No it's not. Words are flexible in usage and thus open to interpretation. That's why I rely on logical consistency - logical constructs - more than linguistic nuances. The principle of merit dominates the Bible from Genesis to Revelation.
Hm, I see grace as more important.
The most important point (the highest way, so to speak, 1.Cor 12:31b) is not merit and suffering, but love (1.Cor 13:3).
I also gave myself as an example - I've been using the expression "cat worship" for many years. This is not worship strictly speaking. It is worship loosely speaking. So you can't pretend I've changed my position.
Are you sure this cat worship was really OK? The Korean Christians got martyrs because they did not accept an interpretation of "emperor worship" along these lines, and the Korean church grew faster than any other church in the world during Japanese rule (after WW II, the church in China was the most rapidly growing church). The Japanese church, which mostly practiced Emperor worship shrunk from almost 10% around 1900 to less than 1% by now.
Your point? Why do you conveniently ignore verse 12?
You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, because you were slain...Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and wealth and praise!
No, you ignore verse 9, which describes it more in full than the short repetition in verse 12:
You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, because you were slain, and with your blood you purchased for God persons from every tribe and language and people and nation.
It is not the being slain as such (indeed, there are many martyrs who were slain like sheep, cf. Rm 8:36, if you only look on this point Jesus is just one out of many), it is the redeeming power, the "purchasing" (only possible because He was sinless), which gave the rulers by which God will rule (Rev 5:9). You cannot pick out v.12 and interpret it out of context (a context I mentioned in my post!).
Worthy of praise because He was slain. Not because He was physically handsome.
I
never said that being handsome was a criterion - this is your invention in order to distort what I really say. It is probably not out of intention, but a result of your prejudices.
The Father acquired those persons too, right?
It was the death of Jesus who achieved this, the Father participated.
But the Father is not mentioned as "worthy" there.
He is mentioned as worthy before (Rev 4:11), and is praised (as one worthy of praise)m together with the Lamb in Rev 5:13. Verses 9,11, and 13 are variations of one and the same theme: The worshiping of God (Father) and the Lamb.
Christ in particular was worthy - because He was slain. Again, this concept of Christ's suffering-based merit has been preached for 2,000 years. Odd that, to save face in a debate, you are suddenly questioning it now.
Just because I don't accept your conclusions, this does
not mean that I deny your premises. We don't agree on every premise of you (so we came from "was God exhausted" to worthy and so on), but that you hastily suggest that I deny the "merit" of the suffering on the cross is
sheer slandering.
BTW, suffering is not the only trait of the crucifixion that is stressed in the NT. At least the same stress is on the glory/shame theme: Jesus gave up His glory (or honor, the same word in Hebrew or Greek), and took on the shame of the cross, in order that we gain the glory of God we have lost. You certainly know some Bible verses that tell this.
This had far-reaching consequences: It changed a culture. The ancient took humility as a vice, under the Christian world-view it became a virtue (the German philosopher Nietzsche again proclaimed that humility is a vice, a stand which influenced the Nazi world view).
You are very intellectually dishonest. Probably 20 times I've acknowledged that loosely speaking almost anything is worthy of praise (viz. cat worship).
You proved the loose term, I asked you to prove that your strict term is the core, and not something else.
That's like saying, "The Trinity is false because the text isn't explicit."
If anyone says so, I can show to him
explicit texts for every important statement in the old trinity creeds. Can you do that with your theses?
Christ is not part of the Deity?
What does that question have to do with what I said? I quoted that the fullness of God dwells in Christ, you countered that this could not be literal because God is omnipresent, and I showed you that Christ is omnipresent, too. So your argument against the traditional interpretation of Eph 4:10 is void.
Now I make what you made often before: You are ignoring all the sermons on the Trinity in the last 1500 years or so. Which showed that Christ is God, not just a demigod as the Arians tended to say, and that He is fully man, not just only by appearance, as the docetists taught. - Feel how it is when one is told one does not believe what one really believes!
You want my pearls? Show me some clear signs of intellectual honesty. You haven't even admitted that traditional thinking is highly problematic with repect to issues like:
...An immutable God became man.
Not problematic if you understand the nature of time and eternity. We only partially understand it, but science gives enough clues to understand why this is no problem. I also showed you another angle (the comparison to an author writing a novel) which makes clear that this is no problem. You just ignore these arguments.
...Hypostatic union has multiple places of incoherence, for example it means your soul could have been selected to be part of the Trinity.
The hypostatic union as defined by the old creed does not mean that. There are some problems, but your construct is not. It is only a problem for those that share premises neither the church fathers nor any true trinitarian shares.
....Merit conflicts with the traditional understanding of God.
No sure what you mean. Your stress on merit conflicts with what the Bible tells on grace, or love as the highest way.
....Merit conflicts with the traditional understanding of Creation
Only if one employ some presuppositions of you. Like the hasty conclusion "the traditional understanding of Creation does not contain hard word, so it must be a condoning of laziness - but this is a
non sequitur.
....Infinity is not a real quantity and thus conflicts with the traditional understanding of God.
This is based on your ignorance of parts of mathematics, which results in the wrong notion that any non-real number (like complex numbers, or infinities) is no part of reality.
In a way, no real number is part of reality, numbers (even natural ones) are a sort of abstraction. But mathematics (a play on theories) can applied to aspects of reality, e.g. the theory of natural numbers is applied in counting items. And since you can use non-real numbers to compute things that are real, these non-real numbers are as "real" as any rational number".
An interesting question would be: »Are non-computable numbers real?« While some real numbers, e.g 1, 1.5, e, or pi, are computable, most real numbers are not. We cannot give a sufficient description of any of these numbers (for any such description would make it computable), but they are certainly members of the set of real numbers.
In German, I could simply write: „Du hast den Unterschied zwischen »reale Zahl« und »relle Zahl« nicht verstanden”, which translates in a first approximation to "you did not understand the difference between »real number« and »real number«".
You are trapped by the linguistic fact that it is much more difficult to explain a point which any German pupil will understand hearing just that sentence: English employs he same term (real number) for two quite different notions.
....An intangible soul conflicts with the idea that Christ's tangible body induced suffering.
....An intangible God conflicts with the idea that He can grasp and manipulate matter.
I can't see any conflict. Do I misunderstand your term "intangible"? English is not my mother tongue …
...An infinite God doesn't resolve the Problem of Evil, as atheists have pointed out.
A finite God has other problems, e.g. how he can create a whole universe? A finite God is rather part of the universe, i.e. creation.
If you won't deal honestly with ANY of these issues, why would you evaluate my ideas honestly?
And you are the one who decides what "honestly" means in this context? I deal with them using my world view, and look whether it is self-consistent.
To remind you that most Christians worship the person in Christ's body and thus His (allegedly created) soul.
You presuppose that in order of Christ having a human soul, he must inquire another, human, soul, instead of a change in His souls that acqzieres human nature, as the hypostatic union states.
I'm no catholic, which means that in my spirituality I do not worship the (invisible, Jn 16:10,16) body of Christ. But Your conclusion from "worshiping the sacrament as the body of Christ" to "worshiping a created soul" may be valid in your thought system (and I conclude it is valid there, because I suppose you are honest), but that is irrelevant to those who accept not the HU you refute, but the hypostatic union as defined in the old creeds.
Um...er...if you recall, I based that complaint on a statement from Milliard J. Erickson, whose Systematic Theology textbook (actually called Christian Theology) is arguably the most-used one in seminaries today, worldwide. He indicated that God manipulated math for the sake of the HU such that 2 + 1 = 2. Which can be rewritten as 3 + 1 = 3. I happen to believe that 3 + 1 = 4. Maybe it's just me.
The problem lies in the chose of the math theory to apply here. It is basically the same as with Trinity. In Trinity, ist is not 1+1+1=1, but 1*1*1=1. Same with hypostatic union: 1*1=1.
The choice of the mathematical operation which describes this is, of course, based on theology. My theology is inh this point somewhat different than Erickson's one (never heard of him, maybe because he is no German professor, but just one american guy
). Or maybe Erickson has some deficits in understanding the role of mathematics and would write otherwise if he had applied a course in
mathematics and philosophical implications?
That's like saying God can shape Himself into a square circle. No such figure is realizable.
You believe it is not realizable. It is nor realizable by men. But their is no
logical reason that says it cannot be real. Unless, of course, you derive the conclusion from an assumption which is equivalent to "infinity cannot be real". I still have the suspicion you think so because you don't understand the difference between "it is a real number" („relle Zahl”) and "the number is real" („reale Zahl”). See above.
In the same way, an infinite quantity isn't realizable because the attainment of any specific quantity remains less than the infinite quantity.
You seem to use "specific" as just another term for finite. Yes, infinity is not finite. But e.g. the infinite number Alepgh-0 can be defined, so it has the same status as the number π (pi): Well-defined, but you cannot give the exact value.
And what if some length happens to be the size of an non-computable number? We may give approximation, but any
definition beyond "the length of the line segment between … and …" is impossible.
To be actualized is to be existent as a specific reality.
Your solution is the denial of any specific reality which includes infinity, even the possibility that our reality contains an infinity. So infinity can be realized because there is no specific reality for that, and such a reality does not exist because there is no infinity …
The problem sir, is that we are fallible readers of Scripture. As such, we can misinterpret linguistic nuances. This means that we really have only two major fail-safes:
....(1) The law of non-contradiction.
This law is only valid under the supposition the (part of) reality which has to be describes is not like quantum physics, where a
quantum logic was used to describe the findings. The physicist Werner Heisenberg wrote an article which was part of my textbook in school. More can be found in his book „Der Teil und das Ganze”, the English edition has (according to Wikipedia) the title "Physics and Beyond", but this is mostly a description of discussions between physicists, and no systematic explanation of modern physics.
You may, of course, hope that the (part of) reality which needed a non-boolean logic can be described from another angle, which makes it boolean again. You may see the trinitarian doctrine and the hypostatic union as attempts to provide such an angle (a rather esoteric one). I am more comfortable with the comparison to quantum logic (basically, you have to replace »experiment« by »Bible passage« to give a sensible comparison).
Gosh. If I ever become wealthy, I hope it's the big infinity of dollars. With the small infinity of dollars, I might not be able to pay all my bills.
The difference between these two infinities is within set theory, the amount of dollars is in a field where mathematics does not make such differences.
You comment is nonsense, but also an example of Ec 10:3: You think it is nonsense out of your ignorance.