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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: An abhorrent doctrine
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Adeodatus
Shipmate
# 4992
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Posted
From this morning's Office of Readings:
quote:
Our life was displeasing to him; everything in us that was of our doing was displeasing to him, but what he himself did in us was not displeasing. So he will condemn what we did but save his own work in us.
St Augustine, Sermon 23A, my italics.
What Augustine is saying is that every act of human charity, kindness, generosity, goodness, is not only disregarded by God - which would be bad enough - but is positively displeasing to him. He will condemn every such act.
I don't, won't, can't believe this. My stomach turned when I read those words this morning. The idea that under the New Covenant God is revealed to so hate his creation ... it's disgusting. We were better off under the Old Covenant.
Anyone care to convince me otherwise?
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"What is broken, repair with gold."
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itsarumdo
Shipmate
# 18174
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Posted
Maybe "that was our doing" is about it being the will of man rather than being in the will of God.
You can do charitable acts from either perspective - because it seems the right thing to do, or because it comes from love of God. I personally find this difficult - but having seen how it can work, it's not impossible or unreasonable or disgusting - it is really beautiful to see in practice.
Not that I'm so keen on Augustine (if it's the one I was thinking of) - he felt what was in divine order and then imposed it as rules on everyone else instead of teaching them how to feel it for themselves. So the rules just don't make sense and are onerous. They don;t come from the heart.
[ 31. August 2014, 11:03: Message edited by: itsarumdo ]
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"Iti sapis potanda tinone" Lycophron
Posts: 994 | From: Planet Zog | Registered: Jul 2014
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EtymologicalEvangelical
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# 15091
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Adeodatus
What Augustine is saying is that every act of human charity, kindness, generosity, goodness, is not only disregarded by God - which would be bad enough - but is positively displeasing to him. He will condemn every such act.
This is simply not true, because all goodness comes from God, irrespective of whether those who perform righteous acts consciously believe in God or not. Isaiah 61:8 - "For I, the Lord, love justice..." indicates that God cannot be displeased with justice, whoever performs the act, because justice is simply justice.
When we choose to do what is right, are we not tapping into the reality of God in some way?
The trouble with some Christians is that they seem to think that the only way God can act is through people who consciously believe in Him. Therefore anyone who falls short of some theological standard is judged to be incapable of doing any good. This is, of course, nonsense, hence the shocking Parable of the Good Samaritan!
In other words, Augustine was wrong.
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You can argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome': but you neither can nor need argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome, but I'm not saying this is true'. CS Lewis
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Raptor Eye
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# 16649
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Posted
Every act of human kindness is of God, as God is love.
Jesus said that those who give others food or drink, care for them when sick, or visit them when in prison will be rewarded, ie God recognises their actions. He also said that God gives good things to everyone, however evil they are.
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Be still, and know that I am God! Psalm 46.10
Posts: 4359 | From: The United Kingdom | Registered: Sep 2011
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Belle Ringer
Shipmate
# 13379
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
In other words, Augustine was wrong.
90% of the time I bump into Augustine he's wrong, so what's new? ![[Smile]](smile.gif)
Posts: 5830 | From: Texas | Registered: Jan 2008
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Martin60
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# 368
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Posted
Aye, he gave us love the sinner, hate the sin, not Jesus as a Baptist friend insists.
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Love wins
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
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dj_ordinaire
Host
# 4643
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Posted
Am I misunderstanding this? It seems to me that the direct meaning is that there may be many things in us which are pleasing to God and that these are the things which we have allowed Him to work in us. Whereas the things we have done of our own accord (i.e. against God) are inherently unpleasing.
The message I take from the passage as given in isolation is that all good things come from God ('from whom all holy desires, all good counsels and all just works do proceed'). Or am I wrong?
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Flinging wide the gates...
Posts: 10335 | From: Hanging in the balance of the reality of man | Registered: Jun 2003
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ExclamationMark
Shipmate
# 14715
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
Aye, he gave us love the sinner, hate the sin, not Jesus as a Baptist friend insists.
It's not possible to hate the sin but love the sinner: to the sinner his sin isn't sin but part of what he is. If you hate the sin that is him, you hate him.
Posts: 3845 | From: A new Jerusalem | Registered: Apr 2009
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Alt Wally
Cardinal Ximinez
# 3245
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Posted
Good things done without faith in God are an affront to God. The flip side of the coin is bad things done with faith in God can be pleasing to God. This to me is what fanaticism is.
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Amanda B. Reckondwythe
Dressed for Church
# 5521
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Alt Wally:
Bad things done with faith in God can be pleasing to God.
Name one.
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"I take prayer too seriously to use it as an excuse for avoiding work and responsibility." -- The Revd Martin Luther King Jr.
Posts: 10542 | From: The Great Southwest | Registered: Feb 2004
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Holy Smoke
Shipmate
# 14866
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Adeodatus:
From this morning's Office of Readings:
quote:
Our life was displeasing to him; everything in us that was of our doing was displeasing to him, but what he himself did in us was not displeasing. So he will condemn what we did but save his own work in us.
St Augustine, Sermon 23A, my italics.
What Augustine is saying is that every act of human charity, kindness, generosity, goodness, is not only disregarded by God - which would be bad enough - but is positively displeasing to him. He will condemn every such act.
...
I'm not a fan of Augustine, but what I think he is saying is that there is a difference between a charitable act carried out as a result of a process of prayerful discernment, where we are listening to and receptive to God's will, and a charitable act which we decided on by a process of rational deduction, because we thought that it was required, or a good thing, on the basis of a set of human rules or principles, in other words, 'of our own doing', rather than something 'he himself did in us'.
Thus, we listen to what God wants, rather than automatically assuming that we know best.
Posts: 335 | From: UK | Registered: Jun 2009
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Horseman Bree
Shipmate
# 5290
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Posted
I seem to recall a sig. line that read (approximately)
That marvellous new theological insight you just had?
It was first proposed in writing by a monk in the fourth century.
He wrote it more eloquently than you.
He was wrong, too.
(Anyone claim the sig.?)
Posts: 5372 | From: more herring choker than bluenose | Registered: Dec 2003
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Alt Wally
Cardinal Ximinez
# 3245
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Amanda B. Reckondwythe:
quote:
Originally posted by Alt Wally:
Bad things done with faith in God can be pleasing to God.
Name one.
There isn't one in my opinion. Believing good things done without divine purpose are evil, is just the flip side of the coin from those who believe evil things done for divine purpose are good. That is fanaticism in my opinion. I agree with the word used in the thread for both. Abhorrent.
Posts: 3684 | Registered: Aug 2002
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Lamb Chopped
Ship's kebab
# 5528
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Adeodatus:
From this morning's Office of Readings:
quote:
Our life was displeasing to him; everything in us that was of our doing was displeasing to him, but what he himself did in us was not displeasing. So he will condemn what we did but save his own work in us.
St Augustine, Sermon 23A, my italics.
What Augustine is saying is that every act of human charity, kindness, generosity, goodness, is not only disregarded by God - which would be bad enough - but is positively displeasing to him. He will condemn every such act.
I don't, won't, can't believe this. My stomach turned when I read those words this morning. The idea that under the New Covenant God is revealed to so hate his creation ... it's disgusting. We were better off under the Old Covenant.
Anyone care to convince me otherwise?
Okay, can't tell you what Augustine meant from a text in isolation, but I can explain a rather similar-sounding Lutheran doctrine (and it's not abhorrent if I can only get it across correctly, please God, it's a toughie).
It's based on the following text I believe:
quote:
Romans 14:22-23English Standard Version (ESV)
22 The faith that you have, keep between yourself and God. Blessed is the one who has no reason to pass judgment on himself for what he approves. 23 But whoever has doubts is condemned if he eats, because the eating is not from faith. For whatever does not proceed from faith is sin.
Now this is kind of obscure, but what the Lutherans make of it is that the motivations and attitude behind an action are just as important as the action itself when it comes to deciding if the thing is good or not. So you could have three people who carry out identical actions, but one does it out of pride and a desire to be noticed, one does it out of fear and a belief that God will punish if the action is not performed, and the third person does it out of love and faith in Jesus Christ.
To human eyes, the actions are identical; but in the eyes of God, the third is the only one that is really acceptable. It's acceptable because it is carried out by God working in us--by the Holy Spirit, who creates faith and love in us, which flows out into a life of good actions. This is the true gold, while actions that are carried out for pride or fear are fair-seeming counterfeits.
Now as for the strong language of "displeasing" or even "hating" (your word, I think?)--
It does NOT say that God hates his creation. What he hates/is displeased by/feels ![[Projectile]](graemlins/puke2.gif) to, are distortions of that good creation--marrings of it, counterfeits offered for true gold. And as we all come of a sin-infected species, "distorted" and "marred" is going to be our default state, unless the Holy Spirit is working in and through us. At that point things start to come right again.
Is that as clear as mud?
[ 31. August 2014, 18:59: Message edited by: Lamb Chopped ]
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Er, this is what I've been up to (book).
Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down!
Posts: 20059 | From: off in left field somewhere | Registered: Feb 2004
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Lamb Chopped
Ship's kebab
# 5528
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Posted
Suppose I should have added--
This is all speaking from a divine point of view. From a human point of view, we usually don't care WHAT the motivations behind a good action are, as long as the action happens. For example, giving to charity--we'll take even the devil's money gladly without enquiring into his motives for giving it ![[Biased]](wink.gif) , and rightly so, since we're working on a human level there. But the text (Augustine's and Paul's) is not dealing with the obvious human level (of course donated $ are a good thing because you can feed more people!) but rather with God's view of things.
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Er, this is what I've been up to (book).
Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down!
Posts: 20059 | From: off in left field somewhere | Registered: Feb 2004
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IngoB
Sentire cum Ecclesia
# 8700
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Adeodatus:
What Augustine is saying is that every act of human charity, kindness, generosity, goodness, is not only disregarded by God - which would be bad enough - but is positively displeasing to him. He will condemn every such act.
That's a rather basic misinterpretation... The traditional picture is that every good act is initiated by God's grace and carried out by going along with God's grace. Whereas every evil act is initiated by us and carried out in resistance to God's grace.
That's exactly the doctrine stated by St Augustine in your quotation. Hence St Augustine is not at all denying the value of "every act of human charity, kindness, generosity, goodness". Rather, he is attributing all of these to God as root cause, whereas humans only act as instrumental cause. Human good just is the alignment with God's grace, which works in us and through us all good. One can critique this view, of course. But your comment is simply a misunderstanding.
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They’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true; thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying; and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace. - The Fool in King Lear
Posts: 12010 | From: Gone fishing | Registered: Oct 2004
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
Based on what I've read of Augustine, he does believe that without grace it is impossible to act out of love. So, for example, he believed that the pagan justice of the Roman Empire was simply a conspiracy of thieves not to rob each other. (Not a thought unknown to pagan Roman authors - 'they make a desert and call it peace' Tacitus has a British chieftain say of the Romans.)
I am not sure that after Marx and Nietzsche and Freud we are in a position to reject the idea out of hand.
Still, whatever Nietzsche or Freud or Marx might say, there are genuine instances of good impulses both inside and outside the church. Which means that on Augustine's view the grace of God must also be at work both inside and outside the church.
Another point is that Augustine does not think of the relationship between us and God as being one of us to something wholly external to us. God is closer to us than we are to ourselves, Augustine writes. In some sense, things we do out of the grace of God are more truly done by our whole selves than things we do not out of the grace of God.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
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Albertus
Shipmate
# 13356
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Gamaliel:
FWIW, I agree with EE.
I fear that I don't. Surely it is possible- as St Paul says and as, for so many of us, our own experience tells us- to sin in spite of our own better inclinations, to wish with the head not to sin but to succumb to temptation. Do you not hate your own sins? And if you do, do you necessarily hate yourself? (Some do, of course, but that is pretty generally seen as the way to despair, isn't it?)
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My beard is a testament to my masculinity and virility, and demonstrates that I am a real man. Trouble is, bits of quiche sometimes get caught in it.
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Russ
Old salt
# 120
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Amanda B. Reckondwythe:
quote:
Originally posted by Alt Wally:
Bad things done with faith in God can be pleasing to God.
Name one.
Back to Abraham and Isaac again, but I've bored everyone with that elsewhere...
Seems to me that the original quote reflects a view of humankind as totally depraved. It's not saying that God hates the good we do; it's saying that he claims 100% of the credit for the good we do.
Best wishes,
Russ
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Wish everyone well; the enemy is not people, the enemy is wrong ideas
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Russ:
it's saying that he claims 100% of the credit for the good we do.
Bear in mind of course that on the Christian doctrine of creation, as opposed to the deist doctrine of creationism, God is 100% responsible for our existence. So, God claiming credit for the good we do is in competition with us getting credit. (Though I think this line of thought renders the whole idea of credit for doing good problematic.)
Also, in Augustinian Christianity evil is a lapse into non-being: a failure to be everything of which we are capable.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
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Amanda B. Reckondwythe
Dressed for Church
# 5521
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Russ:
quote:
Originally posted by Amanda B. Reckondwythe:
quote:
Originally posted by Alt Wally:
Bad things done with faith in God can be pleasing to God.
Name one.
Back to Abraham and Isaac again
Wrong. The act was not consummated, nor did God want it to be in all probability. God was merely testing Abraham.
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"I take prayer too seriously to use it as an excuse for avoiding work and responsibility." -- The Revd Martin Luther King Jr.
Posts: 10542 | From: The Great Southwest | Registered: Feb 2004
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Dave W.
Shipmate
# 8765
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Adeodatus:
From this morning's Office of Readings:
quote:
Our life was displeasing to him; everything in us that was of our doing was displeasing to him, but what he himself did in us was not displeasing. So he will condemn what we did but save his own work in us.
St Augustine, Sermon 23A, my italics.
Does anyone have a link to Sermon 23A?
I've found this quote in the Office of Readings for August 31, but it says "from a sermon by Saint Augustine"; elsewhere I've seen references to Sermo 23a: CCL 41, 321-323, but I haven't found any link to the whole thing, just links to the breviary text. (I've found Augustine's Sermon 23 on the New Testament, but it's not the source of the breviary text.)
Posts: 2059 | From: the hub of the solar system | Registered: Nov 2004
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Cameron PM
Shipmate
# 18142
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Dave W.:
quote:
Originally posted by Adeodatus:
From this morning's Office of Readings:
quote:
Our life was displeasing to him; everything in us that was of our doing was displeasing to him, but what he himself did in us was not displeasing. So he will condemn what we did but save his own work in us.
St Augustine, Sermon 23A, my italics.
Does anyone have a link to Sermon 23A?
I've found this quote in the Office of Readings for August 31, but it says "from a sermon by Saint Augustine"; elsewhere I've seen references to Sermo 23a: CCL 41, 321-323, but I haven't found any link to the whole thing, just links to the breviary text. (I've found Augustine's Sermon 23 on the New Testament, but it's not the source of the breviary text.)
Same.
"but what he himself did in us was not displeasing"
If all goodness comes from God, all love comes from God, and if all kindness comes from God, and if God is the inspiration for our goodness and loving kindness, then our actions are pleasing because He Himself did them in us.
You've heard "Jesus is in the poor" and "Jesus is in the suffering", at least the way I interpreted that passage was that out human acts required condemnation - our sin, since we are human, we do sin, yet the good we do isn't condemnable because good works and good faith are the acts of God.
I could be completely off kiltre though.
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Your call.
Posts: 59 | From: Talamh an Eisc | Registered: Jun 2014
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Belle Ringer
Shipmate
# 13379
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by ExclamationMark:
It's not possible to hate the sin but love the sinner: to the sinner his sin isn't sin but part of what he is. If you hate the sin that is him, you hate him.
That's an intriguing observation. Not 100% black and white, few observations are, Apostle Paul talks about battling sin impulses in himself.
But I've been in several conversations over the past decade in which a healing professional (M.D., psychologist, faith healer) has said when a person has a long term limiting behavior (such as physical or mental"disability" or other limiting personality quirk), it becomes part of their self concept. It's who they know to be. Healing it, especially healing it quickly, can be disorienting, disconcerting, "I don't know who I am anymore."
Our quirks, our beliefs, our abilities and limitations define us. To some extent yes that would include our sins, they are part of our way of understanding or misunderstanding how to get through life.
A friend married a man who left his dirty socks on the floor never would put them in the laundry basket. I asked "do you love him in spite of the dirty socks or because of the dirty socks?" She said "I love him with the dirty socks."
Yes. She loves him. The rest is details.
Posts: 5830 | From: Texas | Registered: Jan 2008
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ChastMastr
Shipmate
# 716
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Gamaliel:
FWIW, I agree with EE.
Me too.
O Older Brother St. Augustine, you had many good and wise things to say about Our Father, but I'm sorry, I think you got this one wrong.
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My essays on comics continuity: http://chastmastr.tumblr.com/tagged/continuity
Posts: 14068 | From: Clearwater, Florida | Registered: Jul 2001
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ChastMastr
Shipmate
# 716
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
The traditional picture is that every good act is initiated by God's grace and carried out by going along with God's grace. Whereas every evil act is initiated by us and carried out in resistance to God's grace.
That's exactly the doctrine stated by St Augustine in your quotation. Hence St Augustine is not at all denying the value of "every act of human charity, kindness, generosity, goodness". Rather, he is attributing all of these to God as root cause, whereas humans only act as instrumental cause. Human good just is the alignment with God's grace, which works in us and through us all good.
Ah, so then it's more out of context than anything else?
O Elder Brother St. Augustine, please potentially disregard the last text message. Thank you.
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My essays on comics continuity: http://chastmastr.tumblr.com/tagged/continuity
Posts: 14068 | From: Clearwater, Florida | Registered: Jul 2001
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IngoB
Sentire cum Ecclesia
# 8700
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Posted
This is the source of this sermon, and here is the full (Latin) text of this sermon (obtained via this useful site, click "sermones" and then look under "Sermones de Scripturis de Vetere Testamento"). Best I can tell, the only thing missing in the Office of Readings translation are the last six lines, starting after "confitebimur tibi deus, confitebimur et inuocabimus nomen tuum". And that's basically a call to confession, or so my nearly defunct Latin from two decades ago suggests.
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They’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true; thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying; and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace. - The Fool in King Lear
Posts: 12010 | From: Gone fishing | Registered: Oct 2004
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ChastMastr
Shipmate
# 716
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
This is the source of this sermon, and here is the full (Latin) text of this sermon (obtained via this useful site, click "sermones" and then look under "Sermones de Scripturis de Vetere Testamento"). Best I can tell, the only thing missing in the Office of Readings translation are the last six lines, starting after "confitebimur tibi deus, confitebimur et inuocabimus nomen tuum". And that's basically a call to confession, or so my nearly defunct Latin from two decades ago suggests.
Alas, the first link goes to a website to order the book, and none of this appears to be translated into English... ![[Frown]](frown.gif)
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My essays on comics continuity: http://chastmastr.tumblr.com/tagged/continuity
Posts: 14068 | From: Clearwater, Florida | Registered: Jul 2001
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Dave W.
Shipmate
# 8765
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
This is the source of this sermon, and here is the full (Latin) text of this sermon (obtained via this useful site, click "sermones" and then look under "Sermones de Scripturis de Vetere Testamento"). Best I can tell, the only thing missing in the Office of Readings translation are the last six lines, starting after "confitebimur tibi deus, confitebimur et inuocabimus nomen tuum". And that's basically a call to confession, or so my nearly defunct Latin from two decades ago suggests.
Thanks, IngoB. Opening that in Chrome and right-clicking to translate, I get enough to tell that it's the same basic text, but it appears to be about twice as long as the breviary. The machine translation isn't terribly clear, but the breviary text appears to be condensed - there are definitely sentences throughout the Latin which the breviary doesn't have. (For example, between the 2nd and 3rd sentences which appear in the breviary, the Latin has two additional sentences, the second of which refers to a scripture saying "ite in ignem aeternum, qui praeparatus est diabulo et angelis eius" or "Go into the everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels".)
Posts: 2059 | From: the hub of the solar system | Registered: Nov 2004
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IngoB
Sentire cum Ecclesia
# 8700
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Posted
True, there's more editing going on in the text. It would take about half an hour of work to splice the current English translation with the removed Latin parts, creating a hybrid text that would serve as a convenient basis for some crowd-translation. Unfortunately, I see no way of doing this without violating copyright.
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They’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true; thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying; and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace. - The Fool in King Lear
Posts: 12010 | From: Gone fishing | Registered: Oct 2004
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seekingsister
Shipmate
# 17707
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Adeodatus:
What Augustine is saying is that every act of human charity, kindness, generosity, goodness, is not only disregarded by God - which would be bad enough - but is positively displeasing to him. He will condemn every such act.
A different way of putting it - what meaning do they have to God, if done without faith? I would say none.
That is - I believe that many those who never know of God or Christ's Gospel may (I hope will) be saved, but only by God's grace and mercy. I can't accept that the non-Christian who did lots of nice things for others is going to get more points than the non-Christian who (maybe due to circumstances) did not do as many.
It's problematic to go in any direction towards "God is pleased by good works" for many reasons, although perhaps Augustine has taken it to the opposite extreme.
Posts: 1371 | From: London | Registered: May 2013
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Adeodatus
Shipmate
# 4992
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Posted
Only time for a quick catch-up at the moment - thanks everyone - but this caught my eye: quote:
Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
So you could have three people who carry out identical actions, but one does it out of pride and a desire to be noticed, one does it out of fear and a belief that God will punish if the action is not performed, and the third person does it out of love and faith in Jesus Christ.
To human eyes, the actions are identical; but in the eyes of God, the third is the only one that is really acceptable.
What about the fourth person? A person of no faith, perhaps a thoroughgoing atheist, who performs an act of charity out of simple human kindness? Is that "acceptable" to God? Or is it, in Augustine's word, "displeasing" to him? Or are you going to go with the crowd on this and say there's no such thing as simple human kindness - that if it's a good act, then God grabs the credit?
(I'm sorry, by the way, that online sources for this sermon are scant. The link provided by Dave W. is the reading as I read it; I think under Universalis's normal rules it'll vanish in a day or two.)
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"What is broken, repair with gold."
Posts: 9779 | From: Manchester | Registered: Sep 2003
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Callan
Shipmate
# 525
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Posted
Originally posted by Adeodatus:
quote:
What about the fourth person? A person of no faith, perhaps a thoroughgoing atheist, who performs an act of charity out of simple human kindness? Is that "acceptable" to God? Or is it, in Augustine's word, "displeasing" to him? Or are you going to go with the crowd on this and say there's no such thing as simple human kindness - that if it's a good act, then God grabs the credit?
Does God relate to his creatures in that sort of way? If the two of us set out to paint all the lamp posts in Croydon purple and if I paint 30% of them then by necessity you have to paint 70% of them. But if we are on a divinely inspired painting spree then by the grace of God we paint 100% of them. The appropriate response is gratitude to both God and the painter.
The question of motive can be safely left to God who alone knows the secrets of our hearts. But if we charitably assume that our good deeds are sometimes done with reasonably good motives we are not, in that instance, somnambulists. In the first instance we give thanks for the kindness of the atheist; we can safely leave our respectful disagreements about the metaphysics of the act for a more apt occasion.
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How easy it would be to live in England, if only one did not love her. - G.K. Chesterton
Posts: 9757 | From: Citizen of the World | Registered: Jun 2001
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IngoB
Sentire cum Ecclesia
# 8700
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Posted
Adeodatus' complaint boils down to an understanding of God as basically a human being writ large, whose grace acts as a kind of command. This is however not the traditional understanding of God in Christianity. As I have said before, we get a better intuitive feeling for the "traditional God" if we start from assuming that God is an impersonal power, and delay the question of His Personality until we have worked through the problem at hand without anthropomorphic blinders. So consider a vacuum cleaner and electricity. It is accurate to say that the vacuum cleaner sucks up the dirt. It is also accurate to say that the electricity enables this. No electricity, no cleaning. And if the electricity was somehow misdirected, then the vacuum cleaner might burst into flame instead of doing its job. So the root cause of the cleaning is the electricity, but the instrumental cause is the vacuum cleaner. But this does not somehow take away from the statement that the vacuum cleaner is what does the cleaning. It merely explains how this works: there is an underlying power that is shaped by the device into the action. This is not a relationship in which two entities vie for dominance, rather one enables the other. Now that we have analysed this without personalities, we are safe to reintroduce them without getting sidetracked. God as a Person indeed imparts a kind of "good directionality" onto things, grace is an aimed "electricity". Likewise we as persons can align with this aim or against it (unlike a vacuum cleaner, which is either in working order or not). But it remains true that there is no vying for dominance here, no usurpation of merit. One is the enabling power of the other.
The point here is that we do not loose our humanity by aligning with grace, because it is not really a kind of command issued by a Divine tyrant. Rather we gain our humanity by aligning with grace, because it is an enabling power that we can tap into to become what humans are supposed to be. We do not become free by rejecting grace, rather we become less human by misdirecting or wasting the very power that is supposed to drive our humanity. While we do render God's grace into "commandments" for conceptual understanding and concreteness, ultimately that is a wrong, anthropomorphic picture. God does not command, He creates. In a sense, that is all God ever does, creating, giving being. But that is a comprehensive act that for our minds has to be broken down into parts to become understandable. So we talk about commandments, or indeed, slightly more sophisticatedly abut "enabling powers". But really all this is, is God giving us a specific being. God's grace is not really some kind of gift in a wrapping paper that he hands to your mind to be unwrapped. It is the fact that you as a creature have this alternative to do good or bad. The very fact that you act there in a valued choice, that you are an entity that is capable of doing good, just is God's grace. It is like saying that copper can conduct electricity, God creates copper into this being, He does not first create copper and then commands it to carry electricity. In that same sense the continuous holding into being of you as you are just is the steady flow of God's grace, and when you do good it cannot be divided against God's grace because God made you be so that you could do good. Not just in some past sense, but right here in this moment you are maintained in existence as a moral agent.
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They’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true; thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying; and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace. - The Fool in King Lear
Posts: 12010 | From: Gone fishing | Registered: Oct 2004
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wishandaprayer
Shipmate
# 17673
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
So consider a vacuum cleaner and electricity. It is accurate to say that the vacuum cleaner sucks up the dirt. It is also accurate to say that the electricity enables this.
ASIDE: This was actually a really good explanation - but it did remind me of the part of Adrian Plass' secret diary where Leonard Thynn attempts to describe the Holy Spirit by using a Vacuum Cleaner... ;-)
Posts: 94 | Registered: May 2013
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Dave W.
Shipmate
# 8765
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
True, there's more editing going on in the text. It would take about half an hour of work to splice the current English translation with the removed Latin parts, creating a hybrid text that would serve as a convenient basis for some crowd-translation. Unfortunately, I see no way of doing this without violating copyright.
I'm rather surprised that there doesn't seem to be a complete English translation old enough to be in the public domain.
Posts: 2059 | From: the hub of the solar system | Registered: Nov 2004
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Alt Wally
Cardinal Ximinez
# 3245
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Posted
I'm not trying to argue, but the explanations don't make sense to me. A model of humanity based on the vacuum cleaner/electricity analogy I think more or less makes humans merely a vessel of grace. We are not the source of grace, and doing good things may even go against our own inner convictions such as in the example of the atheist who does good things. That does not sound like people to me, that sounds like robots. Once you're past this, you're on to the "okay, if people aren't the source of good, and God is - what is good and by whose standard?" Eating pork, drinking alcohol, other dead horse issues? What about when God appears to be doing bad things. What then? The issue of fucking with Abraham's mind to prove a point has been raised. What about the other examples you could pluck from scripture that don't sound altogether good, at least how we view God now. Does "goodness" change and evolve?
[ 01. September 2014, 13:59: Message edited by: Alt Wally ]
Posts: 3684 | Registered: Aug 2002
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Adeodatus
Shipmate
# 4992
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Posted
Alt Wally, I quite agree. If, when I'm doing a good deed, I'm only ever acting as God's glove puppet, then what is the point of me?
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"What is broken, repair with gold."
Posts: 9779 | From: Manchester | Registered: Sep 2003
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Alt Wally:
I'm not trying to argue, but the explanations don't make sense to me. A model of humanity based on the vacuum cleaner/electricity analogy I think more or less makes humans merely a vessel of grace.
I am deeply dubious about the 'merely' here. (Or to put it another way, is the vacuum cleaner 'merely' a vessel of electricity?)
I agree that the view doesn't work if you think of humans as self-contained and self-sufficient individual atoms. But I think it's been a long while since that was altogether tenable as an opinion.
The main point is that God is not in competition with humanity.
quote:
We are not the source of grace, and doing good things may even go against our own inner convictions such as in the example of the atheist who does good things. That does not sound like people to me, that sounds like robots.
I hardly think it's against the inner convinctions of most atheists to do good things.
The atheist might be mistaken about the anthropology of it, just as the Augustinian is mistaken if there is no God, but the fact that an opinion would imply that some people have false opinions is not an objection.
quote:
Once you're past this, you're on to the "okay, if people aren't the source of good, and God is - what is good and by whose standard?"
Umm... God is good. I'm really not sure why this is an objection to the particular view on offer. The questions in your post can certainly be asked about the view that God is good in general, but I'm not sure why they're problems for this doctrine of Augustinian Christianity in particular.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Adeodatus:
Alt Wally, I quite agree. If, when I'm doing a good deed, I'm only ever acting as God's glove puppet, then what is the point of me?
Bringing out the hoary old analogy of the author and his fiction, is Hamlet Shakespeare's glove puppet? Is that really the best way to understand the relation between the author and the fictional character? A great author surely gives far more life to their characters than that. (For that matter, a great puppeteer gives more life to his characters than that.) The point is that in the same way that human actions can be understood as the outcome of electrical and chemical events in the brain, they can be understood as conscious decision making, and as the outworkings of God's grace. Just as level one and level two don't invalidate each other, so level three doesn't invalidate either of the other two.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
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Anglican_Brat
Shipmate
# 12349
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Adeodatus:
Alt Wally, I quite agree. If, when I'm doing a good deed, I'm only ever acting as God's glove puppet, then what is the point of me?
My understanding is that when we do good, we cooperate with God, and so we do exercise our free will, but we exercise it freely so that it aligns with the will of God.
When we sin, we exercise our free will, but we exercise it in violation of the will of God.
That is how I reconcile free will and God's divine providence.
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It's Reformation Day! Do your part to promote Christian unity and brotherly love and hug a schismatic.
Posts: 4332 | From: Vancouver | Registered: Feb 2007
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Lamb Chopped
Ship's kebab
# 5528
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Adeodatus:
Only time for a quick catch-up at the moment - thanks everyone - but this caught my eye: quote:
Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
So you could have three people who carry out identical actions, but one does it out of pride and a desire to be noticed, one does it out of fear and a belief that God will punish if the action is not performed, and the third person does it out of love and faith in Jesus Christ.
To human eyes, the actions are identical; but in the eyes of God, the third is the only one that is really acceptable.
What about the fourth person? A person of no faith, perhaps a thoroughgoing atheist, who performs an act of charity out of simple human kindness? Is that "acceptable" to God? Or is it, in Augustine's word, "displeasing" to him? Or are you going to go with the crowd on this and say there's no such thing as simple human kindness - that if it's a good act, then God grabs the credit?
Look, the underlying idea on this is that nothing and nobody is "acceptable to God" because of what they do, but rather through Jesus Christ our Savior. That includes the very best as well as the very worst of the human race. The problem is not with the deeds themselves, it's with the person doing them.
Maybe we can move away from the achievement model and look at a better one? Think of sin as a body-wide infection. If a person is infected, none of their organs, blood, etc. are going to be "acceptable" (healthy) no matter how well they function. I may have terrific kidney function, but if I have a systemic infection there is no way my kidneys (no matter how awesome) will ever be "acceptable" for, say, a transplant. The infection has to go. No surgeon would touch them otherwise.
In the same way, as long as the infection of sin is untreated in a human being, none of their thoughts, words, deeds are going to be "acceptable" to God. The taint is there. It needs to be gotten rid of. The good deeds may be perfectly acceptable on a human level--if person X saves a hundred orphans' lives, I'm sure as hell not going to speak against what he did!--but without Christ, the infection is still there, the deed is still contaminated in that sense. Just like everything else we do outside of Christ.
This is in no way to denigrate the good deeds of atheists or anybody else. It's simply saying that there's an infection. Duh. And like a good doctor, God wants to deal with the major issue--the infection--first. It's no use saying to your doctor, "But look how well I can urinate!" when she's saying, "Duh. But you've got system-wide bacteremia going on." Deal with that first. THEN be proud of how well you can piss.
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Er, this is what I've been up to (book).
Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down!
Posts: 20059 | From: off in left field somewhere | Registered: Feb 2004
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LeRoc
Famous Dutch pirate
# 3216
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Posted
quote:
Lamb Chopped: The good deeds may be perfectly acceptable on a human level--if person X saves a hundred orphans' lives, I'm sure as hell not going to speak against what he did!--but without Christ, the infection is still there, the deed is still contaminated in that sense. Just like everything else we do outside of Christ.
Aargh, an abhorrent doctrine indeed.
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I know why God made the rhinoceros, it's because He couldn't see the rhinoceros, so He made the rhinoceros to be able to see it. (Clarice Lispector)
Posts: 9474 | From: Brazil / Africa | Registered: Aug 2002
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Lamb Chopped
Ship's kebab
# 5528
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Posted
How, exactly?
I said that on a human level (which is basically everything bar "this earns salvation") the deeds are awesome and wholly acceptable.
I said I wouldn't speak against him (which equals understatement for "the guy is awesome").
I said that good deeds have nothing to do with being acceptable in God's eyes, i.e. salvation.
If it's the last that you find unacceptable, no problem, most of the world agrees with you.
But if it's the earlier points, I don't understand.
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Er, this is what I've been up to (book).
Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down!
Posts: 20059 | From: off in left field somewhere | Registered: Feb 2004
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LeRoc
Famous Dutch pirate
# 3216
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Posted
quote:
Lamb Chopped: I said that on a human level (which is basically everything bar "this earns salvation") the deeds are awesome and wholly acceptable.
I believe they are awesome and wholly acceptable to God too. In fact, I picture Him to be fist-pumping every time someone saves a hundred orphans' lives. Well done!
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I know why God made the rhinoceros, it's because He couldn't see the rhinoceros, so He made the rhinoceros to be able to see it. (Clarice Lispector)
Posts: 9474 | From: Brazil / Africa | Registered: Aug 2002
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Lamb Chopped
Ship's kebab
# 5528
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Posted
Well, maybe it's the word "acceptable" we need to work on.
Obviously God is aware of, and approves of, the good deeds of unbelievers. We see this all over the place in Old and New Testaments where God calls out his own people for not living up to the standards of the outsiders, let alone what they should be doing as God's people (See: the prophets, etc., also the "even the Gentiles" type sentences in the NT).
Nevertheless, if we move into the area of "these things are acceptable offerings for God's altar," suddenly the standards have changed. We're now looking at 100% perfection, no flaws need apply. Which basically rules out any human deed ever.
Enter Christ. What he does (among lots of other stuff) is to make those flawed offerings acceptable. Sort of like Picasso adding a few strokes and his signature to a little kid's doodling on the back of a paper place mat.
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Er, this is what I've been up to (book).
Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down!
Posts: 20059 | From: off in left field somewhere | Registered: Feb 2004
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LeRoc
Famous Dutch pirate
# 3216
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Posted
quote:
Lamb Chopped: Nevertheless, if we move into the area of "these things are acceptable offerings for God's altar," suddenly the standards have changed. We're now looking at 100% perfection, no flaws need apply. Which basically rules out any human deed ever.
If that is so, then He may take my offerings and stick them where the Sun don't shine.
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I know why God made the rhinoceros, it's because He couldn't see the rhinoceros, so He made the rhinoceros to be able to see it. (Clarice Lispector)
Posts: 9474 | From: Brazil / Africa | Registered: Aug 2002
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Kelly Alves
Bunny with an axe
# 2522
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Posted
I think it's the idea that God is observing acts of goodness, rather than being the agency of them, that we need to work on.
The will of God is acted out through human hands. Quite often, God doesn't seem to care if those hands are attached to someone who believes all the right things. " The Kingdom of God is among us"-- but only when people faciliate it.
We are all a sacrament. We are all material tools of God's grace. Some folk, I believe, might not intellectually believe this, but instinctively-- somatically?--respond to the call to participation in God's agency. ( if you will.) What spiritual theories they may or may not have worked out are of negligible importance in comparison in comparison to responding to God's agency.
Belief is a discussion about the effects of parachuting. Faith is jumping out of the plane.
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I cannot expect people to believe “
Jesus loves me, this I know” of they don’t believe “Kelly loves me, this I know.”
Kelly Alves, somewhere around 2003.
Posts: 35076 | From: Pura Californiana | Registered: Mar 2002
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