Hngerhman said

Jesus certainly was guilty of ‘mindcrime at times’–he is often wrathful in the gospels. 

 

Totally agree. [Said positioning away from any areas easily struck by lightning]

 

Therefore, you can reach the Kingdom as a sinner, or nobody would be in it.

 

Yes, though I want to wander about a little to shade the territory of how I think about it. 

 

It’s not that every sinner can or does get in – hence all this Gehenna business, and cutting off offending appendages. So, one can be sufficiently sinful to not make the cut.

 

Jesus underwent JB’s baptism for sins, an action which was seemingly part rite and part commencement of a new life under metanoia. Jesus focused on people changing their ways (metanoia again) – which signifies that one then can change sufficiently to get included into the kingdom. So it has something to do with having adequate intent – it is at least somewhat about holding the appropriate mental state, one that also converts to sufficient action. Pelagius?

 

One can be a former sinner, but must be (sufficiently) changed – and the question is whether that’s all. If not, what else?…

 

Are there gradients of sins (either singularly or in aggregate) for Jesus? Seemingly yes, but that then invites some weird thought experiments. Would a mindcrime not keep you out of the kingdom? What if you lived perpetually in a state of that mindcrime, is there a cumulative amount of it that tips you over, even if under a state of metanoia? If not, then why bring them up? Either they are irrelevant or relevant to a kingdom calculus. So there’s either a sufficient amount of mindcrime that counts you out, or he’s just hyper-focused on building a fence. And if there’s a sufficient amount, then would being born with involuntary, hair-trigger anger and libido count you out?

 

Ok, I’m now in a knot…  

Jesus worried a lot less about the bad things you do than the good things you refrain from doing.

That’s pretty obvious.  After all, what did the Priest and the Levi do, when they saw a wounded man in a ditch?  Nothing.  

It’s doing nothing, more than anything else, that sends you to Gehenna.  The Parable of the Talents–you’re given a gift at birth–do you invest it wisely?  Or do you bury it in a hole, for fear of losing it?  

The knots aren’t really all that complicated.  We make them complicated.  

Lucky for us he was wrong about the Kingdom and Gehenna, huh?

😐

Oh you mean like The Rapture? 

Jesus wasn’t talking about that, man.  You got a bum steer. 

😉

Well, as I said, Augustine and Pelagius weren’t all that far apart–it was the fine points that created the feud–that and the fact that as Christianity became the state religion (with far more power than any religion has in the western world today), Pope and Emperor felt impelled to get everyone on the same page, not that this ever really happened.

You’re forgetting Augustine’s main point–it’s all about Jesus.  I don’t think Jesus thought it was all about him.  But between Paul and the gospel authors, not to mention the early Church Fathers, there was an awful lot pointing in that direction.  Jesus was deified, but Pelagius wasn’t writing about a deity.  He was either too far ahead of the curve, or behind the times, depending on how you figure it.

Augustine and Pelagius had junked most of Jesus’ metaphysics–obviously he couldn’t have meant what he is clearly saying, so he must have meant something else.  

Well yes, I think that too, though Bart mainly doesn’t.  Jesus believed himself to be a necessary sacrifice, for the Kingdom to come.  I’m not convinced he thought this way until sometime after John’s beheading though.  And he probably had serious misgivings right to the end, which explains why he was so furious at Peter’s reaction–he was strongly tempted to abandon this course of self-immolation he’d set himself on. 

However, that’s a very different thing from Augustine saying that you can only be saved by accepting Jesus as your savior, and Jesus would have been enraged at the notion that unbaptized children went to hell–I agree with Bart that he probably never believed in hell, but he certainly didn’t believe that infants could be damned.  The notion that he would be used as an excuse for such a doctrine would have filled him with horror. 

Pelagius’ ideas are a lot less well understood than Augustine’s, since we have so little of what he wrote, and we can’t be sure Augustine is accurately characterizing Pelagius’ ideas when he tries to rebut them.  Three key distinctions–hmmm. 

1) Pelagius thinks Jesus saves us through giving us an example to follow, a model to aspire to (an enduring notion, in spite of Pelagius being rejected as a heretic).  Augustine thinks he saves us through redeeming grace that we tap into by accepting him as savior. (Also a lasting idea in Christianity.)

2) Accordingly, Pelagius believes original sin was simply a bad precedent set by Adam and Eve, which does not in itself corrupt human nature, and we can all choose to behave differently by force of will.  Augustine, famously, believes that we are all tainted by original sin, and Jesus was born sinless because he wasn’t the product of sexual intercourse. 

3) Pelagius felt that people were using the excuse of human frailty (created by our corrupted nature) to commit all kinds of sins, which they could then be forgiven for by saying they’d accepted Jesus back into their lives.  And repeat.  Sound familiar?  While Augustine would probably have been impatient with those who used his ideas as an excuse for sinning, his own youthful experiences made him certain Pelagius was wrong to say it was just a matter of will power, and humans must subordinate themselves to a higher power in order to triumph over their corrupted nature (Well, it works for 12 Step Programs….)

Jesus would probably agree more with Pelagius about how to overcome sin–through deciding to do good and reject evil–but he would also say that faith in God is vital, and human nature tends to be weak and corruptible.  (So would Pelagius, I’m sure.) 

But where Jesus would split from both of them, of course, is that he almost certainly didn’t believe most people would be saved.  Many called, few chosen.  Genuinely good people are rare and precious–most of us are torn between the best and worst in ourselves, and it requires a conscious effort of will to overcome sinful impulses–but even more importantly, to embrace the naturally good impulses, even when pursuing them can lead to all kinds of negative consequences (Like being attacked by bandits while saving someone.  Or not having any money because you gave it all to the poor, and then nobody gave you anything. Or getting yourself crucified to bring about a better world.)

Jesus was a radical preacher, waiting for an apocalyptic event that would bring all temporal powers to an end.  Augustine and Pelagius were high-ranking Christian clerics, with significant influence within the empire, and they both feared the collapse of the empire, which was now Christian–something Jesus hardly foresaw. 

So strictly speaking, Jesus was neither Pelagian nor Augustinian in his thinking, since both Pelagius and Augustine wanted to save the society they lived in, conserve it, because the Empire that had been the enemy for Jesus was now Christian. 

Jesus is closer to Pelagius, most of all, because there is basically nothing in Pelagius that Jesus would find objectionable, but he’d find much of Augustinian thought reprehensible and bizarre.  Pelagius is more about how an individual lives well, but Augustine’s ideas are more suited to collective action.  About how to create a lasting religious institution.  Which is why Augustine triumphed.  But if there’s anything we can be sure of about Jesus, it’s that he never intended to create a new religion. 

Robert said

Rather than speculate about your hypothesis regarding Paul’s libidinous youth to strengthen your desired comparison of Paul with Augustine, why not bother to read what we have of Pelagius’ commentaries on the letters of Paul, especially his commentary on Romans? I suspect you will find that Pelagius also saw himself as following Paul. Augustine and Pelagius may have somewhat competing interpretations of Paul, but they also share a great deal in common in their reading of Paul, not least of which is their focus on the importance of grace.

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Everybody was influenced by Paul.  What goes without saying goes without saying.  And you saw where I said it’s the fine points of doctrinal disagreement that often lead to the bitterest conflicts, right?

(And I shouldn’t need to say that either, since this forum proves that.)

Robert said

It may be the case that there are an awful lot of Pelagius morons, including myself. It may also be that Pelagius’ Greek was better than Augustine’s, which is a pretty low bar. I’m certainly no expert on these thinkers, not by a long shot, but it would not surprise me if Pelagius has just as good of an understanding of at least parts of Paul as Augustine. It’s hard enough to understand Paul’s texts, not to mention those of Pelagius, whose writings are largely lost and whose views are disputed, let alone the thought of Jesus who left behind no texts whatsoever. All we have is a great variety of interpretations of what little we know of Jesus.  

Pelagius had much better Greek than Augustine–one of the things that kept him in the fight longer than might otherwise have been the case.  I first learned of him from Alexei Kondratiev, who was deeply interested in Celtic Christianity (and knew more languages than almost anyone). 

I think Augustine was probably the more original thinker–certainly the more ambitious.  I don’t begrudge him his central place in western thought.  But as with Plato, I think we need to be all the more aware of the massive assumptions both men were making, and the very serious baggage their insights come with.  The most influential thinkers are not always the clearest ones, because their reach almost invariably exceeds their grasp–and they can never acknowledge this. 

I trust foxes more than hedgehogs.  Paul and Augustine were hedgehogs.  Pelagius was clearly a fox.  But Jesus?  That’s a much tougher nut to crack. He is a very hard man to define, and the lack of any writings from him–the fact that it was largely hedgehogs who ended up interpreting him for us, because religion is almost always about finding a universal truth to hold to–means that the matter may never be settled. 

Speculations are speculations.  Maybe Paul never had sex in his life, but he sure thought about it a lot.  “Better to marry than burn” speaks to a strong sex drive. 

Augustine went out of his way to make his personal life public knowledge (which is not to say we can be sure he was 100% accurate in his descriptions of his early life).  His statements regarding human sexual behavior are quite similar to Paul’s, but we know almost nothing about Paul’s early life. 

It is not in any way inappropriate for someone interested in comparing them to wonder if they had similar experiences and/or personalities, leading to similar outlooks.  Professional historians do this all the time.  Nobody here is a professional historian, but we all have some insight into human nature, since we’re all human.  Textual analysis is something I’m not going to take seriously from anybody but a serious professional scholar, since I can’t engage in textual analysis of texts I’m unable to read in their original form.  A psychological insight can be judged on its own merits or lack thereof.  I never have the slightest idea if anything you say about someone’s Greek is accurate or not.  When you argue Greek with someone, I stay out of it.  And I largely skim past it. 

And I’ve said nothing my history professors would quarrel with–I routinely got A’s for similar speculations made in my papers in grad school.  As long as it was clear they were speculations.  And what the hell else would they be? 

You do it your way, I’ll do it my way.  But neither of us is making any impact on the field.  You know this.  This is about self-education, expanding one’s own personal store of knowledge, and I’ll happily learn from anyone who has something to teach.  I’ve spent a lot of time reading about the history of ideas.  That’s a major interest of mine. 

Question–does the term ‘hedgehogs and foxes’ mean anything to you?  I could recommend a very fine essay on Russian literature. 

The thread is about how different people see the same things differently.  Is that really so hard to understand?  Of course sex is part of it. Not every person of faith thinks sexual desires constitute the single biggest obstacle to salvation.  Jesus clearly didn’t.  Elaine Pagels, discussing the Augustine/Pelagian split, talked about how the Pelagian thinkers simply couldn’t understand how Augustine saw the world, nor could he understand them, because they had different libidos.  Augustine was probably tormented by desire his entire life, and sublimated it into his work.  And since it was such a problem for him, he assumed that was true of everyone.  Pelagians, by contrast, may have assumed their relatively greater degree of self-control was something everybody could have, without resort to God’s grace. 

Archilochus came up with a clever catchphrase (I prefer his poem about the abandoned shield).  Isaiah Berlin put flesh on it.  You live in too small a room, and it’s only sublet.  Part of intellectual history is studying a wide variety of minds.  That’s what I want to do.  If you don’t, nobody’s making you post here.