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Tom
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Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353

Posted 10/29/2011 9:26 AM (GMT -6)

How might the movie Avatar helps shed light on various Christological models.

As it stands, the American soldier (hero) of the movie passes into sleep while his consciousness is relocated into the flesh of an alien. So the PERSON of the soldier emergenes into the alien body.

This is a straight up one-mind, one-will, one-nature model...just like Greg's (and Jeff's?). Straight up Avatarian Christology.

How might the model have to change in order to reflect an Orthodox (Nicene/Chalcedonian) two-natures, two-wills, two-minds Christology?

Tom

"The aesthetic value the world has for God is in expressing, not constituting, the aesthetic value God eternally finds within Godself." Greg Boyd

Tom
Registered Member

Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353

Posted 10/29/2011 9:40 AM (GMT -6)

The human being in this case would have to remain conscious and as every personally related as fully realized human being can be ('cause we're making him equal to the divine Son in this model). Secondly, he's have to embrace MORE than just Avatar FLESH. He's have to embrace the alien JOURNEY, being fullly alien (and that requires a conception onward journey, so that everything it MEANS to be a member of that alien race is experienced by the human being). Thirdly, it would mean a two-minds two-wills experience. The human being would--within his own consciousness--own the limitations of the alience consciousness but (asymmetrically) the alien experience would NOT equally transcend everything going on in the human realm, that realm would not be transcended by the human. But the human would be transcended by the divine...

Lucid dreaming baby. It's the best analogy we got.

T

"The aesthetic value the world has for God is in expressing, not constituting, the aesthetic value God eternally finds within Godself." Greg Boyd

Tom
Registered Member

Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353

Posted 10/29/2011 9:45 AM (GMT -6)

As it is, Avatar is adoptionistic (because the human steps into alien existence at some mature point in the alien's existence) and Apollinarian (because the human is JUST using the alien's BODY, there's not the same emergent consciousness "in alien terms" in/through which the human has to annimate its flesh. In the movie, the hero has one-mind--the human--that gets downloaded into an 'avatar'. Greg's view may only SEEM different than these because he argues that the downloading takes place at conception and not mid-stream. But the same fundamental abandonement of transcendence occurs.

Tom

"The aesthetic value the world has for God is in expressing, not constituting, the aesthetic value God eternally finds within Godself." Greg Boyd

One Love
Registered Member

Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888

Posted 10/29/2011 10:44 AM (GMT -6)

Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice contemporary analogy, Tom!

Perfect, in fact.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Corey
Five with a Four-wing

Date Joined Feb 2003
Total Posts : 1893

Posted 11/5/2011 8:21 AM (GMT -6)

One of the audience asked a very similar question last night at the Evens lecture. He asked, how would the lecture have been different if somehow he and Evens' soul switched bodies. Evans responded that in his view, since the body and soul are so intertwined and configured for each other (my words), it would not be possible for his soul to function in someone else's body. There's a key/lock analogy.

Notice that even in Avatar, Scully could only operate the one avatar that was specifically matched to him.

One Love
Registered Member

Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888

Posted 11/5/2011 11:55 AM (GMT -6)

I remember hearing that, Corey. Evan's idea of a particular soul being compatible with ONLY one particular body. And I had a huge problem with that.

I thought dude should have asked this: If somehow we were to have switched BRAINS...with all the rest of the body the same...how would the lecture have been different. Evans would have had to admit that, per a successful brain transfer, the lecture would have went WAAAAY differently.

Now, we could have just done extension: anyone's BRAIN that we could put in Evan's HEAD would have made the lecture different.

So what would he have done? Tie the soul's compatibility to solely the BRAIN, not the BODY as such?

Yeah, right.

But what about SPLIT-BRAIN experiments where it seems to be two RELATIVELY AUTONOMOUS spheres of consciousness going on such that the left hand LITERALLY doesn't know what the right hand is doing? Sometimes the two sides can OPPOSE each other, even! Do we THEN say that the each HEMISPHERE of the brain has a "soul"???

Sheesh.

Something else I thought about during Evans' "significant minimal dualism":

If you were to have completely disintergrated two living human beings (where literally nothing but dust particles remained), he would say that the "souls" would still exists. I would want to ask: how would these "souls" be LOCALIZED/LOCALIZABLE for them to be DISTINCT, PARTITIONED spheres of consciousness? We are talking immaterial consciousness here. How would one say "HERE is this guy's soul...and over THERE is that guy's soul."? Wouldn't it make more sense to say that there is ONE FIELD OF CONSCIOUSNESS in which all human brains participate...and the irreducible relationality between the field of consciousness and the human brain forms the ground where the "self" can emerge? Wouldn't that make more sense than to try to localize and partition completely incorporeal reality, sans any brain or body?

MAN, I wish I'd have had more time with him on this one on one. Heh. THAT'd have been hilarious.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Post Edited (One Love) : 11/5/2011 12:22:10 PM (GMT-5)

One Love
Registered Member

Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888

Posted 11/6/2011 10:21 AM (GMT -6)

The above stuff reminded me. I asked C. Stephen Evans a question during his talk.

I asked this. Paraphrasing.

What is the relationship of the "soul" and the "person"? If you had a virtuous theistic believer who, because of brain deterioration/damage problems, became a vice-filled non-believer...what would be the relationship of the one "soul" of the human body to those personalities? Would the "soul" be "saved"?

He gave some kind of answer basically saying that he would trust that God would know the "real" person that God always intended for that person to be sans the brain dysfunction/malfunction borne of brain deterioration/damage. So basically, it's like the "restore" function on our computers...when you can "go back" to the state of the computer before the problem occurred.

Hmm.

What I wish I would have asked sometime after that was this...

What if a vice-filled non-believer who, because of brain deterioration/damage problems, became a virtuous theistic believer..but then died? Would God still resurrect the human "soul" to pre-brain deterioration/damage state for the Judgement?

If Evans would have said that latter "saved" one, then this would make God an opportunist. He'll take em any way he can get em...even by brain deterioration/damage unto personality alteration! This view, ironically, would negate the reasoning that God would necessarily use a "restore function" on a human being SIMPLY BECAUSE personality alteration happened from brain dysfunction/malfunction borne of brain deterioration/damage; Evans would no longer be able to say that God would on principle resurrect the human "soul"/body union with it's pre-brain deterioration/damage personality as the "true" person God intended.

But if Evans would have said that God would have resurrected the PRE-brain deterioration/damage personality on principle...then he'd have to say that God effectively threw away the person's "chance" and ensured that human being (in the vice-filled non-believing personality) would be raised by God unto judgment.

Yeah.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Post Edited (One Love) : 11/6/2011 9:25:12 AM (GMT-6)

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