I consider comedian Bill Maher to be a fairly funny guy. I don’t care for his politics. But I watched his movie Religulous, and I thought it had some funny and interesting moments. He’s not as smart as he thinks he is. He’s typical of kids who were raised Catholic, who didn’t pay too much attention, and who later sloughed off the whole thing as childish, without any serious investigation.
Here’s some of his schtick:
- “God had a son” – sorry Bill, you can jeer at the claim rather than seriously consider it, but that only reveals your contempt for Christianity – it doesn’t show anything ridiculous about the claim. Granted, it is an unusual claim. Of course, Jesus was an unusual man.
- “suicide mission” – Sort of sounds like he’s blowing himself up to kill others. Gee, Bill, that’s just not at all like the claim that he came, in part, to willingly offer him as a sacrifice for all the sins of humanity. Bill surely knows better, and is depending on the ignorance of the audience to find that a stinging and funny comparison. Fail.
- “they can’t kill you because you’re really Me”
Here, Bill has a point. Consider this argument:
- God is immortal.
- Anything which is immortal can’t die.
- Jesus died.
- Therefore, Jesus is not God.
The argument is indisputably valid; that is, if 1-3 were to be true, then 4 would have to be true too. But are 1-3 true? 1 and 3 are directly and clearly asserted in the New Testament. 2 is true by definition. It looks like if you agree with the New Testament, you must endorse the argument as sound, and not only valid. Incidentally, far better men than Maher, and long-time faithful followers of Christ, have made this same argument – not to mock Christianity, but rather to clarify New Testament teachings.
About all the catholic tradition has to say to this compelling argument is that Jesus died “in his human nature” or that only his human nature died or that he “died as a man”. But that won’t do. The New Testament plainly assumes and asserts that Jesus was a man, a human being – and one who died. It doesn’t say that only a component of him – his “human nature” (which enjoyed a “hypostatic union” with the eternal and immortal Logos) died. A human nature, the tradition says, is not a man. So it can’t be the man who died. Also, it seems contradictory to say that as man, Jesus died, but as God (or as divine, or as the Son) he didn’t die; we’re talking about one Jesus here, and he can’t have died, and not have died.
Also, Bill is also right that many Christians hold Jesus and God to be numerically one. That conflicts with 4, of course – that’s the joke. (Never mind that it’s not funny – I realize that this post is not giving evidence for my claim above that he’s pretty funny… this is not his best stuff.)
If you’re a thinking Christian, you need to decide what you think of the above argument. I believe it to be sound. We can thank Bill Maher for drawing our attention to it.
@ Burnett [#7, April 15, 2013 at 10:17 am]
Let’s put one thing straight, straight away. When I say that some expression (say, “God the Son”, or ousia, homoousios, “trinity”) is un-biblical I mean something stronger that its (mere) absence from the text of the Bible (although this is already a relevant criterion): I mean that it has no foundation in the Bible, and that only retrospective projection may let biased readers “find” it in the Bible.
As for 1 Peter 3:19 allegedly being in support of the peculiar view whereby, even before his resurrection, “Jesus’ immaterial self/substance which existed posterior to his physical death was still conscious and active”, first, the least requirement is to put 1 Peter 3:19 in the minimal context of 1 Peter 3:18-20. Then, the synoptic comparison of ALL similar relevant texts (Genesis 6:1-6, 1 Peter 3:18-20, Jude 1:6) leads to the conclusion that they ALL refer, rather mysteriously, to the “fallen angels”, to the Nephilim and to what happened before the Flood. There is no reason whatsoever to assume that the expression “in which [spirit] he also went and made proclamation to the spirits now in prison” (1 Peter 3:19) refers to Jesus’ “disincarnated spirit” between is death and his resurrection, but rather to Jesus, in his “spiritual body”, (sôma pneumatikon), after his resurrection and before his ascension. BTW, so as to pre-empt any possible future reference to it, it would be simply preposterous to assume that 1 Peter 4: 6 refers to Jesus “preaching” in the Sheol to the unbaptized. “In context the phrase those who are dead refers to those now dead who had accepted the gospel while they were still living and had suffered persecution for their faith.” (1 Peter 4:6 NET – footnote 2 sn)
Finally, if you want to debate seriously, in any context, be open to criticism of your positions, reply punctually, and stop repeating to yourself, like a self-reassuring mantra, that you don’t think any argument that criticises your positions “offers a defeater for [your] view”. That is NOT an argument, BUT a self-defeater … 😉
MdS
@ villanovanu
Let’s get one insignificant, preliminary issue out of the way. “The Bible” is not a biblical phrase. “Unitarianism” is not a biblical phrase. “Hamartiology” (the study of sin) is not a biblical phrase. In the same way, perhaps “God the Son” is not a biblical phrase. Here’s my point: WHO CARES. That’s disputable anyway (cf. Heb. 1:8: “Of the Son he says: ‘Your Throne, O GOD…'”).
Anyway… I suppose I’m not into internet debates so much. I would just point out that it doesn’t at all seem as if anything you’ve said offers a defeater for my view. Clearly entering into the flesh is not the same as the hypostatic union. Jesus’ immaterial self/substance which existed posterior to his physical death was still conscious and active (1 Pet. 3:19) and that’s all I mean by this still living posterior to physical death, yet still existing in two natures. You offered no defeaters for this view. Theophanies are obviously physical appearances. After all, light-particles are bouncing off something into the retina of the writers. And notice how YHWH ate with two elohim with Abraham at the oaks of the Mamre there (Gen. 18:1ff). So it is physical. But it is not hypostatic union. Therefore, entering into the SARX is not the same thing as being united to a new nature. And about 1 Cor. 2:8, you’re obviously in the wrong, since “Lord” (kyrios) is “the name that is above every name” (cf. Carmen Christi, Phil. 2:5-11). So unless you think there is some other name above YHWH, then you’re mistake to think that 1 Co. 2:8 — Jesus’ primary designation — could be anything else substantial if not YHWH.
Finally, I would just criticise your method. Maybe don’t be so seemingly aggressive if you feel as if people like me ought to take you seriously on the internet.
I’ll end my responses here. ~ FIN.
@ B. P. Burnett [#5, April 13, 2013 at 7:44 am]
You say, believing to base yourself on the authority of James 2:26, that when “Jesus’ spirit left his body, therefore he died”. It all depends what you understand that “spirit” to mean. The Greek word in James 2:26 is pneuma which is God’s vivifying power (Hebrew: ruwach), NOT psychê, and, anyway, certainly NOT the “soul”, understood in the Platonic meaning of “immortal spiritual element in the individual, that lives on even when life has abandoned the body”. Jesus, when he died, was dead, without ifs and buts, like every person who dies.
You try to distinguish between incarnation and hypostatic union. Is there a difference? Before we examine the point, we must say that it is not quite correct to say that “incarnation is God the Son’s entering into human flesh”. First, because the expression “God the Son” is NOT biblical, while “Son of God” certainly is. Second, because the Prologue to the Gospel of John says crystal-clearly that what got incarnated (sarx egeneto) was God’s eternal Word/Logos/Dabar, NOT some un-biblical “God the Son”, NOR even some un-biblical pre-human “Son of God”: God’s eternal logos “became flesh” in/as Jesus of Nazareth (in Palestine, ca. 6 BCE), with his conception by God’s Spirit/Pneuma/Ruwach, not one split second before.
Having premised the above, what is the difference between incarnation and hypostatic union? Simple: the former is well grounded in the Scripture, and, in particular, in the Prologue to the Gospel of John. The latter expression is an un-biblical, a mere Hellenistic attempt to explain, somehow, the “union of the two natures of Jesus, the divine and the human, in one person (or hypostasis)”. Mere philosophical speculation.
Your laborious attempt to discriminate between incarnation and hypostatic union (with some citations from the OT: Gen 18:1, Exo 3:2), in fact, ONLY shows that you try to distinguish between OT theophanies and the unique incarnation. We certainly agree here, but I wonder in which category would you put the OT theophanies …
It is simply abusive to translate the Greek expression ton kyrion tês doxês (1 Cor 2:8) with “the YHWH of glory” because the Greek word kyrios is ambiguously used in the NT: depending on the context it may refer to YHWH God, OR to the Lord Jesus. In 1 Cor 2:8 it certainly refers to the Lord Jesus Christ.
Besides, by using the expression ”the spirit of x has left the body of x” you seem, again, to confuse between “spirit” and “soul”, the latter in the un-scriptural, heathen-philosophical sense of “immaterial personal substance, surviving death”.
Your attempt to harmonize the death of Jesus with his “divine immortality” is purely speculative, and without a spec of scriptural support. All we can say, on the basis of Scripture, is that Jesus, with his sôma psychikon, died, without ifs and buts, and that, “on the third day”, God raised him from the dead with a sôma pneumatikon. NO “substance dualism” involved, BUT transformation.
Finally, while it is correct that the phrase “Christ’s human nature died” is senseless, it is not correct to say that “on the cross Christ’s spirit departed from his body”: what we read is paredôken to pneuma, “gave up
histhe spirit”.MdS
Considerind te immortality argument
1. God is immortal.
2. Anything which is immortal can’t die.
3. Jesus died.
ERGO Jesus is not God.
premise 2 is clearly false. The biblical definition given by St James of “death” is when “the spirit leaves the body.” So Jesus’ spirit left his body, therefore he died. But he did not go out of existence, and it is this kind of necessary existence from which the inference to God’s everlasting eternity and immortality is located. For God even communicates his immortality to human beings (1 Cor. 15:53-54), by which St Paul merely means we will not go out of existence.
Let’s make this clearer. Christians understand that God is the God of life who sustains all things and is “alone immortal” (1 Tim. 6:16). And in quite another context (Jms. 2), Apostle St. James defines being “dead” as “the body without the spirit.” Death, we know, can also mean alienation from God. Now the incarnation is God the Son’s entering into human flesh. The hypostatic union however is the union of the two perfect natures. This distinction is critical. Whereas the Son of God enters into the world in the flesh in order to experience God’s physical world in a unique way along with us, it is in the hypostatic union that Christ took on an additional nature in his own person, and therefore it seems as if the incarnation and the hypostatic union were simultaneous, but not identical.
Given that these are not identical, it seems plausible to think that the human nature to which the divine nature was unified is not identical to the body itself. Indeed it’s likely that physical, corporeal existence has nothing to do with something’s essential nature at all. In the Old Testament, the LORD and appears in physical form to Abraham at the oaks of the Mamre (Gen. 18:1), as do the angel(s) of the LORD in various places (e.g. Gen. 19:1, 4-5; Exo. 3:2). But neither the LORD nor his angel(s) take(s) on a new nature like ho logos theou did in the first century. So if we believe that inhabiting a fleshly body is not essential to the human nature as such, but is rather a vehicle through which to experience God’s physical world in a unique way, this distinction between flesh and human nature as such stands. Indeed it doesn’t seem we can make sense of the humanity of the immaterial soul (or spirit) when it leaves the material body; there’s no reason to think that the human soul is somehow less-than-human without its body. Rather, it’s far more plausible to think of the human nature being grounded in those faculties which is befitting of man (which is a whole new discussion).
So now we come to the cross, upon which “the YHWH of glory” died (1 Cor. 2:8). Following James, if we say “x died” we mean ”the spirit of xhas left the body of x.” That is what it means to die. (This of course implies some form of substance dualism about human beings, but even if you were a theistic physicalist about human beings like Peter van Inwagen then Jesus, being God, would still be construed in this spiritual way as the eternal person of the Son.)
How does this make sense on the cross with respect to the God-man, especially in relation to Jesus’ divine immortality? I think possibly in this way: When we say “Jesus died” we simply mean that Jesus’ single spirit — complete with two united perfect natures — left his physical body, into which Christ became physically incarnate. And since there’s nothing essential to any nature divine or human with respect to the possession of a body or not, we can say “the immortal God the Son died” by referring to Christ’s death in this “the-spirit-departed-the-body” sense. Yet because the actual immaterial spirit or soul of Christ goes on living, just like every spirit, only to take up the body again, and glorify it to appear to the disciples later, there is nothing inconsistent here with saying the person of Christ died even when in his divine nature he is immortal.
That, I think, will get you a coherent explanation of the death of God in Christ’s self-giving sacrifice.
I think this explanation is much better than saying that Christ’s ‘human nature died.’ Firstly, what does it mean for a nature to die? That’s not at all clear. Persons die, not their natures. Even human beings are still human after their death. Therefore their nature did not die. To say the immortal person of Christ, who is both divine and human, died, is simply to refer to the fact that on the cross Christ’s spirit departed from his body. So the death of Christ is not an issue of the death of one of his natures, but an ordinary description of physical death
@ stevet [#3, April 2, 2013 at 12:22 pm]
Correct.
And that just proves the absurdity of the trinitarian spin, of the “died in his human nature”, of the “died as a man”.
Jesus, the Son of God died. Jesus, the son of Mary died. Entirely. No theological spin allowed.
MdS
But the trinitarian argument goes like this:
John Smith, the British citizen died but John Smith, the Italian citizen did not die.
John Smith cannot have died and not died.
John Smith had a British father and an Italian mother. He had a British passport that said “British citizen” and an Italian passport that said “cittadino italiano”. Non half and half. He was fully a British citizen AND fully an Italian citizen.
One day he died. The one person John Smith died. A British citizen, an Italian citizen, died.
4a. Jesus was God inasmuch as he was the unique (monogenês) Son of God, the incarnation of God’s eternal Logos (John1:14). Jesus was man inasmuch as he was the son of Mary, thanks to the mysterious and miraculous operation of God’s Holy Spirit and Power (Luke 1:35).
4b. Jesus, the Son of God died. Jesus, the son of Mary died. Entirely. No theological spin allowed.
4c. Jesus was raised from the dead, taken up to heaven and is seated “at the right of the Power”.
MdS
Just posted this on my Facebook not so long ago.
Depressingly funny stuff.
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