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Commentary on Romans 8

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Interbane

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Re: Commentary on Romans 8

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RT wrote:Hi Interbane, I was so pleased that you made this comment, but I have a low regard for Plantinga.
I made that comment a while ago, and after re-reading it, I see it lacks clarity. My point was that Platinga has a good premise, but draws the wrong conclusion. He is correct that it is difficult to arrive at truthful conclusions. This is why it's unreliable to simply accept belief. Naturalism isn't simply belief, but is a conclusion drawn from a systematic analysis of available evidence. Supernaturalism, meanwhile, is based on belief, without evidence.

He should rename his argument to "the evolutionary argument against supernaturalism".
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.” - Douglas Adams
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Re: Commentary on Romans 8

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Robert Tulip wrote:Grace is a rather mysterious metaphysical term, traditionally thought of as the intervention of God. We can think of grace scientifically in terms of natural order as the source of evolutionary stability. A stable ecosystem is gracious or under grace, while an unstable ecosystem is corrupt or under wrath. Seeing language about God as metaphor for description of natural order, we can say that by the grace of God, algae and then dinosaurs dominated our planet for billions and millions of years.
Hi Robert. I think you are reading Paul anachronistically as if evolutionary theory was what he was talking about. You can say that "by the grace of God algae and then dinosaurs dominated our planet for billions of years", but Paul I'm sure never even dreamed anything like this.
You subvert the meaning of "grace" to suit your naturalistic assumptions. It's meaning is perfectly clear in Paul's letters and is always contrasted with law and works as a means of legal ethical justification before God.
It requires no more than reading these letters to see this but you simply bend and change the meaning of language to fit your zodiacal thesis.
Paul is self evidently speaking ethically and his concerns here are not scientific. The redemption of the natural creation is included but the primary focus is with fallen humanity and reconciliation through Christ's redemptive sacrifice.
This is what Romans is plainly about but you posit a "hidden" different message.
Fine Robert, but I find the whole astro-theological interpretation unnatural and talk of algae and dinosaurs dominion being "by the grace of God", unintentionally comical.
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Robert Tulip

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Re: Commentary on Romans 8

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DWill wrote:
Robert Tulip wrote:Christians today are just as stubborn and recalcitrant as the disciples and others described in the Bible who failed to see the meaning of miracles such as the loaves and fishes. The fact is that all miracle stories are allegory, and it takes a peculiar stiff-necked blindness to fail to see this.
Anthropologically, your statement is obviously untrue, Robert. Think of all the thousands, millions, of stories from mythology, legend, and religion that could be counted as miracle stories. You say they had no purpose other than to convey a truth that was quite counter to their surface meaning. No, rather they often served to characterize the divine beings in ways in which people wanted to see them. In other words, it was story-telling as the primary driver.
Hi DWill, you are mixing up the meaning and the purpose of miracle stories. I did not “say they had no purpose other than to convey a truth that was quite counter to their surface meaning.” Of course miracle stories have many purposes. For example, as John 20:31 puts it, “these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name.” The purpose is to inculcate belief and promote the growth of the church, in line with your comment about story telling.

But that social purpose does not exhaust the meaning of the miracles of Christ. The meaning is more a question of how our temporal world connects to eternal values. Supernatural believers say that this connection is all about how God reveals his presence in the world by breaking the laws of physics at will. That is an absurd claim for modern rationality, but the absurdity of literal faith does not mean that miracles are meaningless.

It is an empty claim to say that the purpose of miracles is to prove that God exists, given the complete absence of any plausible evidence. David Hume’s devastating critique in his essay On Miracles shows that claims about miracles are more likely to be evidence of error, delusion or trickery than of flaws in our abundantly consistent and corroborated modern scientific materialist worldview. So any effort to rehabilitate miracles can only see them as another form of parable, an ethical teaching with a concealed meaning.

If the original intended meaning of miracles is to help us explain reality, then we have to junk the magic and come back to allegory. Christ is an obvious allegory for the sun, with the death and resurrection symbolising the annual cycle of the seasons. Natural symbolism is the only real meaning in miracles.
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Re: Commentary on Romans 8

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Robert Tulip wrote:It is an empty claim to say that the purpose of miracles is to prove that God exists, given the complete absence of any plausible evidence. David Hume’s devastating critique in his essay On Miracles shows that claims about miracles are more likely to be evidence of error, delusion or trickery than of flaws in our abundantly consistent and corroborated modern scientific materialist worldview. So any effort to rehabilitate miracles can only see them as another form of parable, an ethical teaching with a concealed meaning.
I notice Robert, that you repeatedly appeal to David Hume as if he had decisively disproved the possibility of miracles.
Hume though did not even believe in the law of cause and effect, which is bizarre thinking for a rationalist.
To be honest here we have to acknowledge that it is our worldview that tends to dictate what we believe is possible.
The idea that Paul secretly was a natural materialist is pure conjecture and requires the kind of conspiracy spinning you engage in, since he plainly states the opposite repeatedly.
For what it's worth here's a brief critique of Hume and his ideas on miracles and nature, by maths Prof. John Lennox.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dB71Vzw71eo
Last edited by Flann 5 on Wed May 20, 2015 6:10 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Robert Tulip

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Re: Commentary on Romans 8

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http://www.booktalk.org/post141179.html#p141179
DWill wrote:I haven't read The Gnostic Paul, Robert, though I want to.
Now I am up to Page 3 in my responses to comments in this thread. I note that Interbane has just said his comment was old, and I am sorry that it has taken me a month to reply, but better late than never.

The Gnostic Paul by Elaine Pagels is a highly provocative book, exploring how major early thinkers read Paul in a way that is extremely different from the dominant orthodox interpretation we now know and love.

My view is that the flagrant corruption of the Catholic Church means it is more likely that the heretical readings of Paul were accurate while the orthodox readings were a sort of Big Brother type of propagandistic distortion, although Pagels is extremely careful not to make such a heretical claim.

Even Pagels is severely intimidated by orthodox bullying, despite her powerful position as a Professor of Religion at Princeton University. It would hardly do for her to be picketed by Westboro Baptists, for example, for questioning the historical existence of Jesus Christ. So some level of caution about insulting the emotional commitments of believers may well be a strategic move on her part rather than evidence that she accepts the tradition.
DWill wrote:I find it easy to accept that an interplay of forces was involved in the development of Christianity, and that Gnosticism (maybe that should be the gnosticisms) was a major player. We say that orthodoxy won and in fact as the victor did its best to wipe out the literary traces of the heretics, but that was quite far on.
It is actually extremely difficult for us to reconstruct the dynamic between Gnosticism and orthodoxy, since the church was so assiduous in wiping out all trace of its origins. This assiduity (thorough zeal) shows that the church had something to hide, namely that the actual facts are entirely different from the fairy stories in the Bible.

I was thinking about a comparison that may help to understand the psychological motives at play. A radio program the other day about homosexuals in sporting teams explained that many gay people feel the need to conceal their sexuality in order to avoid persecution, and that in fact when they do come out they get persecuted by being bashed and dropped from the team. So we can hardly use the public information as a reliable guide to how many homosexuals there are in major sports.

It is very similar with Gnosticism, with its basic philosophical method of a focus on logic and evidence being highly unacceptable to popular sentiment that seeks signs and wonders. The cynical Gnostic despair at popular ignorance is reflected in John 4:48, where Jesus says "Unless you people see signs and wonders, you will never believe." This statement illustrates the early need to manufacture signs and wonders in order to generate belief, a process which unfortunately escaped from the control of the sorceror’s apprentices.
DWill wrote:It's likely that our imagining of two opposed camps in the first few centuries isn't quite the way it was.
I don’t think that the orthodox camp arose until much later, although there were isolated ‘true believer’ fools early in the second century who were later glommed onto by the church while the much more widespread allegorical gnostics were obliterated from history. The principle used by the church was that any text was examined for political utility, and was banned and burnt if assessed as disutilitous.
DWill wrote: Thus there is contribution from gnosticism even in the final, dominant religion that triumphed as an institution.
This contribution of Gnosticism is far bigger than is generally realised, especially with the cosmic blueprint of precession providing the entire framework for the Christ Myth. The church imagined that it could be like Lady MacBeth, with her ‘out out damned spot’ line, and remove the bloody evidence of its crimes. But this evidence was so deeply intertwined as the true vine of its origins that such efforts to hide the facts were impossible, and the Gnostic origins remained in place to be rediscovered once the social authority of the church could no longer prevent analysis.
DWill wrote:The Book of John is one example, a gnostic-flavored work that Pagels believed was canonized only because it said that salvation could come only through Christ. That was the type of restrictive statement that sat well with both the church leaders and the masses, but the rest of the book could lead one to different conclusions.
Thanks DWill for this insight that John can be read with different conclusions, which I endorse. The Gospel of John is a deeply Gnostic book, with a light veneer of orthodoxy carefully and astutely designed to make it acceptable for mass use in the ancient world.

Applying the ‘signs and wonders’ principle that the public faith had to be dumbed down in order to spread, the vision of the authors of John could only gain traction through a Harry Potter style rollicking yarn. John therefore placed the philosophy and ethics of the secret mystery origins within a magical assertion of a blood messiah among the Jews who acted for an interventionist God.

The reconstruction process now can look to both how the authors applied rational methods, and how these methods were concealed to preserve their insights and intuitions against a rampant mob.
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Re: Commentary on Romans 8

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Robert, when you say something like, "Christians today are just as stubborn and recalcitrant as the disciples and others described in the Bible who failed to see the meaning of miracles such as the loaves and fishes. The fact is that all miracle stories are allegory, and it takes a peculiar stiff-necked blindness to fail to see this," a person naturally takes this as claiming an exclusive purpose for such stories. But I think I see what's going on here. Your concern is not being historically or sociologically consistent. Your concern is actually religious and references the current scene, in which many moderns who should not be believing in miracles, do. You draw a different religious meaning from stories such as the fishes and loaves. I have trouble realizing that this is your perspective, because to be blunt about it, I don't particularly care about these miracle stories one way or the other, aside from their literary value and how they reflect their times.
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Re: Commentary on Romans 8

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DWill wrote:Your concern is not being historically or sociologically consistent.
Far from it. I am entirely concerned with being historically and sociologically consistent. My view is simply that ancient religion was based on astronomy, but Christianity has forgotten this central theme of its existence. I see the reinsertion of astronomy into Christianity as the essential heuristic to enable an accurate historical and social understanding of the original meaning and high purpose of the Gospel stories.

My critique of religionists who insist on unscientific views is based on my view that science provides our only basis for consistent understanding. Astronomy is the epitome of consistent objective knowledge. Science knows with high accuracy how the cosmic order today compares to the skies observed in ancient days. Putting astronomy at the centre of religion is entirely about introducing rigor and consistency into the analysis of faith.
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Re: Commentary on Romans 8

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DWill wrote: how Paul was interpreted by Gnostics is just that, a use that they made of his writings. That they discerned two levels doesn't mean that Paul was writing for two audiences, cloaking his meaning in order to reach out to the Gnostics who were his true constituency. That would be a historical claim and is not warranted. It doesn't mean that here we have the original intent of what Paul did. Again, I haven't read Pagels' book, but I just ask you to please be careful about attributing to her an assertion that Paul was writing for two different audiences in a duplicitous fashion. I'm fairly certain from reviews I've read that she does not claim that, despite the book's title Paul was a Gnostic, so I would be surprised if this scholar commits herself to the view you hold yourself.
When I read your comment I wasn’t sure if you meant that I was suggesting Paul was duplicitous, that I was suggesting Pagels thought Paul was duplicitous, or that I was being duplicitous in misreading Pagels. Going with option one as the simplest, ‘duplicity’ is an incorrect and emotionally loaded way to describe how Paul speaks at different levels to different audiences, and the two level thesis actually has clear evidence for it. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 3:2 “I gave you milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it. Indeed, you are still not ready.” Giving milk to a baby is not duplicity, but rather providing what is needed.

I have got out my copy of Pagels’ book, whose full title is “The Gnostic Paul – Gnostic Exegesis of the Pauline Letters.’ It is truly an amazing and magnificent piece of detailed scholarship, showing why Pagels was able to get her chair at Princeton. As you say DWill, Pagels is extremely careful not to speculate beyond what evidence indicates. But she does point out that the Gnostic exegesis raises some major questions for traditional readings.

Here are some key observations from the Introduction to The Gnostic Paul which provide abundant basis for a revision of standard social and historical claims about Christian origins by showing that the Gnostic material has been systematically ignored.
Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Paul wrote:Gnostic writers claim Paul’s letters as a primary source and revere Paul as a Gnostic initiate. p1

[Bornkamm (Paul, 1969) says that Paul ‘utterly repudiates’ the secret wisdom and gnosis that his gnostic opponents teach.] If this view is correct, the Pauline exegesis of second century Gnostics is nothing less than astonishing. (p1)

Texts now available from the Nag Hammadi collection offer extraordinary new evidence for gnostic Pauline tradition. p2

The mystical themes of Pauline theology… remained without great impact on the ecclesiastical literature of the second century [but were] taken up and developed by the Gnostics. p2

C. Barth (1911) concluded that the basic concepts of Valentinian gnosis were older than Christianity.

Scholars, besides taking information from the heresiologists, have adopted from them certain value judgements and interpretations of the Gnostic material p3

Orthodox theologians (eg Tertullian) note that the heretics have dared to impugn the validity of the Pastoral Letters. p5 (These letters are now generally seen as fraudulent).

The Gnostic writer Theodotus says Paul taught in two ways at once, … preaching the saviour according to the flesh … [and] according to the spirit. p5

The Valentinians claim that most Christians make the mistake of reading the scriptures only literally. They themselves, through their initiation into gnosis, learn to read his letters (as they read all the scriptures), on the symbolic level, as they say Paul intended. p6

Irenaeus, Tertullian and Origen [were] apparently embarrassed by the gnostic terminology that Paul often uses. p9

Conventional exegetical and historical analysis of early Christianity often fails to account for the considerable body of evidence attesting Gnostic exegesis of Paul. p10
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Re: Commentary on Romans 8

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Robert Tulip wrote: When I read your comment I wasn’t sure if you meant that I was suggesting Paul was duplicitous, that I was suggesting Pagels thought Paul was duplicitous, or that I was being duplicitous in misreading Pagels. Going with option one as the simplest, ‘duplicity’ is an incorrect and emotionally loaded way to describe how Paul speaks at different levels to different audiences, and the two level thesis actually has clear evidence for it. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 3:2 “I gave you milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it. Indeed, you are still not ready.” Giving milk to a baby is not duplicity, but rather providing what is needed.
Robert, I was basing the duplicity remark on what you apparently were saying about Paul trying to build a base for the church with a "literalist" message, while also purveying an incompatible theology under the table, for a select group. That indeed would have been duplicitous of Paul, but I don't think we need to be worried about him. The separate-constituencies idea is weak. If Paul speaks on a "higher" level, it doesn't mean he has shifted to a separate audience.
I have got out my copy of Pagels’ book, whose full title is “The Gnostic Paul – Gnostic Exegesis of the Pauline Letters.’ It is truly an amazing and magnificent piece of detailed scholarship, showing why Pagels was able to get her chair at Princeton. As you say DWill, Pagels is extremely careful not to speculate beyond what evidence indicates. But she does point out that the Gnostic exegesis raises some major questions for traditional readings.
An interesting topic, and I don't doubt that, especially this early, it was difficult to separate all the strands of belief we might say were Christian. That there was influence and borrowing seems par for the course. Gnosticism pre-existed Christianity and was at the ready to absorb it, even though a separate movement of Christian Gnostics didn't occur for at least 100 years after Paul.

For my purpose, though, the gnostic question isn't germane, because Gnostics didn't think that Jesus was a created myth. They thought, as everyone else did, that a person had been the starting point. The only remark I'd make is that it seems unlikely that the secret teachings of the Gnostics would be the scientifically-valid astrotheology you favor. What secret knowledge about the heavenly bodies would there have been to conceal?
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Re: Commentary on Romans 8

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Hi Robert,
Just to address your previous attempts to explain away the meaning of "kata sark" translated "according to the flesh" in Romans and elsewhere, I'm providing an article by Christopher Price where he examines Paul's usage of this expression in various passages.

I think it is conclusive and unambiguous that it means of human and physical descent.There's also the the" born of a woman" reference on this of course, but I think it's clear from this article exactly what Paul means by saying that Christ was "of the seed of David according to the flesh".
www.bede.org.uk/price7.htm

It's essential for the mythicist thesis in Earl Doherty's version to claim that Paul did not teach an earthly human Jesus but consistent and clear use of language will not permit this, but rather shows the opposite.
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