if free creatures never chose to sin.

Be careful about how you phrase that. I doubt it’s what you mean, but it could be construed as saying God ordains evil as though it were good. God neither creates evil nor wills it in and of itself. He wills it in a permissive manner, allowing it to come to pass through the free decisions of free creatures in order to bring about an otherwise logically impossible greater good out of it.

Well no obviously. I was speaking about all good things created and ordained by God. But as far as all Evil is concerned, God doesn’t ordain it to happen by rather permits it to happen.

Isaias Chapter 55 verses 10-11
drbo.org/chapter/27055.htm

[10] And as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and return no more thither, but soak the earth, and water it, and make it to spring, and give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater:
[11] So shall my word be, which shall go forth from my mouth: it shall not return to me void, but it shall do whatsoever I please, and shall prosper in the things for which I sent it.

 

[Trevor_Stamm]

Well no obviously. I was speaking about all good things created and ordained by God. But as far as all Evil is concerned, God doesn’t ordain it to happen by rather permits it to happen.

St. Aquinas spoke about this in…

Compendium Theologiae

PART ONE FAITH, FIRST TREATISE ON FAITH THE DIVINE TRINITY, CHAPTER 109:

THE ESSENTIAL GOODNESS OF GOD AND THE PARTICIPATED GOODNESS OF CREATURES

*All this brings to light the different relationship that God and creatures have to goodness. We may examine this difference from the standpoint of the two kinds of goodness discerned in creatures. Since the good has the nature of perfection and of end, the twofold perfection and end of the creature disclose its twofold goodness. A certain perfection is observed in the creature inasmuch as it persists in its nature. This perfection is the end of its generation or formation. The creature has a further perfection which it reaches by its motion or activity. This perfection is the end of its movement or operation.

In both kinds of perfection the creature falls short of the divine goodness. The form and existence of a thing are its good and perfection when considered from the standpoint of the thing’s nature. But a composite substance is neither its own form nor its own existence; and a simple substance, although it is its own form, is not its own existence. God, however, is His own essence and His own existence, as was shown above.

Likewise, all creatures receive their perfect goodness from an end extrinsic to them. For the perfection of goodness consists in attainment of the ultimate end. But the ultimate end of any creature is outside the creature. This end is the divine goodness, which is not ordained to any ulterior end. Consequently God is His own goodness in every way and is essentially good. This cannot be said of simple creatures, because they are not their own existence, and also because they are ordained to something external as to their ultimate end. As for composite substances, clearly they are not their own goodness in any way. Hence God alone is His own goodness, and He alone is essentially good. All other beings are said to be good according as they participate, to some extent, in Him.*

I would agree with him that God is essential good, as in the most good. And beings are not essential most good, but are good to a degree in a participation of the Divine Goodness. Though I would say our essence is not complete in goodness until we are in full communion with His Divine Nature in Heaven, only then can we realize the full meaning of our essence and existence. Only in Heaven can our essence be most good to it’s intended maximum, but God is and will ever be the essential most good of all that has no maximum of goodness but unlimited.

 

[rcjones]

Ave Maria,

I’d like to see what the community here thinks about the Incarnation with the Thomistic thesis and the Franciscan thesis.

As St. Aquinas believed the Incarnation would not have happened if man did not sin, that Christ was begotten to Redeem mankind for Adam and Eve’s actions.

And Blessed John Duns Scotus believed the Incarnation would have happened regardless if man have sinned or not, that Jesus was the masterpiece of God and willed first.
…

Thoughts?

Scotus is correct based on the interpretation of sensus plenior.

Darkness does not represent sin, else God existed in sin before creation. It represents Grace. The Light represents holiness.

God existed in Grace/love before creation. The Trinity was in perfect harmony. Holiness represented by Light existed since Elohim has the pun ‘Not Dark’ but there was no place for the light to shine until the creation. Holiness is separation, and there was no separation in the Trinity. The Light is both self-existent in Elohim, and created. A perfect picture of the dual nature of Christ as eternal God and man.

At the time of creation, the creation itself was separate from God. Therefor it was ‘unholy’. I did not say evil. It was good, just as Genesis says, but God was separate from it. This separation would require God to destroy the creation the instant it appeared were it not for the promise of the cross.

So mankind, living in darkness/grace is not destroyed because as Paul says, life is justified by the blood.

Adam and Eve were created to be a Bride to God in the flesh. No incarnation, no wedding. Eve was created from the sleep/death of Adam before there was sin as a picture that the bride of Christ would come from his death.

He was not made in the flesh for us. We were made for him.

 

[rcjones]

… But strangely enough, St. Aquinas stated that “The tree was called the tree of knowledge of good and evil, not because it had the power to cause knowledge, but because of the sequel: by eating of it man learned by experience the difference between the good of obedience and the evil of disobedience.” With this observation it is fully open to suggest the fall was necessary for us to ultimately know why, by action of free will, we need to obey and to ultimately want to love Him freely. This does not suggest God willed sin into existence or evil to occur, for that which happened (Lucifer’s actions, The Fall, etc…) was done out the agents free will. The actual existing reality we live is the truest and best for created beings to know God, love God, and to serve God.

God split the revelation of himself into one of grace, represented by the tree of life, and one of Holiness/separate by the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They were split because we cannot understand either when they are mixed.

Grasping for the divine, something Jesus did not do, is the primary sin of man. God wants to dwell with us, but we must always recognize that he is not our peer. We must acknowledge him as God.

Jesus reconciles the two revelations of God on the cross. It is because of the cross we can understand that God is Love and He is Holy.

The sin of the garden was in violating God’s Holiness and resulted in a greater separation from him in order to make the point. The calamity in this world joins with our genetic knowledge of God to proclaim that ‘it’ is supposed to be better than this. The calamity is designed to drive us instinctively back to God. But instead we try to improve things without him by improving society, education, man-made religion, etc.

You are right. Even the calamity is the best for us in order to bring us back to God.

 

[SGWessells]

IMHO it was destined even before our Ancestral Parents were created in God’s Divine Plan that we were purposefully designed with the flaw of our lower nature.
God is All-Knowing. We were created as lower creatures than the Angels.
We would be like angelic creatures had their been no original temptation of sin.

Beside the fact after the Great War that broke out in heaven Lucifer/Satan lost most of his powers and was thrown to earth before humans even existed. Thus Satan once a great Angel of God himself loathed the thought of God sharing His thoughts of creating lower creatures and giving them the spiritual potential to become even greater than the Angels. God’s Divine Plan of Redemption already existed in eternity.

I sometimes wonder if this was one of the huge reasons why Lucifer once one of Gods most loved and greatest of angels turned against God when he learned of Gods Divine Plan of Redemption and creating lower creatures as humans. Pride entered Lucifer’s heart when he found out about Gods Plan.

While we’re indulging in fantasies, I wonder whether God intended for the fall to happen, since as designer of human character, he should have known that the best way to get most people to do something is to forbid them to do it. Especially when our curiosity is aroused.
Also, ever notice that in the story, everything the devil said was right? God said that in the day they ate of the fruit, they would die; Satan said they wouldn’t. Genesis says they ate the fruit and lived for many years afterward. Satan says that God knows that they will be like God, knowing good and evil, if they eat. In 3:22, God says, “the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil.”

 

[rcjones]

Also, ever notice that in the story, everything the devil said was right? God said that in the day they ate of the fruit, they would die; Satan said they wouldn’t. Genesis says they ate the fruit and lived for many years afterward. Satan says that God knows that they will be like God, knowing good and evil, if they eat. In 3:22, God says, “the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil.”

All of the scriptures are written so that you may read them in the flesh and accuse God, or read them in the spirit and agree with Him. See how many starting posts in threads start out with something like “God said this and it can’t possibly be true…”.

Adam died that day since he was spiritually separated from God.
After that day they only knew evil continually:
Ge 6:5 And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

Adam had define good and evil for himself. He had grasped at the divine. But he was incapable of defining good and evil for real. Only God defines real good and evil so Adam was tossed out for pretending to be a god.

Furthermore he didn’t see, he was made blind spiritually. And instead of being like God, he became a slave to sin.

The serpent is called the Father of lies because he lied.

 

[SGWessells]

rcjones wrote: " The calamity in this world joins with our genetic knowledge of God to proclaim that ‘it’ is supposed to be better than this. The calamity is designed to drive us instinctively back to God. But instead we try to improve things without him by improving society, education, man-made religion, etc. "

It is difficult for me to respond to this without sarcasm as withering as I can make it, but I will try.
Are you seriously suggesting, on the eve of the 10th anniversary of 9/11, of all days, that God designs calamities, flattens buildings, wrecks cities with tornadoes and hurricanes killing men, women,. and children, causes rivers of tears and anguish, to “bring us back to him”? That’s like saying a human father should beat and torture his children to make them love him more. You know as well as I that the opposite would happen. My wife had a rigidly controlling and abusive father, and after forty years has still not entirely recovered from the negative effects of her upbringing. Who of us knows how many people have been driven away from God by these very calamities? Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Weisel said as much in his book “Night.” The horrors of the Holocaust, which, according to you, God designed to bring humanity back to him, drove this profoundly stricken man into lifelong atheism…and who knows how many others? If God’s plan was to restore piety by evils, disasters, blood and death, I doubt it’s working, since the 20th century surpassed all others in calamity and the 21st has seen an unprecedented increase in unbelievers.
So I ask you, why should we want to go back to such a monster as you describe God to be, who tortures millions to glorify himself?

 

[SGWessells]

Aelred Minor wrote: "To this line of reasoning you might say, “well, tell that to a mother who just lost her child” or “exactly how did Auschwitz glorify God?” There is great power to these objections, because they are evils of such intensity. Confronting them helps us remember that why God permits evil is still truly a mystery and no theologian has even, I dare say, really explained it fully and satisfyingly. "

First, thank you for your thoughtful and challenging reply. I return the favor of imagining your response to my objection to the above quote that “if theologians can’t explain it, how do we even know that God is infinite perfection at all?” Would you at this point say, as many others would, “that is where faith comes in?” Or would you bury me under more philosophy?
I understand what you say about lesser goods such as human happiness; I’m just not convinced that they are lesser goods. Presuming that we have a standard by which good can be quantified, that is. How much evil can be permitted before the good that God brings out of it is still greater, and therefore justifies the evil (presuming that it does at all)? How do we know? Somehow it seems almost obscene to ask, considering how real and agonizing the evil, and how abstract, distant, and merely hoped for is the good. Sometimes I think that greater good idea is just whistling in the dark, a comforting fairy tale we tell ourselves because life would be unbearable without it. That being the case, isn’t a belief so urgently needed, yet so incredible that we need philosophical abstractions dragging God’s perfection out into filaments of promises that entrap our sorrows like spiderwebs and blot our tears, rather suspect? If the psychological benefits of such a faith are so great, how can we assutre ourselves that our assent is anywhere near objective?

Aelred again: “What we can say safely is that if God exists, then there is a reason for these things, and we can trust Him to run the universe in the way He really should.”

With all due respect, that is exactly what I cannot say, unless I beg the question by defining God beforehand as “the infinitely perfect Being who has a good reason for permitting evil and is running the universe as he should.” But in the Book of Job, God doesn’t justify himself by elaborate philosophies of the implications of perfection as related to goodness. He simply asks Job on his dung-heap, scraping his boils, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth”? In other words, I am vastly more wise and powerful than you, so you cannot judge me no matter how right your cause may seem to you. And in other books of the Bible, God is recorded as doing things which, if a human despot did them, we would regard him as a monster of depravity. If the Bible is written for our instruction, to show us God’s character, then why shouldn’t we judge him by these actions? When he orders his people to massacre all the males and mothers of a town, but leave the nubile virgins for themselves (Num. 31:18), how can anyone imagine that such a cruelty glorifies God? Or maybe rcjones can speculate on how many of those helpless virgins, raped by the invaders who had killed their fathers and brothers, were inspired by that calamity to return to God. There are too many barbarities of God’s doing in the OT to list here, but if true, they would raise more doubts about God’s benevolence than even Aquinas can satisfy. That is why I think it glorifies God more to say, he couldn’t have done those things, therefore the Bible is wrong about him, therefore the Church is wrong about the Bible, therefore the Church teaches erroneously sometimes; and if here, where else? Eventually the whole house of cards comes crashing down.

 

[rcjones]

rcjones wrote: " The calamity in this world joins with our genetic knowledge of God to proclaim that ‘it’ is supposed to be better than this. The calamity is designed to drive us instinctively back to God. But instead we try to improve things without him by improving society, education, man-made religion, etc. "

It is difficult for me to respond to this without sarcasm as withering as I can make it, but I will try.
Are you seriously suggesting, on the eve of the 10th anniversary of 9/11, of all days, that God designs calamities, flattens buildings, wrecks cities with tornadoes and hurricanes killing men, women,. and children, causes rivers of tears and anguish, to “bring us back to him”? That’s like saying a human father should beat and torture his children to make them love him more. You know as well as I that the opposite would happen. My wife had a rigidly controlling and abusive father, and after forty years has still not entirely recovered from the negative effects of her upbringing. Who of us knows how many people have been driven away from God by these very calamities? Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Weisel said as much in his book “Night.” The horrors of the Holocaust, which, according to you, God designed to bring humanity back to him, drove this profoundly stricken man into lifelong atheism…and who knows how many others? If God’s plan was to restore piety by evils, disasters, blood and death, I doubt it’s working, since the 20th century surpassed all others in calamity and the 21st has seen an unprecedented increase in unbelievers.
So I ask you, why should we want to go back to such a monster as you describe God to be, who tortures millions to glorify himself?

You may be as sarcastic as you wish. I am suggesting we believe what God says about himself no matter how much you wish to disbelieve it yourself. The fact that you know that it is supposed to be better than this is a testimony within you that there is a God.

Isa 45:7 I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil (calamity): I the LORD do all these things.

Ro 1:18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness;

…which follows with an explanation of how God gives us what we want and lets us wallow in the consequences. Our rebelliousness (collectively) is the proximate cause. He created the system where our rebelliousness creates the calamity. And he says His system is good.

You get the consequences of wanting to determine good and evil yourself, and then blame God for the resulting mess. It is pure rebelliousness to not accept the testimony within you that this world is fallen because of us and that only God can make it better. No amount of ‘civilization’ , education, political correctness, “let’s all just be friends”, hands around the world, people feeding people, thousand points of light, etc. is going to change it.

It is only the most hardened of hearts that believes that anything but God can resolve it. This short life we have is only a shadows of the real eternal life. The death we face here is only a shadow of eternal death. Only those who do not trust God fear this death and blow it’s affect out of proportion.

A universe where rebellion had no consequence would be Hell. So yes. The consequences of our rebellion should drive us back to Him.