Posted by RomanJoe  5/25/2017 10:04 pm | #1 |
After reading through NT Wright's The Resurrection of the Son of God, William Lane Craig's writings on the resurrection, and Michael Licona's The Resurrection: A New Historiographical Approach, I think Jesus' resurrection is probably historical. Here's my issue: this still doesn't get me to Christianity, let alone Catholicism. How can one get to the belief that Jesus is God, that he established and gave authority to a Church, that this Church has endured to today?
Last edited by RomanJoe (5/25/2017 10:08 pm)
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Posted by Proclus 5/26/2017 8:35 am | #2 |
I think it matters that Jesus predicted the resurrection beforehand, it was prophesied beforehand, and his followers at the time universally saw the event as a vindication by the Father of Jesus's claims, including the claims that (i) Jesus is the messiah, (ii) Jesus is Lord and Judge of all, and (iii) Jesus is God. (Of course the last took some time to work out the metaphysical details, but the claim is clearly throughout the NT.)
It may not be readily apparent why the rest of Christianity is logically necessitated by the truth of the resurrection (it isn't as simple as modus ponens, after all), but since all the bits and bobs of Christianity are a deeply interconnected web of thought, it becomes increasingly difficult to sustain intellectually a simultaneous affirmation of the resurrection and rejection of the rest.
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Posted by RomanJoe 5/26/2017 8:40 pm | #3 |
Proclus wrote:
I think it matters that Jesus predicted the resurrection beforehand, it was prophesied beforehand, and his followers at the time universally saw the event as a vindication by the Father of Jesus's claims, including the claims that (i) Jesus is the messiah, (ii) Jesus is Lord and Judge of all, and (iii) Jesus is God. (Of course the last took some time to work out the metaphysical details, but the claim is clearly throughout the NT.)
It may not be readily apparent why the rest of Christianity is logically necessitated by the truth of the resurrection (it isn't as simple as modus ponens, after all), but since all the bits and bobs of Christianity are a deeply interconnected web of thought, it becomes increasingly difficult to sustain intellectually a simultaneous affirmation of the resurrection and rejection of the rest.
I do think that there was immediately a high christology after the resurrection. Both Paul and the gospels are a testament to the early Church's belief in Christ as divine. I would like to see if those passages where Jesus foresees his own death and resurrection were historical or if they were the result of the gospel writers writing a high christology into the narrative.
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Posted by Proclus 5/27/2017 2:08 pm | #4 |
It seems like over and over again in the gospels the writers call attention to the shortsightedness of the disciples at the time that Jesus foretells his death and resurrection. This makes them look foolish, which would make it somewhat harder to believe that they merely invented these episodes ex post facto.
I was also chewing on this thread and some of your other threads earlier today. One of the elements that you seem to be working on quite a bit is the personhood of God (analogically predicated, of course). It may be that this attribute cannot be gotten from many of the classical arguments for the existence of God. Many versions of the cosmological argument in particular only go so far. I am sympathetic to an argument from the theologian Dennis Kinlaw in his book Let's Start with Jesus, that we would not know that God is personal apart from revelation, ultimately culminating in the revelation of who God is in the person of Jesus Christ. It may be possible to establish his personhood in theory, but historically, our conviction that "he is a who" rather than merely "it is a what" comes from the various theophanies (e.g. to Abraham, Moses, Elijah, and ultimately in Jesus). Kinlaw argues systematic theology is often conducted backwards, beginning with the classical arguments from natural theology, eventually establishing the possibility of revelation, and finally proceeding to a discussion of Jesus. Instead, he claims, we should begin with the historical facticity of the resurrection of Jesus Christ and work our way outward from this central event thinking through the implications that this event holds for everything else. You may find this book and this approach in general helpful. (Or you may not; one never knows.)
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Posted by Proclus 5/27/2017 3:15 pm | #5 |
I just so happened to be reading Joseph Ratzinger's important essay "Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology," today and thought this point would reinforce the idea from Kinlaw:
"...the Christological concept of person is an indication for theology of how person is to be understood as such" (p. 450). In other words, if you want to understand personhood, you need to start with Christology, rather than the reverse procedure of starting with a philosophy of personhood in order to understand Christology.
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Posted by RomanJoe 5/28/2017 1:26 am | #6 |
It seems like over and over again in the gospels the writers call attention to the shortsightedness of the disciples at the time that Jesus foretells his death and resurrection. This makes them look foolish, which would make it somewhat harder to believe that they merely invented these episodes ex post facto.
I was also chewing on this thread and some of your other threads earlier today. One of the elements that you seem to be working on quite a bit is the personhood of God (analogically predicated, of course). It may be that this attribute cannot be gotten from many of the classical arguments for the existence of God. Many versions of the cosmological argument in particular only go so far. I am sympathetic to an argument from the theologian Dennis Kinlaw in his book Let's Start with Jesus, that we would not know that God is personal apart from revelation, ultimately culminating in the revelation of who God is in the person of Jesus Christ. It may be possible to establish his personhood in theory, but historically, our conviction that "he is a who" rather than merely "it is a what" comes from the various theophanies (e.g. to Abraham, Moses, Elijah, and ultimately in Jesus). Kinlaw argues systematic theology is often conducted backwards, beginning with the classical arguments from natural theology, eventually establishing the possibility of revelation, and finally proceeding to a discussion of Jesus. Instead, he claims, we should begin with the historical facticity of the resurrection of Jesus Christ and work our way outward from this central event thinking through the implications that this event holds for everything else. You may find this book and this approach in general helpful. (Or you may not; one never knows.)
Great! I'm bookmarking that link--the book looks promising. Yes, you're correct, one of my issues with many of the arguments for God's existence is that they can only prove so much. Many object that the cosmological arguments can only get us to, at best, a sort of transcendent force--but not something that is personal. I think proportional causality, coupled with my current belief that the human mind is immaterial, is perhaps a good starting point for viewing the first cause as something which, in some sense, has an immaterial mind. I haven't read a good treatment of Aquinas' work on the Divine Attributes. Feser does a good and pithy job of covering them in TLS and Aquinas. I just got Garrigou-Lagrange's Reality in the mail and am hoping he addresses them.
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Posted by Proclus 5/28/2017 12:17 pm | #7 |
For the crucial question of "Who is Jesus?":
It's definitely worth going through the way in which thinkers in the Church historically came to affirm increasingly strong and clear statements of Christology....When you see something of the process by which doctrine developed into what we have today, many apparently obscure and unjustified points tend to snap into place.
This. I agree 100%
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Posted by RomanJoe 5/29/2017 9:39 am | #8 |
For the crucial question of "Who is Jesus?":
It's definitely worth going through the way in which thinkers in the Church historically came to affirm increasingly strong and clear statements of Christology.
Can you elaborate on this a bit more? How does later doctrinal development show that Jesus actually claimed to be divine?
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Posted by Johannes 8/03/2017 10:50 am | #9 |
After reading through NT Wright's The Resurrection of the Son of God, William Lane Craig's writings on the resurrection, and Michael Licona's The Resurrection: A New Historiographical Approach, I think Jesus' resurrection is probably historical. Here's my issue: this still doesn't get me to Christianity, let alone Catholicism. How can one get to the belief that Jesus is God, that he established and gave authority to a Church, that this Church has endured to today?
I hope my contribution here can still be of some use, even though this thread has been inactive for two months. On this post I will focus on the belief that Jesus is God.
A straightforward basis for that belief is believing that the text of John's Gospel and/or the book of Revelations is divinely inspired. Readers of this post at this point will probably be thinking of the first verse of John's Gospel, and surely it is important, but there is a passage that may be an even stronger affirmation of Jesus' divinity, not from a conceptual viewpoint but from a faithful-behavioural one (i.e. the faithful's willed-by-God behaviour):
"The Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son, so that all will honor the Son just as they honor the Father. Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him." (Jn 5:22-23)
IMV, this passage makes it amazing that there could be anyone at all, let alone as many as the Arians of the IV-VI centuries, that, at the same time, held John's Gospel to be divinely inspired and denied the consubstantiality of God the Father and his Son. Because if the Son were not "homoousios" with the Father, then Jn 5:23 would be stating that God's will is that all commit idolatry, because God is honored by worship, and idolatry is just worship of an entity that is not God. Accordingly, the cosmic worship in Rev 5:13 is addressed to the Father and the Son equally.
But even if someone would adopt a freethinker position regarding Christian Revelation and posit that John's Gospel is a later elaboration which does not contain Jesus' actual words, there are passages in the synoptic Gospels which are unequivocal affirmations of Jesus' divinity, this time from a Jesus-behavioural viewpoint. One such passage is when Jesus forgives the sins of a paralytic in Capernaum and then heals him:
And when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, "Son, your sins are forgiven." Now some of the scribes were sitting there, questioning in their hearts, "Why does this man speak like that? He is blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?" (Mk 2:5-7; also Mt 9:2-3 and Lk 5:20-21).
Another such passage is the part of the Sermon of the Mount where Jesus fulfills the Law of Moses, specifically the six passages of the form:
"You have heard that it was said to the ancients [OT commandment] But I say to you that [Jesus' new commandment]". (Mt 5:17-48, six times with some variations)
To understand the significance of these passages, we must take into account that the OT commandments in question, such as ‘You shall not murder’ or ‘‘You shall not commit adultery’, had been said to the ancients not by Moses but by God Himself. Now, it is perfectly conceivable that God Himself could upgrade his own commandments, such as when a fitness trainer increases the demand placed on his trainees as they become more fit, or as when a teacher increases the level of difficulty in the exercises he gives to his students as they become more proficient in the subject. Thus, if Jesus had said "But the Lord says to you that [...]", he would have acted just like a prophet speaking in the name of God. But Jesus' actual statements (i.e. if you hold the veracity of this passage of Matthew's Gospel) were "But I say to you that [...]". He was giving his new commandments, and thus upgrading God's old commandments, on his own authority, therefore inequivocally placing Himself at the level of God.
To note, the charge of blasphemy that the Gospels record was raised against Jesus, both during his ministry and in his trial, does not refer to the specific and technical definition of blasphemy, which according to tractate Sanhedrin, Chapter VII, Mishna VI, requires the blasphemer to have mentioned the Name, i.e. the Tetragrammaton, which Jesus never did. Rather, the charge of blasphemy refers to Jesus' claim of divinity.
Also to note, the Sanhedrin's charge against Jesus is more precisely stated from a Jewish legal standpoint in the Talmudic retelling of Jesus' trial, as "instigation to perform idolatry", which is the logical consecuence of the substance of the charge against Jesus in the Gospels, namely his claim of divinity, if the Rabbis writing the Gemara thought, as they obviously did, that Jesus was not God. (In case someone is interested, I wrote an article on the subject of the trial of Jesus some years ago.)
Last edited by Johannes (8/03/2017 11:16 am)
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Posted by Johannes 8/03/2017 12:14 pm | #10 |
After reading through NT Wright's The Resurrection of the Son of God, William Lane Craig's writings on the resurrection, and Michael Licona's The Resurrection: A New Historiographical Approach, I think Jesus' resurrection is probably historical. Here's my issue: this still doesn't get me to Christianity, let alone Catholicism. How can one get to the belief that Jesus is God, that he established and gave authority to a Church, that this Church has endured to today?
On this post I will focus on the belief that Jesus established and gave authority to a Church, and that this Church has endured to today.
A straightforward basis for that belief is the belief in the divine inspiration of Mt 16:17-19, which I quote below with the 1st half of Mt 16:18 literally translated from the (non-preserved but obvious) original Aramaic into English. (In the Aramaic words spoken by Jesus, both instances of "rock" in Mt 16:18 were "kepha", a masculine name suitable for a man's name. When the text was translated to Greek, by Matthew or the final author, as the Greek word "petra" for a rock is feminine, the 1st Kepha was changed to "Petros", i.e. masculine ending, to make it suitable for a man's name.)
And Jesus answering, said to him, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood did not reveal it to you, but my Father in heaven. And I also say to you that you are Rock, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” (Mt 16:17-19)
Thus, Jesus said that He intended to build a church and promised that "the gates of Hades will not prevail against it". Now, we can ask ourselves two questions about that promise:
1. What is the time span of validity of the promise? For as long as Peter was alive, i.e. until 64 or 68 AD? For as long as any of the Apostles was alive, i.e. until around 100 AD? Or rather the time span of validity must be inferred from the ending of Matthew's Gospel?
“And behold, I am with you all the days, until the completion of the age." (Mt 28:20b)
2. What is the scope of the promise? I.e., what does it mean that "the gates of Hades will not prevail against" the Church? The answer is in the passage where Jesus teaches the Jews what the Hades' dweller desires to do:
“You are of your father the devil, and you desire to do the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning, and has not stood in the truth, because there is no truth in him. Whenever he might speak falsehood, he speaks from the own; for he is a liar, and the father of it.” (Jn 8:44)
Therefore, if "the gates of Hades will not prevail against" the Church, specifically against a Church that was built on the rock of Peter, that Church will always teach the truth revealed by God without any mix of falsehood. Which is in line with this passage of the Apostle Paul:
but in case I am delayed, I write so that you will know how one ought to conduct himself in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and support of the truth. (1 Tim 3:15)
Last edited by Johannes (8/03/2017 12:17 pm)
