(…CONTINUED…)
Then kindly explain who these “Sons of God” were that had sex with the “daughters of man” and gave birth to the “heroes of old”? Every commentary on this matter that I have ever heard has implied that demons mated with women. If you have a different understanding, I would be most interested in hearing it.
The story of the Nephilim suggests one of a couple of distinctly unpalatable things:
1–That Angels and / or Demons have genes that they can pass on (through sexual intercourse) to mortals.
2–That Angels Demons can incarnate (which raises number of throny issues–and I’ll quote my previous post):…how is this incarnation accomplished? Do they inhabit a body? Animate it? Is it accomplished through possession? Or do they,
like Jesus Christ become flesh? And how is that possible? How is it that a demon, who has no flesh, can become flesh? Do they share in the nature of the flesh into which they incarnate, like Jesus did? If they don’t, how is it that they incarnate, as the only nature they would inhabit is their own, and as their own nature is fleshless, how is it that they can put on flesh?
Option one posits that the Angels and Demons are not bodiless. Option two posits that Angels and Demons can assume the prerogatives over nature and creature that are reserved only to the Son of God.
Among the only options that are remotely sound, it seems to me, are:
1–that the Nephilim story does not reveal doctrine (or if it does, it does so in a
non-literal way).
2–that the Nephilim story is a way of
including stories of heroes and demigods encountered by the Hebrew nations into their monotheistic belief by attributing their rise to demons or angels.
3–that the intercourse between demons and women was spiritual, non-physical --consider, for instance, the old Jewish/Kabbalistic folk belief that demons are created through nocturnal emissions–representing copulation in dreams with a spirit–which would suggest one of two things–that a demon is made from the corruption of matter, or that a demon is made from the subtle “tissue” of an impure thought–certainly such thoughts can be obsessive–see the writings of Evagrius Ponticus for explication of a similar idea.
The assumption that demons
physically mated with women assumes that hell is a
physical place (somewhere, perhaps, near the center of the earth) and not a
spiritual reality. I reject such materialism.
And what was the point of Satan tempting Eve? Didn’t God USE Satan to test us by ALLOWING Satan to tempt Eve? If God used Satan for this purpose, which by the way, lead to the fall of mankind where MANY were damned, why could God not use them to cleanse the earth?
God didn’t
use Satan by
allowing Satan to do anything. God’s allowance of the parasitical existence of evil does not therefore imply agency on God’s part–this makes God out ot be somewhat horribly duplicitous. Which he is not–see Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysius on the nature of evil.
To believe that God used Satan to tempt Eve is to believe that God is cruel or that God just didn’t trust us very much, and like an irrational human being, decided to tempt us into destroying ourselves. What kind of theology is that??
Eve was tempted because she had the thought the she would like to eat the fruit of the tree despite what she knew was the right thing to do–she was tempted because she began to see her creaturliness as something to be valued
in itself and not something that has value
only in relationship with God. She was tempted because she was given the ability to love, and she chose to love herself and not God. God is not duplicitous, Sir Knight.
And God does not use demons to cleanse anything. If it were possible to do so, why didn’t a demon cleanse the world instead of the Holy Blood of Jesus? You try purifying dirty water with mud, or investigate what happens when you clean a dirty window with sewage.
(CONTINUED…)
