[fluoridation]

LOL, "researched".

>Is there something new or relevant you’re making a case for?

New? Not, not really. It's not at all new that the official position of the church ("Jesus is entirely mortal and entirely divine") is inherently self-contradictory. I mean, what the hell. If I didn't know any better I'd think an atheist came up with it to troll early Christians. Try saying something similar about literally anything else. "The contents of this glass are simultaneously entirely water and entirely mercury." It says nothing good of either the followers or the clergy that that nonsense has been accepted for so long.

[svieira]

It's not inherently self-contradictory for us to say "Jesus revealed Himself as the Son of God and the Son of Man ... how can we properly speak about that?" https://www.newadvent.org/summa/4002.htm#article2 - now that requires a lot of extra distinctions that we don't normally think about when thinking about being and essence, but it's certainly not impossible.

"Mr. Archibald Potterfarthing is at the same time the Chair of the Committee and at the same time its most senior ranking member". Accidents, naturally, but co-existing in the same space-of-being. It turns out that "person" and "nature" are distinct (who knew?) and that it is possible for there to be one person with two natures just as well as there can be one person with two titles. But that presumes you believe the authority of the one who told you this - if not, it's useless to talk about it, because why would you ever need to distinguish person and nature unless you had encountered the reality of Christ? Nothing else we have encountered in the universe has (as far as we are aware) two natures. But nothing else behaves like a singularity either - uniqueness is not a proof of non-existence.

[fluoridation]

>it is possible for there to be one person with two natures just as well as there can be one person with two titles.

Of course, but that falls apart as soon as you reread the dogma. Jesus is entirely human and entirely divine. He is both things in the same way at the same time. He has to be entirely human for his sacrifice to have any meaning, but he has to entirely divine... I can't remember why. So he could be worshiped?

A man who is both a doctor and a judge isn't entirely either one. There are moments of his day where he is neither presiding over a courtroom nor seeing any patients, and there are parts of his body that are neither judicial nor medical. More importantly, when he passes sentence he doesn't exercise his medical privileges, and when he prescribes medicine he doesn't do it in a judicial capacity. Even if both aspects bleed somewhat into each other, they're still mostly compartmentalized.

None of this can apply to Jesus, if the word "entirely" or "fully" means anything. If he dies, he must simultaneously die like mortals do and live on like deities do. So which is it? Did he die or didn't he?

[svieira]

> He is both things in the same way at the same time

Not quite. He has a divine nature and a human nature. There is only one person, two natures, analogous to one person two job titles. He has both natures, fully.

> Did he die or didn't he?

Having two natures, he can experience things that people without two natures cannot experience. Like the experience of death in His human nature that in no way affected His divine nature (analogous to "experiencing censure as a judge, but still being able to practice medicine"). Fortunately, death isn't a cessation of human nature, merely an interrupting of part of its actuality (that is, an evil). You and I will still possess a human nature after we die. Just as we both would possess a human nature if we lost part of our bodies, we still possess a human nature after we lose our bodies completely in death.

[fluoridation]

>Not quite. [...] He has both natures, fully.

You're contradicting yourself.

>analogous to "experiencing censure as a judge, but still being able to practice medicine"

That's only possible because, as I said, being a judge is not the totality of a person. If you strip a judge of his title the parts of him that are a person still remain. If you strip a person of their humanity then there's nothing left, because there's nothing of a person that's not human.

A normal person according to Christianity is closer to having two natures in the way you describe, because their body is mortal while their soul isn't. But Jesus' body should be equally as divine as his soul. So then how can it die? If he was just an immortal soul in a mortal body then he was just a regular human.

[kulahan]

> So then how can it die? If he was just an immortal soul in a mortal body then he was just a regular human.

He could die in the same way the bush could burn in front of Moses without becoming a burnt object. Divinity is not corrupting or corruptible.

[krapp]

But to be entirely human is to be corrupted by original sin, doomed to judgement and eternal separation from God.

To be entirely divine is to be equal to God, untouched by sin and incorruptible.

These two states cannot coexist within the doctrine itself. Jesus cannot be entirely human and entirely divine any more than matter can be antimatter.

>He could die in the same way the bush could burn in front of Moses without becoming a burnt object.

But that makes it not entirely a bush, or else not entirely a fire. Something other than "a burning bush" is going on there. It looks like that, but it cannot be that.

If Jesus' soul wasn't corrupted by sin like any other mortal human then he wasn't entirely human. If Jesus was entirely human, he cannot also be divine, since God cannot coexist with sin. If Jesus can be both, then original sin is not an immutable transgression and the persistent state of evil and God's eternal judgement are simply arbitrary, and God can make exceptions whenever He likes.

Which is the actual answer because there are instances in the Bible of humans who just ascend to Heaven because God liked them, despite that supposedly being existentially impossible. God simply sometimes bends the rules, He just won't do so for you or I.

Assuming one wants to take all of this seriously and assume the Bible has univocality and try to interpret mythology with logic, which to me always seems like a bad idea.

[fluoridation]

>the bush could burn in front of Moses without becoming a burnt object

A "burning bush that isn't consumed" has at least the excuse of being a literary device. The narrator is describing what he sees in front of him, not describing the process at the physical level, so we can imagine that the bush wasn't literally on fire, but rather surrounded by some mystical flame, or shining, or whatever we can dream up.

The story of Jesus isn't like this. Jesus is supposed to have literally died. There's no possible metaphor there. In Christian theology Jesus is a literal scapegoat; he has to have died, as in his vital processes ending and his soul leaving his body to go to the afterlife. If he didn't do that after being tortured, crucified, and stabbed, then he wasn't fully human.

>Divinity is not corrupting or corruptible.

Exactly. So where's Jesus' uncorrupted, divine, lifeless body? Don't tell me it ascended to heaven, because normal human bodies don't do that.

[svieira]

> A normal person according to Christianity is closer to having two natures in the way you describe, because their body is mortal while their soul isn't.

AH, THERE'S YOUR PROBLEM! Cartesian dualism isn't the best lens to view human nature through and it makes talking about Christ's nature harder than it needs to be. The human person is a being whose nature is body+soul. The separation of the soul and the body at death is an evil brought about by sin. Put another way, death is injurious to human beings, not natural to them. (See https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3164.htm#article1).

Jesus is fully man. His human nature is body+soul. His human soul is immortal, as all human souls are. Unlike other human beings (other than Adam and Eve before they sinned) He was not subject to death as a punishment for sin, but He accepted it on our behalf. When He died, he really died. His soul and His body were separated and for three days He could be spoken of as "not a man". See https://www.newadvent.org/summa/4050.htm#article4 for the details. Follow that up with https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1075.htm#article4 for how that relates to us. One particularly striking quote - "[c]onsequently, to say that Christ was a man during the three days of His death simply and without qualification, is erroneous. Yet it can be said that He was "a dead man" during those three days."

Jesus is also fully God. His divine nature is perfect and unchanging. His divine nature is immutable (not merely immortal) and was not subject to death. Thus Jesus was subject to death in His human nature not in His divine nature.

[fluoridation]

I'm not going to respond to any arguments that rest on the veracity of mythology (such as the garden of Eden). I'm only interested in the internal consistency of Christian doctrine.

>Jesus is also fully God. His divine nature is perfect and unchanging. His divine nature is immutable (not merely immortal) and was not subject to death. Thus Jesus was subject to death in His human nature not in His divine nature.

This is maddening. Okay, so these are the logical relationships between the terms,

* Jesus is fully God.

* God is immutable.

* Something immutable is also immortal (and by contraposition, something mortal is not immutable).

* Jesus is fully man.

* Jesus is mortal and died.

Correct? None of this is in dispute, I assume, since it's what you said. Alright. To this I answer: if Jesus is mortal then he is not immutable, and if he's not immutable then he's not fully God. If you insist he is God then that's a contradiction by the terms you yourself laid out. The supposed two natures don't matter if they lead to this conclusion.

To give a simple analogy, you can make a sword that's sharp only halfway along its length and is blunt the rest of the way. The statements "the sword is sharp" and "the sword is blunt" are both simultaneously true. What you can't do is make a sword that's both sharp and blunt all throughout its length. You can say, "well, God can do the logically impossible". Fine. But then you're telling me that I'm right, that Christian theology does contain contradictions.

[stogot]

Do you have similar concerns about the three in one resonance structures of nitrate? Or are you cherry picking random laws to fit a preconceived position?

[fluoridation]

I would have personally gone with the particle-wave duality as an example.

The day the church successfully uses its position on the divinity of Jesus Christ to engineer something rather than letting it remain as an abstract bit of sophistry, I promise I'll shut up about it.

[kulahan]

Are you not aware of the Church's science symposiums?

[fluoridation]

Are you conflating the propositions "members of the church do science" and "the church has based science on theological doctrine"?

[stogot]

id have you believe instead of just “shutting up”. you’ve avoided answering the fact that analogies exist. I’ll take it that you cannot articulate a reasonable response

[fluoridation]

>You’re essentially asking for a mathematical proof

Mathematical proofs are internally consistent. Also, yes, mathematics is used in engineering. For example (as if one was needed), GPS is all about geometry.

>Do you deny the existence of Jesus of Nazareth, His divinity, or how the “church” defines it?

I don't have a problem answering this question, but I would like to know what my personal position has to do with anything.