(snip)

> I believe the position I stated to be the Biblically correct one: those who ask receive forgiveness, those who do not ask do not receive forgiveness. John 3:36 says, "Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God's wrath remains upon him." If you think I am misinterpreting this far-from-vague statement, enlighten me.
>

No, you're right. I think our positions are really the same on this except the words we use are different.

I think that if a person is unsaved and they die they go to Hell, yes, and if a person is saved and they die they go to Heaven. But what I question is the idea that we are in some sense better, more moral, more just people because we are saved.

And the decision by God to offer the chance for forgiveness, if you prefer, was not based on any decision of our own. We were all dead and wallowing in sin when the choice was first offered to us; it was a free gift. Colossians 2:13-14 is pretty clear in this regard: "When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the written code, with its regulations, that was against us and that stood opposed to us; he took it away, nailing it to the cross." Or Romans 5:8, "But God demonstrates his love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us." So there is Scriptural support for my phrasing.

(snip)

> That is what I was getting at, except for two nitpicks. First, the verse was addressed to a nation, not an individual. We've already been over how the government and the citizens of the government do not have exactly the same rights and responsibilities.

Yes, and I've stated my problem with that concept. Basically I think because a government is all people in a group acting in concert it has the right to make decisions that affect the whole group; individuals don't. (So I alone can't come up with a law and enforce it over the population of California. But the citizens of the state of California, acting as a group through leaders they elect, can.) The same principles apply, though. Justice is justice wherever and to whomever you go. So is mercy.

>Second, it says the nation is to *act* justly and to *love* mercy. That is the big distinction I was hoping to convey earlier.

You mean I exact perfect justice without mercy, ever, but deep in my heart I cherish the *idea* of mercy? Without doing anything about it?

Whatever else you say about the James passage, it speaks pretty directly to that idea. Loving mercy is doing mercy; that's the "simple" interpretation. Any other meaning of loving mercy in this context seems to me to be pretty high-level.

>
> > Love encompasses the Law: Galatians 5:14.
>
> "The entire law is summed up in a single command: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'" -- In other words, the law tells us to love.
>

True. But the original written Law of Moses, at least the specific commandments so cherished by the Pharisees, didn't. The Great Commandments given by Jesus appear, yes, but they didn't seem to receive much attention from the teachers of the Law, because they, for obvious reasons, weren't laws you could enact into a governmental code and nab people for violating. (I think the whole confusion here was the confusion between the whole Law, the Law of Love, and the written Law, both the Mosaic commandments and the US penal code etc.)

> >The Law does not encompass love: Matthew 5:20.
>
> "For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven." -- Is this the verse you meant? There's nothing here about law or love.
>

The Pharisees and teachers of the *Law* were unsurpassable as far as practicing the written Law went. But they were abysmal as far as having love. That's why Jesus said we were to surpass them in their false "righteousness".

> >Or I Corinthians 13:2-3. There are others.
>
> "If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing." -- There's nothing about the law in these verses either.
>

The latter verse is describing all the actions that go with self-sacrificial love, but Paul tells us that it's possible to do them without actually *having* love. By "following the Law" here I meant doing what the Law says; by love I meant an inner condition of the heart. I think that's the distinction Paul was making here (or how could giving everything to the poor and sacrificing one's life for the cause be an unlawful or unloving action, in itself)?

> I think this business of the law being a subset of love may be justifiable from an abstract logical and theoretical basis, but is not really present in the Bible, or at least of no consequence whatsoever. The law was given by one who loves, and it instructs us to love. That should be enough.
>

Sure, except we keep having people who try to follow the Law (that is, a *part* of the Law) and neglect the Law of Love, which is the higher principle.

We run into the opposite error, too, people who get so hooked on what they think is the concept of love that they divorce it from the concept of Love and drain it of any real meaning.

It would do us good to remember that they're connected, and remember *how* they're connected.

> > > > One very well *can* commit crimes against the soul; James told us to commit crimes against the body was basically committing crimes against the soul.
> > >
> > > Where?
> > >
> > James 2:15-16. If I show concern for a person's spiritual well-being and even pray for the person's future physical well-being but do no concrete action to help that person physically, I'm basically not doing anything. Faith without works is dead, and here James is implying love without works is likewise dead.
>
> "Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, 'Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,' but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it?"
>
> First, lack of faith is a far cry from a crime against the soul. Second, these verses don't mention the soul. Third, they are talking about faith, not love.
>

He's *contrasting* "faith" (belief in God and the truth of his Word, including the Law) and "love" (actions to benefit the welfare of other human beings). The point I was trying to make, which I admit I've been doing badly (but I still think it's a valid point) is that it does no good to wish well on another person and do nothing to actually help the person. And it does no good to give lip service to Jesus and his teachings ("faith") without following his teachings, particularly in loving and showing mercy to other human beings ("love").

*sigh*... I already said what I meant by a crime against the soul. Obviously we mean different things by these terms. If the way you define a crime against the soul is narrower than mine, then we really have nothing to argue, since our terms don't match. Dividing a person up into pieces is fine by me, philosophically speaking, but when you deal with real, living people I prefer to deal with the whole person and not speculate what part of him I'm benefiting or harming. I see no evidence that we are to do anything to the contrary in the Bible. I remember an example C.S. Lewis used in the _Screwtape Letters_, where one of Screwtape's old patients drew the line between soul and body so neatly in his head that he was able to pray very sincerely for his wife and children's "souls" one moment and turn around and viciously beat the real wife and children the next. And there's those people who pray ardently for the souls of the poor but won't give a penny to feed their bodies.

I fail to see how, when you beat and persecute a person's body, their soul doesn't undergo persecution.

> > I don't mean you can do anything directly to "harm" the soul in the sense that damnation "harms" the soul, but since a soul comprises a person's consciousness, mind, and experience, persecuting a person in body in a manner so that they will experience it is persecuting them in soul; wouldn't it be?
>
> There is no hard scripture reference to say that the soul is any of those things. We are triune beings; most Christians seem to believe the mind, will, experience, and personality to be what the Bible refers to as the spirit.
>

Enh... *this* I would say is really high-level interpretation. The Bible doesn't actually say this; people take it as implied from such verses as "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength" (which would actually seem to imply we are *tetraune* beings; would "strength" mean the physical body?), while I prefer to think of those as aspects of a single person.

We can extrapolate from the Trinity as much as we like, but the fact remains that I don't think you can make much correlation between the three Persons of the Godhead and different aspects of a human being. The three Persons readily appear to be different Persons when we view them as humans; they can even seem to act "against" or in opposing roles to each other (the Holy Spirit acting as our Advocate to the Father, pleading our cases and bringing our prayers, for instance; the Son giving himself up to the Father's wrath; etc.) If we are triune it's on a much smaller and less important scale, since to *me* I look like one person, to *you* (presumably) I look like one person, and to the rest of the world I look like one person.

Most of us use the word "soul" as a synonym for "spirit", and I don't have a problem with seeing this as the Biblical usage, either. And if all the things you describe are "spirit" and not "soul", what then is a soul? (I said elsewhere that if a "soul" is "you" in any meaningful sense it doesn't make sense to disassociate it from all the aspects of yourself the way reincarnationists and others do.)

BTW, agreement about how many parts human beings have is far from universal among Christians, as far as I know. The argument still rages on whether we are tetraune or triune or diune; Paul only explicitly spoke about the spirit warring against the flesh, and so I think the only strong evidence is for a diune perspective. You can add as many other separate parts as you like, but it seems to me a futile exercise. (A human is composed of a body, a soul, a God-conscious spirit, an angel-and-demon conscious spirit, a physical-phenomenon conscious spirit, an intuitive correlation spirit, etc.... I've heard dissections of human nature that go on like this.)

> > Anyway, the original point was, IIRC, that the Law provided no penalties against the soul because the soul could neither commit nor be the victim of sin, which I think is first of all wrong because Jesus *did* tell us there would be a penalty imposed on the soul, Matthew 10:28,
>
> "Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell." -- Will or can? I think it is an important difference.
>

I'm not implying I'm an annihiliationist of the soul; I'm not. But even if the soul is not annihilated in Hell, wouldn't you say Hell is a less preferable state for a soul in Heaven? So, then, something is done *against* the soul, putting it in a less desirable state?

What you seem to be saying is that the part of me that feels physical pains, hunger, sickness, and all of that is my body, the part of me that feels fear, anxiety, depression, wrath, separation, despair, etc. is my spirit, and then there's a soul that doesn't feel much of anything or do much of anything, it just sort of sits there and exists and gives me identity. (I hope I'm not misinterpreting your particular POV; this is where I end up going with a lot of people who believe in triune human nature.)

I have no problem with this, but if the soul is nothing but some kind of cosmic ID card, what's the use of calling it a whole part of human nature? If there's no meaningful way to separate it from the spirit (that always got me, TV shows where a person sells his soul to the Devil (in a comedic situation) and never knows the difference, and no one points out the obvious flaw in that idea which is that *there's no person left after the soul is gone*), then why call them two separate entities?

And I don't think this is a definition of soul that the Bible really supports; looking at the way it's used in the NT, it seems, to me, at least, to be pretty much a synonym for spirit.

Now, we could get somewhere talking about if the mind is separate from the soul, because that idea I *can* conceive of; after all, there've been many periods in my life when my mind has grown a great deal but my soul has changed diddly squat, and vice versa.

> >and second because the soul (or "heart") is the source of sin, Matthew 15:18, and the only part truly victimized by sin, see above.
>
> I don't agree at all that the "heart" is the soul. See Deuteronomy 10:12. I would include that label in the spirit with "will," instead.
>

Then how come "heart" gets its own mention here and neither "will" nor "spirit" do?

I will admit to the idea that it could be possible from some points of view to see the will as separate from the soul; that nasty little undefinable seed inside us that makes decisions and is free to choose seems to be one particular thing, separable from all the rest of this stuff about emotions and memories and intelligence, which just seems to *respond* to the will. I think here the word "heart" is being used as a synonym for "will". (As in, not the big muscle-pumper thing in your chest, but the "heart" or "center" of your existence, the thing that directs everything else.)

But, like I said before, that's included in the whole general non-physical mish-mash I choose to use the word "soul" for. Or "spirit", if you prefer. "The whole human minus the body", if you like.

(I'm not particularly tetraune or triune or diune; I think people are people and you can divide them into parts for convenience when speaking one way and treat them as units for convenience when speaking another way. Like with atoms in physics. The Bible seems to do it often enough.)

> > > Or there might be concrete concepts of good and evil.
> > >
> > What do you mean by "concrete", exactly?
>
> I mean that there is a real good and a real evil, as real as anything else. One can quibble over the precise definitions and natures of good and evil if one likes, but it is hardly important as long as we can distinguish between them. In such a case, it wouldn't matter how I define them; they simply are. This is usually invoked when people ask the ridiculous question "If God said that something bad were good, would it then be good?" or a something similar. Perhaps a simpler and stronger defense could be made by reminding that God is good and unchanging, rendering the question moot.

It's simpler, but it's also weaker, because then I just ask you, "How do you *know* God is good and unchanging?" If you stop to think about it, your answer is really begging the question; the question is at bottom "How are the concept of God and the concept of good related?" It's a true answer, of course, and if a person already understands the terms and the ideas you're using then it's a very good answer (for example if you're talking to a Christian who's idly speculating), but that's the probable reaction you'd get from a skeptic, having both argued with and been a skeptic in the past.

I don't think it's that ridiculous a question when one's notion of God is incomplete, only encompassing his power and not his goodness. I'd answer that that comes from a false idea of where good and bad come from. Things are good not because God at some point decides they are good, but because they align with God's nature. God *already* is good before he defines anything else as good. That's what the word good means, how we know things to be good, the, in fact, simplest definition of good; what's in God's nature. And God doesn't change his nature, because that is, in nature, impossible. God is the initiator of all other change; he cannot change himself. (This is part of the definition of God, as the First Cause.)


(snip)

>
> More simply (and, I think, accurately), he chooses to give us free will, whatever that may entail, good or evil. We are all every one of us evil, so he doesn't separate us into good people and evil people. He asks us if we want to be with him, and if we do, then he forgives us and lives with us, and we with him. If we don't want to, then he remains apart from us, because he cannot bear sin.
>

The thing I think a lot of people (not you) miss is that God can't just "forgive" the way a human might forgive and still be a just God. If he can at the drop of a hat go *poof* and say evil isn't evil anymore or evil doesn't have any evil consequences anymore (which, in my worldview, is basically the same as saying evil isn't evil anymore) then he *isn't* a just God. In order for us to be near him, we have to be without sin, because he can't bear sin, and that's why our sins are put on Christ. Christ takes them away; he takes the punishment and the crime together, and we become new creatures.

The word "forgive" is still very applicable here, since *our* debt is gone and sent to another; but there is a big difference between believing that the debt was simply erased and that the debt was paid for you by another. And there's a big difference between believing a debt is something you just have and believing that it's an aspect of what you are; the Bible makes it plenty clear that when our sins are taken away by redemption, so is our sinfulness. The change while we're on Earth and alive is a gradual process, but once our bodies die and we go to the next level, we will be made perfect children of God.

> > This comes straight from my reading of the Bible, though parts of it are semi-high-level interpretation. I think all the pertinent parts are fairly well-accepted by the Church and well-documented in the Bible, though.
>
> This may just be a difference of opinion, but what some call 'high-level interpretation,' I call 'speculation.' Excepting the poetic sections, I vastly prefer to remain firmly grounded in what the text actually says. Where it is poetic, I'm more open to unusual meanings.
>

I was kidding; that's why I said "semi-high-level". There really is no such thing; either it's high-level interpretation (I don't know what it means, I have to think about it) or low-level interpretation (I read it; I know what it means almost immediately or as soon as I understand all the terms).

What I meant (and what I said later, when I said my beliefs are well-established and well-documented) was that it would be a nontrivial task to go through the NT and pick out each individual chapter and verse that build up this worldview. And there are important connecting points that *are* inferred from implications, not stated, even though I think it's hard to make sense of the Bible as a whole without them. But the Church has throughout its whole history gone through these issues so many times that it's possible for the casual scholar (if there is any such thing) to avoid having to reinvent the wheel.

Not that I'm advocating swallowing traditional orthodoxy on faith in the Church; one must always be prepared to do the research oneself before one allows oneself to be convinced. But there's also an element of humility in recognizing that "just because I didn't think of it myself doesn't mean it's wrong". :)

> > Out of curiosity, what simpler explanation would you propose? Starting from my worldview, that explanation is the "simplest" (actually, the only one that makes complete sense to me, though others come close). The only assumptions I started with were that God was the source of everything that exists, and yet God is also the standard of everything that *should* exist; all-powerful and all-good. And the only belief system I've found that can explain a God like that given the world we live in is Christianity.
>
> Granted, 'simple' is often in the eye of the beholder. Also granted, I have the ability to cheat, in that I am rather sparing with words. Short seems tightly mixed with simple. ;) I won't cheat, though.
>

I don't know about short being mixed with simple. The ideas behind Christianity are very simple, at least they seem so (after all, I think truth always, at bottom, ends up being simpler than falsehoods), but they've generated more words than maybe any other subject in history. Not all or even most of them wasteful or useless words, I'd say.

I guess it often takes very complex arguments to explain very simple truths. Because truth may be simple, but people are complex. :)

> Regarding the death penalty issue that all of the above referred to, you use semi-high level interpretation to show that mercy is preferable to justice, and to show that this applies to allowing people to live as long as possible to give God more opportunities to find them.
>

Mercy "preferable" to justice? If I gave that impression, I apologize, because I never meant any such thing. Otherwise I could never call myself a Christian. Secular humanist, maybe. Liberal nominal "Christian", maybe. But not a Christian.

My argument was that justice is paramount, but justice has also been *satisfied*. The murderer deserves death, true; Christ did *not* deserve death, also true; but Christ died, as true as the rest; so now the score is even.

Even if you don't believe the murderer's particular sin has been atoned until he specifically asks for it (which I think I have Biblical grounds for arguing with), you still have to allow for cases of when the murderer *does* ask for it. Not all death row inmates go out defiant like McVeigh, as I'm sure you know. (And it's anecdotal evidence, distributed on the Internet, which, of course, means it's worth as much as the paper it's printed on, besides which it doesn't really mean anything related to this issue... but one woman who was present at the McVeigh execution said that, true, she saw defiance and hatred in his eyes while he was lying there, the same as everybody else, but she kept watching as they turned on the different solutions, and when they began the injection to stop his heart.. she saw the hate fade and be replaced by stark fear. Even a person as self-deluded and depraved as that man, when he came right to the brink, was aware of the fear of the fire. And any man who knows the fear of Hell, IMHO, has at least taken the first step to repentance. Too bad for him it came so late.)

> The explanation I use involves direct interpretation: God gave divine recognition that the death penalty is allowable in the Old Testament and he continued to give divinely inspired recognition of the same in the New Testament.
>

This is what I'd like a direct source on. Because (I already talked about this exhaustively elsewhere) the Bible does talk about Jesus being the end of the Law, our being dead to the Law, the Law being fulfilled, etc., etc. And the DP was very definitely part of if not the epitome of the old Mosaic Law.

> In all honesty, the death penalty is an issue I have flip-flopped on before. My current position is that it isn't any great, wonderful thing, but I'm not going to contradict God's direct words that it is OK for a government to do.
>

While I'm not a huge fan of high-level criticism and reinterpreting the Bible (in fact, when I encounter people whom I genuinely believe to be doing that I get fairly upset; the reinterpretations to make slavery okay back in the nineteenth-century American South, the reinterpretations to make homosexuality okay now...), I do think the Bible requires thought to understand, like any other book. In fact, moreso than many other books; it's God's revealed Word about the truth of the Universe, which is a bit more complex than a phone directory. I don't stand for the Gnostic idea that only the "enlightened" or the trained can know the Bible's meaning; the basic meanings are simple and can be understood by a child, but to understand all the details, implications, and resonances would be nearly impossible even after a lifetime of study.

I don't mean to offend you; I do agree with many of your thoughts and I can see your reasoning, but I'm not sure how I feel about the idea that the simplest explanation is always the best. The simplest explanation that *fits the facts and makes sense* is always the best, but I'd never advocate swallowing a contradiction in the name of simplicity (though some call that the sign of true intelligence :) ). Short, glib answers that don't really explain anything turn me off more than long, boring lectures that contain at heart a glimmer of truth. (This may explain my own writing style.)

If the Bible tells us to be merciful and to be just (and, outside of that verse, it *does* directly tell us to be merciful; James 2:13, which you quoted), and if mercy and justice are opposites, then the Bible is telling us to do something impossible. There's no way to just sit back and accept that; there must be an explanation, and it's worth studying the Bible to find one rather than (as I said elsewhere) doing the Zen thing and just ignoring it. That's why we're commanded to study and meditate on the Scriptures, so we can get a fuller understanding of it and know better what exactly to do in response to it. And there *is* a difference between forcing a meaning onto the Bible and pulling a meaning out of the Bible. (I like the terms isogesis and exegesis, even though I've been told the first one isn't a word. Oh well.)

>
> Despite the name of the thread, this is all interesting.
>
> gabby

I think so too. That's why I'm changing the name. :) Thanks for having the patience to stick with this thread.

Ar"not above a little false advertising sometimes"thur