Evil is privation of good. Yes or No
Yes, however it is a decision of will, not a place of privation. More specifically it is privation of due good, bonum debitum. Good and Evil is natural inclination of creatures with free will, it is not natural expression of other creation such as rocks, trees or even invisible ones such as Hades. All these created things are automatically "good" as they were declared such by God in Genesis, they lack nature and ability of privatio.
God is absent from Hell in terms of grace and beatitude, Yes or No?
No, Hell/Hades is an invisible place created by God and thus cannot be absent of God. Even under Thomism God's grace is part of his essence, so uncreated grace or other operation of God is in effect even in Hell. Hell is absent of sanctifying grace, but that is Thomistic created effect meant for humans. Not all places or creatures that lack sanctifying grace are hell.
But beware. If you are using Thomistic framework, the relations of persons within ousia of godhead are unlike any created effects. Divine glory or love or grace flowing between persons in the godhead are uncreated, and unlike anything outside. God can withdraw sanctifying grace, but he cannot withdraw the divine uncreated grace flowing between person of the Godhead. Christ cannot be spacially diferentiated from Father or Holy Spirit. Again, there is no "Divine Separation" as an attribute of the Holy Trinity.
Additionally while God can withdraw some created attributes such as sanctifying grace from creation, he cannot withdraw everything as it would functionally mean annihilation. Not-God place is nothingness and impossibility.
Hell is the subjective experience of God’s uncreated glory and presence by those who reject Him, Yes or No?
Yes AND. As with other things, hell is also a place created by God. One word can have multiple referential points.
Hell is far from God in affection, spirit, and beatitude, Yes or No?
Yes and No depending on what you want to say.
Also these stupid Yes/No questions are exactly the source of false dialectic that poison the mind of many modern thinkers and especially protestants. Let me give you an example of similarly stupid question:
"Killing is against God's law, Yes or No"
I am not saying that Hell or Evil is a substance in and of itself, which is what you keep arguing against. Anything that exists has the grounds of that existence in God. But Hell is defined by having a separation from God and a lack of the beatific vision.
Incorrect. Beatific vision is something that is going to happen after eschaton with certain exception such as angels or saints etc. It does not mean that everything that does not have beatific vision is Hell. This is exactly what I wanted to say, this stupid theology dangerously skirts Gnosticism and Nestorianism due to incorrect Christology.
By calling evil a lack, I'm avoiding giving it a substance of its own.
No, you give it substance by tying it to a place. Place does not have will to deny God.
God in the place that is defined by God's absence
Again, this is the main point. There is no such thing as God's absence even in Satan. There is only refusal of God or accepting God, but the ontology is always as privatio, an act of will, there is no ontological substance to rebellion. There is no ontological reality to refusal of God, some "God's absence" realm. Refusal is act of will, not an ontological reality. God created everything and named it as Good. There is no corner of created or uncreated world where the God is absent. This is important as it impacts Christology. Christ did not descend to Not-God place. He has command over all creation and preached gospel to the dead. I just want to point out that Bishop Barron draws heavily from Hans Urs von Balthasar, and these are considered as heterodox theology that runs close to denying several established dogmas with Church Fathers and dogmas established by various councils. It is one thing to claim metaphorical language of "Not-God" as internal experience of somebody severed from Grace. It is another to posit ontological power of such severance to create a "space" or "realm" where damned reside collectively and which is cut off from the God completely. In classical view, Jesus waltzed into Hades and preached gospel to individual trapped souls. He did not walk to unassailable "evil" Manichean prison outside of God's creation to free the souls. That is dangerously close to Manicheanism and assigning evil the ontological status, thus even promoting Satan to some sort of ontological Evil God who creates his own "realm" of Not-God in Hades.
Because there is already an eternal "space" of self-giving love between Father and Son, that space can stretch to encompass the finite distance created by human sin. The abandonment on the Cross is not a sudden rupture of divine love, but the manifestation in historical reality of the divine, self-emptying love that exists eternally within God.
In the theology there is a difference between God uncreated attributes, powers and operations and human ones. You can love your neighbor and it is analogous to Father loving his Son. But it is not the same. And it does not matter if you look at it through Thomist Absolute Divine Simplicity or Palamas Essence-Energy distinction, "energies" or operations of God such as Divine Glory, Mercy etc. are either divine essence or uncreated energies and thus outside of purview of not only humans but also angels and any other creatures. In that sense there is no "space" of self-giving love between Father and Son. Divine love is either consubstantial part of Divine Essence eternally present between Son and Father or it is Palamian uncreated energy that is the operation of divine nature of both of them. This is important trinitarian dogma. As in John 16:15
All things that the Father has are mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.
This includes Divine love, which is operation of divine nature. There is no "space" between The Father and The Son. There are distinctions between persons such as Jesus being begotten and Father being the source and archaea. But these are relation of opposition inside the ousia of the Trinity, there is no space inside the trinity as an extra attribute dictating this relationship inside Thomism, that would be against Absolute Divine Simplicity. Palamism says that Father and Son share uncreated divine energies, however these are operations of divine nature of persons within Trinity. In the same way as it is appropriate to human nature to let's say talk or breath (an operation of human nature), it is natural for Father and Son and Holy Spirit to express Divine Love.
There is no space there as some independent variable, there is no "Divine Space" between persons of Trinity outside of it, dictating operations of God. Wherever Son is, Father and Holy Spirit are also fully in their consubstantial form, they are there 100%, no "spatial distance" can diminish it to 99.9999% as space is not an attribute dictating operations of God as said above. That is the main point of retarded view of PSA - if Father punishes the Son, he punishes himself and the Holy Spirit, he cannot separate himself from the other and do "Divine Punishment" operation on them as that would break Trinity. That is why PSA is Nestorian heresy trying to divide Jesus in his human/divine hypostasis as if it was separate created "human Jesus" who descend to Hades while "divine Jesus" rested at the right hand of his Father somehow watching his alter ego doing stuff in Hades or maybe laying and chilling in the tomb or whatever.
Church Fathers had it correct, you start with Christology which is deeply tied to overall Christian theology. And then the rest flows out naturally. You cannot change soteriology (as it depends on Christ and his resurrection) even ecclesiology (it posits Christ as the head of the Church) as it has butterfly effects on Christology and Theology, eventually distorting the overall view.
Again, when Jesus conquered death in his dual human/divine (in his hypostatic union) nature healing the rift brought upon human nature by Adam, he came as a victor to Hades - a created realm by God (Niceno-Constantinoplitan creed names God as creator of of all things visible and invisible) to preach gospel to individual souls who now had healed human nature. They had the same opportunity as we healed humans have now through baptism and deification. They could participate in Gods's grace individually - maybe some did and some didn't. It is not as if Jesus took away redeemed souls of prophets and other righteous from "Not-God" realm of Satan toward the "Yes-God" realm of creation or something like that. It was individual choice of each soul in the same way we now have on this Earth now. We are not living in Not-God realm if there is overwhelming sin around us as in Sodom, where the sin creates some splinter-reality of "Not-God" and where the space or air is imbued by this ungodly property, it is incredibly heterodox thought.
georgioz
5d ago
Pretty nitpicky for flowery language, when the sentence before I said what I mean by not-God - the depths of evil and suffering
This is definitely not nitpicky or flowery language it is the point, your claim is borderline Nestorian, which is by the way the error of PSA. Jesus descent to Hades was not descent to suffering in form of any range of Not-God. That is the point, Jesus is God and he was in no way damned or suffered in form of being severed or diminished from consubstantiation with the trinity. His sacrifice ontologically changed the nature of all humans, it was not some exploration of suffering. That is a very important Christological distinction. Jesus descending to Hades as a victor over death to preach Gospel to dead with now healed nature, he was not exploring some realm of Not-God or suffering, paying some debt to justice or anything like that.
You cannot meditate on a mystery of the faith without it being an act of prayer. God initiates all prayer. Do I need to add this disclaimer to everything I write on spiritual topics?
Again, this is not about prayer or meditation. It is about ontological change and deification. Also God goes not "initiate a prayer", he makes you able to pray, he is the source of grace - but we have free will and we are coworkers in our salvation through willing participation on Grace. Synergism vs monoergism. If you agree with synergism, then we are in some substantial disagreement.
All this is important especially in context of Calvinist PSA the OP discussed.
georgioz
5d ago
I also like Vicarious in some formulations, not yours. It's not about God "understanding us" in a way He couldn't before. It's that God set out to the depths of evil and suffering, went to the furthest reaches of Not-God, to find us and love us from the full range of God and Not-God. He descended into Hell. We recite that in the Apostles Creed but do we appreciate what that means? There is no where we can run that He has not traversed.
I would just say that this Not-God language does not align with traditional Catholic and neither Orthodox understanding. Evil or Not-God is thought of in terms of privatio, there is no "Not-God" realm that would turn God into a dialectic, in fact this thinking led to many heresies. Not-God has no ontology, such a reality it would cease to exist there is "no" there to find find anything. Even Satan is not true "Not-God", he does not sustain himself, he derives his existence from rebellion against God, which is not the same as "Not-God", again there is no true dialectic as with let's say Manicheans or Gnostics or Bogomils and other religions or heresies.
Ultimately, it is a mystery. I don't mean mystery in the secular sense, where there is one answer and if you find it you can stop looking. I mean in the Christian sense, mystery is something like Jesus' parables. Something that you need to keep coming back to, something that always has more to understand, something you can meditate on for all eternity and still find more to appreciate. Trying to pin it to a wall like a butterfly will kill it.
Partially true. We see this by holistic reading of The Scripture. For instance consider John 6:32–35
"Jesus then said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. 33 For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” 34 They said to him, “Sir, give us this bread always.” 35 Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.
There are many foreshadowing and multiple meanings in The Bible, the famous quadriga of the exegesis, where the text has literal and historical meaning, allegorical and moral meaning, it can be foreshadowing of future things or all of the above at once. Another famous example is the Destruction of the Temple at 70AD described in many passages from Old Testament, New Testament such as Mathew 24 but also in Revelations. It is at the same time a prophecy of actual historical event, it is also an explanation for the Church to be new Israel and it is also at the same time prophecy about eschaton. It is all of the above 100%. It is not 20%/60%/20% or anything like that.
But there is also more to mystery. For instance Church fathers talked about sacraments as a Mystery. Talking about mystery in purely intellectual term is in this sense a category error, mystery can be known by divine Grace, that is how you "pinpoint" the mystery. That is the very nature of the process of deification. You do not pin the mystery on piece of paper to examine it like a butterfly by your intellect, you pin yourself onto the butterfly so to speak.
The fruits mentioned in the epistles, an obsessive regard for the common good, being happy with little and sharing any abundance with the community, abstaining from consumerism and worthless status competitions, directing one’s energy as far as one is able to promoting a good life to those around them, submitting as if a slave to wisdom, having a high trust community, loving good work, loving everything good, things like that.
Again, the same psychobabble. The fruits means caring for common good, also happiness and also promoting good life, good work with bunch of random shit attached. This is stoner level argument of Wow, good is good bro. Where is the grounding for what is good, where is the argument? This is just bunch of childish assertions with the crown jewel supposedly being: A rule [for good] would be “does it promote common wellbeing on the whole, longterm”. Oh, the good is a thing that does not prevent good in the future. Are you even listening to yourself and how moronically tautological this argument is?
That’s what the scapegoat ritual was doing from a psychological perspective. I suppose without this explanation, you believe that for hundreds of years God literally placed the sins of Israel on a goat and sent it off to the wilderness. In any case, the ancient Israelite believed that this occurred, and the belief would have actually reduced their sinful inclinations through this belief (placebo).
Again, bunch of assertions. How do you know it? Maybe they sacrificed goats because they were pissed off with their bloating and wanted to murder them, plus did you see goat eyes? Or alternatively, it was something that God commanded them and they agreed to do that. Again, you are just spinning stupid stories, thinking that your schizoid conspiracies about societies thousands of years ago have any meaning. How do you know that aside of bunch of assertions that actively goes against what they wrote about themselves?
Then you and the theobros will be like the Greek Orthodox monks who quibbled over footnotes in Constantinople as the Muslims took over your entire city ...
Okay, you lost me there. Just another inane story.
In real life, God punishes those who miss the big picture and God rewards the groups who are more organized.
This is completely false, by this logic, God "punished" Jesus (and himself) by crucifixion for being disorganized. This completely misses the meaning of punishment, free will and overall Christian soteriology and anthropology just to fit your narcissistic psychobabble story you want to fit as your inane grand narrative.
If you believe this revelation, you are judging him as good.
Aboslute non sequitor. If you believe in math, then you judge that 2+2=4. It is not my "judgement" or belief that makes it so. That is the point I am making.
I had thought that "might doesn't make right" was such a well understood and uncontroversial principle that nobody would dispute it, not even you, so exactly how we got there doesn't really matter.
Why have you though that? Give me an argument why "might makes right" rule of let's say millions of Social Darwinists is wrong. Just appealing to majority does not cut it. That is exactly what I am asking you - from your worldview, what makes that morality incorrect? What is the moral standard in your worldview, even in abstraction? Does your worldview even account for any moral standard at all? Again I am not denying that I am also finite being using reason and senses to arrive at conclusions. But we are going one meta-level higher, what these conclusions allow for? Just because two finite beings arrive at different conclusions - let's say one says 2+2=7 and another says 2+2=4, it does not follow that they are both incorrect as they are both finite. One has a coherent model of math and logic, the other has a model that is incoherent.
The infuriating thing is that you at the same time say that we are finite and there is no grounding, but at the same time confidently say shit like might doesn't make right" was such a well understood and uncontroversial principle that nobody would dispute it. Really? It is impossible or universally incorrect to challenge such a claim? That is an objective and universal claim for which you have no grounding.
Plus it does not matter what I believe, that is pure ad hominem. We can both agree on facts but for wrong reasons which makes one or both of us incorrect.
But the argument is that since you can't create the things that God creates, he is morally unquestionable. The only characteristic of God that this argument depends on is God's power, so this argument applies to a rich dude. If you didn't intend for it to apply to a rich dude, you need to fix up the argument.
Yes, that is the thing that I appealed to. Again, God is a necessary condition for objective morality to exist. I even gave you example of Godel's god providing for modal collapse. Are you incapable of understanding this basic logical argument? Let me spell it for you:
- For X to exist, it is necessary that Y exists
- X exists
- Therefore Y exists
It is basic modus poens argument. Do you get at least the formal logic of that one? And no, "rich dude" is not the necessary condition there. Existence of somebody more powerful than you - let's say Bill Gates - does not ground logic, metaphysics, ethics and all the rest.
Agreed, these kind of obvious loopholes should be closed immediately. I remember that back in the day there was some regulation that forbade bars to sell loose cigarettes. Enterprising bar owners created a bundle of matches+cigarette and the idea was that the customer bought overpriced matches and got the loose cigarettes for free as a gift, so technically cigarettes were not sold. This was stamped out quite quickly.
Oh, here we are. Famous Paul 2 Timothy 2:14. Because matters of Trinity and Christology are "petty arguments" and pure logomachia. I don't give a shit about fake piousness and tone policing.
You are living in your head, this conversation never happened.
Again, an invented conversation that never happened and completely disrespectful.
Again, this conversation never happened. Why you have a need to invent whole paragraphs of false literally strawman conversations and fake arguments?
So finally, after all these fictional stories in your head we arrive at conclusion. No, Jesus did not travel into a Not-God place. As I argued before. Also, this low tier emotionalist theology and fake protestant tone policing does not work.
Just state your argument.
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