Re: You fools!
- From: steven@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: 27 Nov 2005 22:31:50 -0800
I'm grateful to Gareth for taking the time to critique my piece, and
for his valuable rewording of my argument for clarity
Gareth McCaughan wrote:
> I suggest that Paul's actual position is different: he regards
> both the soma psuchikon and the soma pneumatikon as (what we would
> call) physical, and the key (though not the only) difference
> betweem them is in *what's in charge*: psuche or pneuma.
No, what their material is. 'The last Adam became a life-giving
spirit'. 'Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God'
'All flesh is grass' Isaiah and 1 Peter.
And there is all Paul's teaching about what different things are made
of , stars, animals and humans having different bodies. Clearly
suckering up the Corinthians to acccept that the resurrected Jesus was
made of something different from Adam. '
47The first man was of the dust of the earth, the second man from
heaven. 48As was the earthly man, so are those who are of the earth;
and as is the man from heaven, so also are those who are of heaven.
49And just as we have borne the likeness of the earthly man, so shall
we bear the likeness of the man from heaven.;
Paul once more stresses and contrasts the *material* that Adam was made
from, and what the second Adam came from.
>
> Let's look at all the contrasts Paul draws between the somata
> psuchikon and pnumatikon:
>
> - "you do not sow the body that is to be, but a bare seed".
>
> What's the relationship between a seed and the plant that
> grows from it? They're quite different things, but they're
> basically the same *kind* of thing. You don't sow a wheat
> seed and get a printing press or a symphony or a ghost.
This is what Paul says. Paul says God gives it a body - a body
appropriate to the seed.
7When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed,
perhaps of wheat or of something else. 38But God gives it a body as he
has determined, and to each kind of seed he gives its own body.,
You do *not* plant the body that will be.
What is the basic seed metaphor? Unless you are a preformationist, who
thinks there is an oak tree inside an acorn, a seed has something
inside a husk. The husk dies and what is inside comes out.
Separating the wheat from the chaff is a strange metaphor for people to
use if they hold to Gareth's view that the wheat and the chaff are
'basically the same kind of thing.'
The whole point of separating the wheat from the chaff is that they are
not basically the same kind of thing, They are two different kinds of
things.
Paul thought our 'husk' died. 'What you sow does not come to life
unless it dies.'
> I think Paul means: the "earthly", psuchikon, body is sown;
> what grows from it is still a body, still made of flesh,
> still the sort of thing that can act and interact in this
> world, but better and more complete.
Better and more complete than Jesus *before* the resurrection. Jesus
was fully God.
Any chance of a quote from Paul implying that while flesh and blood
cannot inherit the kingdom of God, these 'idiots' in Corinth will soon
realise that he was talking about flesh and blood.
Paul was supposed to be amazed by a resurrection. He regards flesh and
blood as things to be destroyed , because they are mortal (God will
destroy both stomach and food, although eating was totally unsinful)
Somebody brought up to believe that all flesh was grass, and then
discovers that flesh will be made immortal?
It is like somebody suddenly learning that we need nitrogen to stay
alive, not oxygen. He would not then say that we must give this the
oxygen of publicity.
Similarly, a Paul whose whole world had been turned upside down by the
news that the Kingdom of God will be a world of flesh , would not
casually say 'Flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God.
> - "what is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable".
Clearly what is sown is not what is raised. As Paul explains , when you
sow, you do not plant the body that will be.
> - "it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power".
There is no 'it' in the Greek. A better translation, and a perfectly
possible translation is ' sown in weakness, raised in power.'
> That is: the soma pneumatikon will not suffer from all
> the pesky limitations we're all too familiar with in the
Apart from having its stomach destroyed by God?
>
> - "it is sown a soma psuchikon, it is raised a soma pneumatikon".
There is that pesky 'it' again. A word not in the Greek.
>
> That is: first a body animated by, controlled by, the psuche;
> then a body animated and controlled by the pneuma.
But Jesus was fully God *before* the resurrection. How could God
Incarnate not have a spiritual body in your sense.
> He then starts talking about Adam and Christ.
>
> - "the first man, Adam, became a living being; the
> last Adam became a life-giving spirit". As I understand it,
> Steven is taking this as evidence that Paul took Christ
> to be (at least post-resurrection) some sort of (what we
> would call) non-physical being.
Nope.
People thought of spirit as a substance.
Some early Christians called the stars 'spiritual bodies'. They were
not animated by the Holy Spirit. They were simply closer to Heaven and
so not composed of earthly materials.
Let's see. The first half
> of the verse is quoted from Genesis 2. It certainly doesn't
> Does this indicate that (for Paul) Christ was -- at least
> post-resurrection -- not the sort of entiity that could
> go around eating fish and so on?
Yes. God will destroy both stomach and food, come the resurrection.
> And then back to resurrected bodies:
>
> - "flesh and blood does not inherit the kingdom of God,
> nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable".
> Sounds like evidence on Steven's side, but let's read
> a little further...
>
> - "this perishable body must put on imperishability,
> and this mortal body must put on immortality".
> This
> seems to say quite clearly that it's the *same* soma
As Paul has contradicted himself in just a few sentences it is clear
that it is not clear at all.
And you still keep adding words not in the Greek. Where did you get
'body' in your quote of 'this perishable body'?
> Steven's argument appears to me to depend on a number of
> assumptions for which he presents no evidence. Perhaps there
> is good evidence for them, but I haven't seen it.
And your argument hinges decisively upon adding words Paul deliberately
left out of his writing.
> - That the Corinthians' reason for doubting the resurrection
> was a concern about how a decomposed body could be raised.
> That argument is nowhere directly addressed in 1 Cor 15,
> nor does Paul quote any such argument. And it's commonly
> (and plausibly) held that the early Christian community
> expected the return of Jesus imminently -- Paul certainly
> seems to have done so here. Bodies don't decay to nothingness
> over a few years. (And anyone who had read Ezekiel would be
> unfazed at the prospect of being reconstituted from bones.)
> So I don't think it's plausible that this would have seemed
> a major problem to the Corinthians.
Bodies do decay to nothingness in a few years when they die having been
consumed by fire or eaten by fishes, I remind you of the constant
danger of drowning in the NT.
> - That "the Gospels claim that there was only one body, and
> that it was not spirit". I don't think they do; I don't think
> they even *imply* it. They do represent Jesus as denying
> being "a spirit", but it seems clear to me that "pneuma"
> is being used in different senses in the two places. He
> was denying being a ghost, just as he did (using a different
> word, to be sure) in Matthew 14.
So the Gospels do not deny that Jesus was a spirit? Jesus could have
been a spirit, with flesh and bones. Perhaps you could look up the
doctrine of docetism....
> - Incidentally, even if your understanding of Paul were
> right and even if the gospels clearly stated that Jesus's
> body after the resurrection was only a soma pneumatikon,
> I don't think the two would be irreconcilable. Between
> the crucifixion and the First Letter to the Corinthians
> comes not only the Resurrection but the Ascension; for
> all we know, Paul may have considered that Jesus got his
> soma pneumatikon at the Ascension.
Possibly. But then that reduces the apologetic value of all those
appearances in 1 Corinthians, as Paul must have been talking about
post-ascension appearances.
> One other thing, for which I can't find any suitable place
> in the above. Steven mentions 2 Corinthians 5 and claims that
> it says that the soma pneumatikon is "already prepared for us
> in Heaven". This is supposed to be evidence for the "two
> completely separate bodies" theory. I think there's some
> of eisegesis going on here.
> - Does saying that "we have a building from God, a house
> not made with hands, eternal in the heavens" actually
> mean saying that it's "already prepared for us"? I'm
> not at all sure it does. If a student says "I have a job
> waiting for me at IBM" -- a construction that seems to me
> exactly parallel to Paul's -- she doesn't mean that this
> job is sitting there, doing whatever it is that jobs do
> when unfilled; she means that if and when she turns up
> at IBM and says "please give me a job" they'll do so.
So you agree that the student will not have her current job
't'ransformed' into the IMB job?
> The job won't actually get created until she gets there.
So Jesus's resurrected body was not created in Mary's womb, and then
transformed at the resurrection into a body controlled by spirit - it
was created at the resurrection.
> And if she calls it "a job for life" -- which, again,
> seems closely parallel to Paul's use of the word "eternal" --
> she doesn't mean that it's been hers from birth, she means
> that she can keep it as long as she wants it.
So the body which Jesus had at the resurrection had not been his from
birth? You seem to be doing a fine job of arguing my case for me.
> - It says "... because we wish not to be unclothed, but
> to be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be
> swallowed up by life". That sounds to me much more like
> our existing bodies becoming pneumatikos in the sense of
> "animated by the pneuma", than like having them replaced
> with something entirely different.
Mortal , of course, being what is inside the tent that we discard, and
which is then clothed with the heavnly tent.
Paul often uses a clothing analogy. We will get new clothes at the
resurrection, These are not our old clothes patched up. These are new
clothes.
> - In 2 Corinthians 5, Paul mixes his metaphors (bodies, clothes,
> tents, buildings) so lavishly that it's (to me) not entirely
> clear what's going on at every point.
'Body' is hardly a metaphor.
and clothes, tents and buildings are all things that we live in.
We live in our present clothes and will get new clothes. Implication -
our body are just clothes we wear and which we will discard when he get
new clothes.
.
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- From: steven
- Re: You fools!
- From: Gareth McCaughan
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