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One Love
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Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 12/8/2009 4:17 PM (GMT -6) |   | Maximus:
“I think that there was perhaps another way, foreknown by God, for human beings to increase, if the first human being had kept the commandment and not cast himself down to an animal state by abusing his own proper powers. Thus [Christ] has done away with the difference and division of nature into male and female…without which it would perhaps have been possible [to procreate].”
Did Christ do away with this difference...by the way he came (Mary, the Theotokos, the "New Eve" )?
Asked another way, is sex the ONLY way the two human beings can have a child and raise a family? (Hint: With God, all things are possible.)
Hmmm...I think Zizy says something like this. Being and Communion Pp. 54-55.
The long dispute with Nestorianism was not an exercise of academic theology but a hard struggle with the existential question: how is it possible for Christ to be the Savior of man if His hypostasis is what I have called here the "hypostasis of biological existence" ? If Christ as a person "subsists" not in freedom but according to the necessity of nature, then He too finally, that is, definitely, fails to escape the tragic aspect of the human person. The meaning of the virgin birth of Jesus is the negative expression of patristic theology. The positive expression of the same concern consists in the Chalcedonian doctrine that the person of Christ is one and is identified with the hypostasis of the Son of the Trinity.
I. D. G. A. F.
Christ is All. | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 12/8/2009 4:18 PM (GMT -6) | | | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 12/8/2009 4:29 PM (GMT -6) | | But Mary DID fulfill the promise...
And I will put enmity
between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head,
and you will strike his heel."
I. D. G. A. F.
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One Love
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| Posted 12/8/2009 4:31 PM (GMT -6) | | Bottom line: A man and woman can hate each other, have sex for totally self-gratifying reasons, and make a baby...and the baby's stuck with that. That's just real...and I believe Maximus would say evidential of the problem. But what if ANOTHER WAY to have a baby could ONLY involve God directly as the "middle term" between them?
Like in Joseph and Mary's case.
I. D. G. A. F.
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One Love
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| Posted 12/8/2009 4:36 PM (GMT -6) | | Think of it this way, man.
Humans are part of the animal kingdom, right? Animals have sex and have babies. Can animals "pray" and receive a child from God? No, only HUMANS can. So, when humans have children by having sex, are they transcending the animal level at all? Nope. Heck, meerkats and hippopotomi have babies with sex...and human copulation (and procreation from such) doesn't really transcend that.
Maybe THAT shows us something in the whole Theotokos thing.
I. D. G. A. F.
Christ is All. Post Edited (One Love) : 12/8/2009 3:41:06 PM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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PotOnWheel
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| Posted 12/8/2009 5:21 PM (GMT -6) | | | | |
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PotOnWheel
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| Posted 12/9/2009 12:53 PM (GMT -6) | | Sexual preparedness for procreation is thought of a precaution, not a caused result.
Like carrying an inhaler does not caus the exposure to mold but does help when exposure happens.
Tom said...B: STORY GOES.... THAT IT IS ANTICIPATION OF ALOST INEVITABLITY (NOT RESULT OF). T: Didn't understand a thing there B. Sorry. T
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PotOnWheel
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| Posted 12/9/2009 1:10 PM (GMT -6) | | | | |
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Tom
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| Posted 12/9/2009 4:02 PM (GMT -6) | | Torstein Tollefsen writes me:
I believe it is wrong that St Maximus thinks the human person is eradicated. When it comes to the reference to Thunberg, I cannot believe he would have argued something like that. Unfortunately I do not have Thunberg’s book available for the moment, but if the argument rests on Ambiguum 41, I can imagine that someone, not Thunberg I am quite sure, misunderstood the following (1312d, Louth’s translation):
“The individuals, considered according to the species, finding agreement one with another, are in every way constituted as identical one with another, being indistinguishable from their same nature and free from any difference.”
I am quite sure that Maximus here tries to show philosophically that beings are ontologically interconnected, which is of importance for his soteriological scheme: since all things are related ontologically, the Logos may recollect all things through his redemptive act. And, of course, it is true to say that individuals (in nature) are identical specifically (according to species). This is Aristotelian commonplace. I have argued in my book that there are logoi even for individuals, and in that case, individuals or persons are preserved in their integrity in God. Maximus says in the Mystagogia that Christ restores me to myself (chapter 5), which could mean just that. And further, in the Ambiguum 7 (cf. Blowers translation) there has always seemed to me that it is the human individual, together with other human individuals that receive deification from God. But the final scope of man is, of course, to exist in a blessed community of human beings, together with other beings in a unity-in-plurality in God.
"Man is a person not by nature but by spirit. By nature he is only an individual." Nicolas Berdyaev | | Back to Top | | |
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PotOnWheel
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| Posted 12/9/2009 6:18 PM (GMT -6) | | If he is using allegorical tools to glean layers of meaning, then I am forewarned.
Tom said...Ah, I see. Well, that still means gender distinctions and sexual reproduction are what human beings sinfully FELL into. I guess if one doesn't care to actually interpret the texts even remotely in context, such theological speculation is OK. I can't do it. T
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One Love
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Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 12/10/2009 12:53 AM (GMT -6) | | | | |
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One Love
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 12/10/2009 1:03 AM (GMT -6) | | Two Scriptures in my mind on this...
"At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven."
and...
"So in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."
Both of these, IMO, seem to presupposes that noetic (spiritual) activity of the human being in the self-God relationship (faith by way of the "eye of the soul" ) is NOT grounded in gender differentiation at all. In short, a spirit being's power of relationality has (and needs) no gender. Do the angels relate to themselves and to God have gender? I don't think so.
I. D. G. A. F.
Christ is All. Post Edited (One Love) : 12/10/2009 12:38:05 AM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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