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by kulahan 238 days ago
> 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.

2 comments

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.

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

This is false, fortunately. "Human" and "sin" are not necessary to each other. Sin is not natural to man. The gift of original justice could not be passed on from Adam to his children because he threw it away. This lack of a gift is what is called "original sin" and its effects include all of the disordered expressions we find ourselves inclined to from birth. But this lack of a gift is not necessary to being human.

Which allows God to take on human nature without being in the state of sin ("like us in all things but sin"), but accepting the punishment for sin (death) to redeem us and offer a new gift of mercy that restores the original gift of justice for those who accept it. Since God is outside of time, He can even give the fruits of that gift "before" that gift is realized in time (Elijah, Mary).

>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.

It's literally a bush that was on fire which did not corrupt. That was the whole point. It's not a literary device.

Jesus did literally die. His soul and body were uncorruptible. That's why he was able to descend to Hell for three days, and why his fully mortal and fully divine body was able to be raised up. Dying is simply the separation of soul from body. Resurrection is the rejoining of those.

Mortal bodies of all will be raised in the Second Coming. It's not as correct to say normal human bodies don't do that, as it is to say normal human bodies don't do that yet.

So to clarify: just as the bush was literally on fire, yet did not combust, Jesus literally died, yet did not decompose.

>It's literally a bush that was on fire which did not corrupt.

How can you know that? From within the canon of the text, all we have is Moses' testimony. How can you be so sure that what he described as a burning bush was literally a burning bush, as in the matter of the bush undergoing rapid oxidation without being consumed?

>It's not as correct to say normal human bodies don't do that, as it is to say normal human bodies don't do that yet.

Sure. I'll accept "they don't do that yet". So since they don't do that yet, and they didn't do that during Jesus' times, if Jesus' body did do that, then his body wasn't fully human.