tompicard said
Ok , is that just a general comment? or are you referring to some one in particular in this thread, I dont get that impression at all in this thread at least, if so and you are referring to me I would like you to let me how I am doing that.
I wasn’t thinking about you when I wrote it.
Robert is misunderstanding me yet again when he calls it a feud with atheism. It’s a disagreement, with a certain human mindset, that is commonly found among extreme atheists and theists. The same basic type of mind, using different ideas in the same way. To me, these are the same people, thinking in the same way. Not surprisingly, very often they begin as one and end as the other. Theists come over to atheism, atheists come over to theism. And none of them ever really thinking. Because nothing terrifies them more than uncertainty.
I mentioned several distinctions between resurrection and Kingdom above in terms
popular understanding, participants, and timing
continuing with an aesthetic distinction between “resurrection” and “kingdom” maybe a more important distinction can be in the causes and nature
the “resurrection” seems to be a phenomena totally in the hands of God, whether resurrection refers to a body going from grave to walking around on earth or a soul moving from sheol to heaven, I think we must agree this appears to be completely independent your or my intervention
On the other hand, the “kingdom” coming to earth, at least in my view, (i mean, in my view of Jesus’ view) (or both), has a definite component of human responsibility to act in accordance with God’s Will. at least that is what I think Jesus was teaching.
another way of saying the above is that
the resurrection is supernatural occurrence
the coming of the kingdom on earth is not,
Hngerhman said To help disentangle one metaphysical knot I do see, dimly: do you view grave and Sheol to be mutually exclusive – not just as “locations” in themselves but also as loci of personhood post-death? If they are separate locations (and not just synonyms), can a person’s bones be in a grave but the person (whatever it is that instantiates personhood) simultaneously be in Sheol?
preachers, minister, and prophets seemed to use them interchangeably
metaphysically, I am unable to help beyond the concept described by miracle max (same film)
“sheol” to “grave” might be similar correspondence as “mostly dead” to “all dead”
[not sure that is relevant]
maybe sheol implies some conscienceness not implied by grave . . .
And I call that hair-splitting. I have had these ideas long before I encountered Stephen, and will continue to have them long after I’ve forgotten the both of you. Interesting that you use the word ‘feud’. I don’t think of it in quite the same way. Since that implies a more or less even fight. 😉
moving from aesthetic to evidentiary
but first in case it went 100% clear
since it appears to me Jesus held a non-supernatural view of the Kingdom, then it must certainly be the case that he saw the citizens of this kingdom as male and female peoples who reproduce in normal manner within marriage.
Robert mentioned
Mark 10,28-31
Peter began to say to him, “Look, we have left everything and followed you.” Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age—houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.”
this does indicate marriage may need to be put on hold during Jesus’ ministry prior to the Kingdom, but I dont think it means marriage becomes obsolete. the hundredfold children implicitly confirming marriages continue
I dont know if Robert was implying the same view or opposite or neither
I also googled “pushing strings” and it leaned it refers the capability of moving something (argument?) in one direction but not the opposite [did i miss the meaning] was that what you meant or that you couldn’t move in either direction???
Jesus believed the Kingdom would be a material place on earth–perhaps all of the earth, since Gehenna was going to achieve its purpose very quickly.
It does not necessarily follow from there that he thought it was non-supernatural. He believes the heavenly realm will extend its sway to earth, and thus the earth will become a supernatural realm–at least that seems closer to what he’s saying. If some people are going to be as angels in heaven, that means they have been changed into supernatural beings, after a fashion. Different from angels, but akin to them. Does he believe the Garden of Eden wasn’t a supernatural realm? I don’t want to project later Augustinian views onto him, but Augustine read his bible very carefully.
The problem for me is that if children continue to be born, the earth will go back to what it was before. It might take a while, but it would be inevitable. God cleansed the earth with a flood, most humans perished–and what happened? Everything went back to how it was before. If not worse.
You know the old spiritual. James Baldwin didn’t make it up. People who read their bible saw it pretty clear.
God gave Noah the rainbow sign
No more water–fire next time.
Next assuming Jesus as a student and believer in prior scripture
who would have been familiar concepts such as Isaiah 65:17-20
For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth;
and the former things will not be remembered,
nor come into mind.
But be glad and rejoice forever in that which I create;
for, behold, I create Jerusalem to be a delight,
and her people a joy.
I will rejoice in Jerusalem,
and delight in my people;
and the voice of weeping and the voice of crying
will be heard in her no more.
“No more will there be an infant who only lives a few days,
nor an old man who has not filled his days;. . .”
Isaiah’s “new heaven and new earth” being commensurate to Jesus’ “kingdom” indicates the continuation of births and implicitly, we assume, marriages
godspell said
Jesus believed the Kingdom would be a material place on earth–perhaps all of the earth, since Gehenna was going to achieve its purpose very quickly.It does not necessarily follow from there that he thought it was non-supernatural.
agree, nor does it imply the opposite
He believes the heavenly realm will extend its sway to earth, and thus the earth will become a supernatural realm–
No, he prays that God’s Will be done on earth as it is in heaven, but that does not mean earthly kingdom is supernatural
the changing to angels if that is what he really said and whaat he really meant would be at “resurrection”, which I do not see evidence that Jesus necessarily saw as coincident with “kingdom”
I will get to Garden of Eden, which Jesus referenced in his ministry later
You could interpret that very easily as “There will be no more infants, and nobody will grow old.”
As long as life remains part of nature, there will be short-lived offspring, old ones who suffer pain and infirmity. Life in the natural wold means change, both good and bad.
Most human cultures have tried to imagine an end to all the afflictions, misfortunes, cruelties, and infirmities that are part and parcel of being a living creature. That our animal cousins bear without complaint, but we, being cursed with higher consciousness, remember with sadness, and anticipate with dread (as Robert Burns once mused). Because we can’t live in the present all the time, we try to imagine things were better in the past, or will be in the future. This is universal to the human experience. As the Buddha said, “Life is suffering.” But the Buddhist tradition says the answer is to escape the cycle of death and rebirth, and the tradition Jesus was part of said you escape it by the very essence of life being changed, forever. But only for the elect. Jesus was simply expanding the notion of who the elect would be. Not people who believed a certain way, but those who lived a certain way. As if they were already in that blessed world, even though they still lived in the painful disruptive world that exists now.
I don’t entirely disagree with you, but I think you’re trying to hard to rationalize something that isn’t meant to be rational. It’s meant to tell people who do good even when others do them harm “You’re not the fools. They are.”
😐
Pushing on a string is a colloquial metaphor for energy expended in futility, which has gotten uptake in discussions of monetary policy (hence the focus on the unidirectional impact of liquidity injection).
Robert has patiently been a great sport while I’ve conceptually pushed on several strings in conversations on the forum, many Pauline, much of them metaphysical or epistemological in nature, and all of them under-specified by available evidence. We’re in one of those under-specified arenas here. Which is why the discussion is so rich and capable of nuance.
Decisions under uncertainty, indeed.
Robert said
Pushing a string is a metaphor that Hngerhman has used. I think he means by this something like trying to extract a lot from limited data, perhaps more than the data can really realistically support. One can easily pull a string and move it along inba straight line, but if you push it at one end the other end does not move, at least not at first.
Precisely.
But when it comes to this area of historical study, scholars push strings all the time. Otherwise, you’d never get any new ideas, and the field would become moribund. That’s why consensus is valuable, and shouldn’t be abandoned too quickly. It’s also why a lot of differing interpretations that diverge from consensus can still thrive in its shadow.
tompicard said
preachers, minister, and prophets seemed to use them interchangeably
metaphysically, I am unable to help beyond the concept described by miracle max (same film)
“sheol” to “grave” might be similar correspondence as “mostly dead” to “all dead”
[not sure that is relevant]
maybe sheol implies some conscienceness not implied by grave . . .
Yet again your choice of avatar image unlocks a hidden door. Aside from being right about mutton, Miracle Max also nailed ‘mostly dead’.
Let’s stipulate for now that Sheol and the grave are two distinct locations. [There are traditions where this is clear, but there are also traditions where this isn’t clear, precisely as you mentioned.]
There is an interpretation (one that seems intuitive, at least to my feeble intuition) that the person (let’s not quibble on what exactly a deceased person’s identity consists in; let’s assume that the metaphysics works well enough) is a shade in Sheol, their bones are in the grave, and that at resurrection, the person and the bones are reunited but then transformed into a newly pneumatic-body person. This happens to be my current best sense of a synthesis of what Paul (loosely) is trying to say, coupled with what appears to be a consistent view of Sheol – but you saw we spilt a lot of digital ink in the other thread on just the Pauline portion of this. A Tabor-like view is possible (though doesn’t fit the language employed as well). As are others.
In that frame, the grave to resurrection into new Kingdom (where heaven and earth conjoin) and resurrection with no marriage all fit. On an aesthetic level. Perhaps not my preferred aesthetic – and that admittedly is a lot of synthesis, and more synthesis than I may feel is warranted by the evidence. But aesthetically, it has coherence.
Btw, another metaphysical knot is what do we each (and more importantly, Jesus) mean by heaven? If heaven is the separated realm where God is now, but which comes to meet and somehow subsume the earth in the age to come (Kingdom), then heaven and Kingdom metaphysically collapse to the same thing at the appropriate time.
I feel here like I just ran about 50 yards downfield before the snap, ignoring all the whistles and flags. But, I did so to reconstruct a self-coherent (still could be wildly wrong) aesthetic view of how the two views, in the end, could be two faces of the same coin. Meaning, aesthetically, there’s a self-consistent way to collapse the distinction.
I’ll now focus on absorbing your evidentiary argument – which argument may invalidate all my noises immediately above…
Actually, I missed a couple of other metaphysical knots in the aesthetic realm.
– That resurrection is supernatural, that Kingdom is not
– That the Kingdom breaks in at least partially due to people’s actions
The first one is something you and Godspell are already tackling above, so I’ll step aside there at present.
The second one is interesting. It’s clear that Jesus wanted people to live Kingdom lives now. It’s unclear that this Kingdom-like living is synonymous with the Kingdom actually breaking in. It’s interesting because, per usual, I have the opposite intuition here. Namely, the Kingdom comes when God deems it time to unfurl it, what humans are doing (putting Jesus* himself aside) is not necessarily part of his calculation. Could be, but it’s more about God decoding to put things right than people doing the right-putting.
* I can interpret Jesus as thinking himself paving the way for the Kingdom itself, but I can also see him thinking that he’s paving the way for people getting admittance when it comes (at God’s entirely self-appointed time).
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert
1 Guest(s)