Transformed or Restored?

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If God created us to be perfect and good then doesn’t salvation just return us to the original design? It seems that we talk about being transformed and sanctified. A cleansing and a moving towards being better. Even if we are saved by grace and righteous because of Christ that is still a covering of sorts. Changing us from one thing to another. Yet if God created us to be perfect then isn’t he just ‘uncovering’ the stain of original sin and returning us to our natural state? I am getting confused in my mind on this.

Recently I have been hearing about the idea of innate health. That we are created to be at peace, confidant, happy, balanced. That it makes sense God created us to be this way. Why would He create us to be broken and flawed? The idea that we are cracked pots that God loves anyway regardless of our brokenness somehow implies that He made us to broken. I think the fall of sin is what makes us ‘broken’. But can’t he just restore us to our original creation rather than changing us into something different?

For me this matters because if I think my default setting is screwed up, messed up, broken and faulty then any efforts I make to become more like Christ are very hard because my default setting wants to return me to that flawed state.

If I think my default setting is peace, love, kindness, self control etc and Christ is just removing the fallen nature that was placed on top of that and returning back to my default created setting then it is easier for me to see that this isn’t a struggle with His help since it is our natural way of being anyway.

I wonder if anyone can help me see the difference or if there is one.
 
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coffeetx said:
If God created us to be perfect and good then doesn’t salvation just return us to the original design?
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I would say more transformed than restored. Mostly because the beatific vision isn’t the same thing as living a sinless life. Mary lived a sinless life but was not living the beatific vision while alive.
 
We live in the age of over-thinking things. This is coming from an over-thinker. Rather than stress and wring one’s hands over this, why not simply trust in God’s grace and mercy? He does the heavy lifting for us, or we are doomed. Simple.

Our God is the God of simplicity.

The evil one introduces complication into all things.
 
The individual is transformed, because the individual, until Baptism, never had a clean slate to be restored to
Humanity is redeemed, not restored
 
coffeetx said:
If I think my default setting is peace, love, kindness, self control etc and Christ is just removing the fallen nature that was placed on top of that and returning back to my default created setting then it is easier for me to see that this isn’t a struggle with His help since it is our natural way of being anyway.
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That is your default setting. When Christ removes your fallen nature it is not a factory reset. The kingdom of God is greater than the Garden of Eden. Through Christ you are transformed into something even greater than your “factory reset”.

We will struggle in this life. Not because the stain of original sin has not been removed, but because we will exist in a fallen world and sin still has its effect. We persevere with God’s grace.
 
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coffeetx said:
Recently I have been hearing about the idea of innate health. That we are created to be at peace, confidant, happy, balanced. That it makes sense God created us to be this way. Why would He create us to be broken and flawed? The idea that we are cracked pots that God loves anyway regardless of our brokenness somehow implies that He made us to broken.
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He didn’t create us to be “broken and flawed.” We made the decision to be that way.

If you’re living a sinless life, then you’re as God intended you to be.
If you’re not living a sinless life, that wasn’t God’s intention, or his fault.

Where are you hearing these “ideas” from, btw? Sounds hinky to me…
 
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The chief aspect of the state known as “Original Sin”, man’s malady and that which causes him misery and strife, is spiritual separation from God, sometimes referred to as the “death of the soul”. This separation from intimate communion with the Source of life means we’re lost, “born dead”, so to speak, in need of being “born again” or “born from above”. The ugliness in human relationships, with each other and even within ourselves: the conflict, selfishness, self-righteousness, pride, etc that cause so much contention and grief in this world can be witnessed and experienced daily.

Here, in this non-Edenic world, we know what it means to experience this separation, we know, by experience, evil, and by contrast good; we know what happens when man’s will reigns supreme for all practical purposes. That’s what Adam wanted, and that’s what we’re here to learn the foolishness of. So that we may turn, like Prodigals from the pigsty, relatively speaking, and run back to the Good alone, having hopefully forsaken evil/sin, having had our way with and fill of it and its way with us, turning back to the Father who’s been waiting with open arms. That’s why Jesus came: to reveal Him, the true, God, as we’re ready to receive the “knowledge of God”:
"Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent." John 17:3

The Catechism teaches that God made His world in a “state of journeying to perfection”. Our wills, as we struggle with sin or that which opposes Him and love in general, are an integral aspect of that perfection, that righteousness, that justice, as we come to increasingly choose and own it for ourselves, with the help of grace. In order to be more and more like God, we must hunger and thirst for and choose righteousness. As we invest the grace or “talents” (as per the Parable of the Talents) given, our justice increases or grows. We believe that God allowed evil only because He endeavored to bring an even greater good out of it, knowing the beginning from the end. From the Catechism:

324 The fact that God permits physical and even moral evil is a mystery that God illuminates by his Son Jesus Christ who died and rose to vanquish evil. Faith gives us the certainty that God would not permit an evil if he did not cause a good to come from that very evil, by ways that we shall fully know only in eternal life.

385 God is infinitely good and all his works are good. Yet no one can escape the experience of suffering or the evils in nature which seem to be linked to the limitations proper to creatures: and above all to the question of moral evil. Where does evil come from? “I sought whence evil comes and there was no solution”, said St. Augustine, and his own painful quest would only be resolved by his conversion to the living God. For “the mystery of lawlessness” is clarified only in the light of the “mystery of our religion”. The revelation of divine love in Christ manifested at the same time the extent of evil and the superabundance of grace. We must therefore approach the question of the origin of evil by fixing the eyes of our faith on him who alone is its conqueror.

cont’:
 
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I. FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY

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.

1732 As long as freedom has not bound itself definitively to its ultimate good which is God, there is the possibility of choosing between good and evil , and thus of growing in perfection or of failing and sinning. This freedom characterizes properly human acts. It is the basis of praise or blame, merit or reproach.

Adam hadn’t yet made that choice; he was heading in the opposite direction last we saw him, in fact, having eaten from the “Tree of Death” to put it one way. I’ll bet he’s learned his lesson by now tho. Anyway, it was by choice; God is not the author of sin; he doesn’t create sinners. Again, we’re here to learn of the fallacy of Adam’s choice, and to begin to eat of the Tree of Life. God’s purpose is to make us greater than Adam was in Eden, with more justice yet, not to merely restore us to his level of original justice. As the Catechism teaches, “man was destined to be fully “divinized” by God in glory.” But Adam "wanted to “be like God”, but “without God, before God, and not in accordance with God”. However, as Jesus told us in John 15:5, “Apart from me you can do nothing.” Man was made for communion with God. Man’s nature didn’t change with the Fall; he just lost something, something we can begin to sense is missing in this world and in ourselves.
 
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I have never heard this before. The idea that Eden was not the plan. I thought Eden was the plan and that humanity messed it up. Why would God create humans to live on Eden first and then in heaven with him later? Why did he not have us in heaven from the beginning?
 
If we do not have a clean slate to be restored to then you are saying we started out dirty? That doesn’t make sense to me. I can understand starting out as God intended, falling, and needing saving. But starting out broken and sinful seems an odd way for God to create us to be?
 
Humanity was created sinless, but we are born separated from God through Adam’s sin. It’s not that we’re born stained; it’s that we’re born separated, and the individual’s ransformation is being brought into full relationship with God.
 
“O happy fault… o truly necessary sin of Adam that won for us so great a redeemer…” From the Exsultet.
In Christ, God and man become one. At every Mass the priest prays “by the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity.”

2 Peter 1:4 tells us that we have become “partakers of the divine nature.” The Church is the mystical extension of the incarnation. In baptism we are given a share of Christ’s own divine nature. This is nourished by the Eucharist. It’s like the parable of the vine in John 15. Christ is the vine and we are the branches. He feeds us His grace, His power.

No man is not simply restored in Christ, but deified. Why do you think we honour the saints, and especially Our Lady? They reflect, and share in, the divinity of Christ.
 
coffeetx said:
I have never heard this before. The idea that Eden was not the plan. I thought Eden was the plan and that humanity messed it up. Why would God create humans to live on Eden first and then in heaven with him later? Why did he not have us in heaven from the beginning?
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Because He wants us to choose heaven, to choose Him IOW. That choice is the heart of our own justice; it shapes and qualifies us, so to speak, to experience the sheer goodness and beauty and resulting ineffable happiness that we will know in heaven. Man cannot be happy unless and until he opts for a higher good than the menial ones he finds here on earth. Adam thought otherwise-that he didn’t need God. Man needs God; he needs to be in a communion of loving subjugation to Him, to learn that He’s that good and deserving of that love. Then things are in order again.
 
coffeetx said:
For me this matters because if I think my default setting is screwed up, messed up, broken and faulty then any efforts I make to become more like Christ are very hard because my default setting wants to return me to that flawed state.
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The default state of the earthly baptized Christian is still subject to death*, sickness, weakness of character, a inclination to sin, etc. It is our goal to unite ourselves to Jesus and take up our cross daily and follow him. However, he tells us when we take up his yoke that his yoke is easy and his burden light.

If we conform our lives to Christ, aware that God is our loving Father who knows exactly what we need, and that the Holy Spirit helps us, then it is not too hard for us, because we approach the situations with trust and acceptance and he gives us grace.

*temporal only
 
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