...that I thought worth considering from his book The Problem of Pain.
1) "I disbelieve that doctrine [of Total Deparvity], partly on the logical ground that if our depravity were total we should not know ourselves to be depraved, and partly because experience shows us much goodness in human nature."
2) (A "harpoon" at Luther) "Perhaps you have imagined that this humility is a pious illusion at which God smiles. That is a most dangerous error. It is theorretically dangerous, because if makes you identify a virture (i.e., a perfection) with an illusion (i.e., an imperfection), which must be nonsense. It is practically dangerous because it encourages man to mistake his first insights into his own corruption for the first beginnings of a halo round his own silly head."
3) "The Fathers may sometimes say that we are punished for Adam's sin": but they much more often say we sinned 'in Adam.' It may be impossible to find what they meant by this, or we may decide that what they meant was erroneous. But I do not think we can dismiss their way of talking as a 'mere idiom.' Wisely, of foolishly, they believed that we were really --- and not simply by legal fiction --- involved in Adam's action.
"I offer the following picture -- a 'myth' in the Socratic sense, a not unlikely tale.
...
Then,in the fullness of time, God caused a descent upon this organism, both on its psychology and physiology, a new kind of consciousness of 'I' and 'me'... His organic processes obeyed the law of his own will, not the law of nature. His organs sent up appetites to the judgment seat of will not because they had to, but because he chose to. ... Since the processes of decay and repair in his tissues were similarly couscious and obedient, it is not fanciful to suppose that the length of his life was largely at his own discretion."
Then Adam ate the apple and "Up to that moment the hman spirit had been in ful contro of the human organism. It doubtless expected that it would retain this control when it ceased to obey God. But its authority over the organism was a delegated authority which it lost when it ceased to be God's delegate. Having cut itself off, as far as it could, from the source of its being, if had cut itself off from its source of power. ... [God] began to rule the organism in a more external way, not by laws of the spirit, but by those of nature. ... And desires began to come up into the mind of man, not as his reason chose, but just as the biochemical and environmental facts happened to cause them. ... Thus human spirit from being the master of human nature became a mere lodger in its own house, or even a prisoner."
skypair
1) "I disbelieve that doctrine [of Total Deparvity], partly on the logical ground that if our depravity were total we should not know ourselves to be depraved, and partly because experience shows us much goodness in human nature."
2) (A "harpoon" at Luther) "Perhaps you have imagined that this humility is a pious illusion at which God smiles. That is a most dangerous error. It is theorretically dangerous, because if makes you identify a virture (i.e., a perfection) with an illusion (i.e., an imperfection), which must be nonsense. It is practically dangerous because it encourages man to mistake his first insights into his own corruption for the first beginnings of a halo round his own silly head."
3) "The Fathers may sometimes say that we are punished for Adam's sin": but they much more often say we sinned 'in Adam.' It may be impossible to find what they meant by this, or we may decide that what they meant was erroneous. But I do not think we can dismiss their way of talking as a 'mere idiom.' Wisely, of foolishly, they believed that we were really --- and not simply by legal fiction --- involved in Adam's action.
"I offer the following picture -- a 'myth' in the Socratic sense, a not unlikely tale.
...
Then,in the fullness of time, God caused a descent upon this organism, both on its psychology and physiology, a new kind of consciousness of 'I' and 'me'... His organic processes obeyed the law of his own will, not the law of nature. His organs sent up appetites to the judgment seat of will not because they had to, but because he chose to. ... Since the processes of decay and repair in his tissues were similarly couscious and obedient, it is not fanciful to suppose that the length of his life was largely at his own discretion."
Then Adam ate the apple and "Up to that moment the hman spirit had been in ful contro of the human organism. It doubtless expected that it would retain this control when it ceased to obey God. But its authority over the organism was a delegated authority which it lost when it ceased to be God's delegate. Having cut itself off, as far as it could, from the source of its being, if had cut itself off from its source of power. ... [God] began to rule the organism in a more external way, not by laws of the spirit, but by those of nature. ... And desires began to come up into the mind of man, not as his reason chose, but just as the biochemical and environmental facts happened to cause them. ... Thus human spirit from being the master of human nature became a mere lodger in its own house, or even a prisoner."
skypair
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