Operational Dynamics of “Reasoned Faith”

[Limnor]

I am old enough to remember both Chick tracts and Return from Tomorrow. I used to collect the tracts. I had a girlfriend who worked at Chick in Southern California, and she would drive out to San Bernardino from Ontario and keep me supplied with all the latest tracts. She was Christian, but didn't take it real seriously, and had no problem overlooking my Mormonism.

Return from Tomorrow came out after I was married and living and working in Provo/Orem. It made a big splash at my work and in the local Mormon community. I am a born sceptic and have always wondered how things like clothes, buildings, rooms, library books, and other physical things exist in the spiritual realm. Where did the materials come from to create clothes, paper, books, etc.? Who made them? Do they have clothing and paper mills in heaven? This is the kind of crap that used to keep me up a night. Then I became an atheist and stopped worrying.

The plates were apparently taken back to heaven which means refined spiritual material can touch and handle Earthly matter? I always wondered how that worked. Similarly how does an immaterial soul interact with matter and remain undetected? All of it made sense when I considered it was all made up by humans.

The handshake test falls into this category as well.

[Physics Guy]

Quite apart from any debate about whether Mormonism counts as a form of Christianity, I think it’s a mistake to think of them as peer categories. Christianity is larger, older, and less tightly controlled.

It’s clear what some Christian denominations teach. The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, for example, is pretty specific about a lot of things, right down to that em-dash. The Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church, on the other hand, is less clear about its precise teachings, just as it is less fussy about its official name, because after all everyone knows who the Catholics are. You can be a Thomist or a Jesuit or a Dominican, and disagree with the others on enough things to get you disfellowshipped from a small Protestant denomination, and still be a good Catholic. Or you can be an Anglican, and thereby part of a global church with around 100 million members, while having doctrinal views anywhere from Pentecostal to Catholic to Quaker.

One Christian tradition that really is pretty common, if not universal, is to insist that one’s own particular flavor of Christianity is Christianity. People who have come from a community like Mormonism shouldn’t be fooled, though. “Christianity” is not nearly as precisely defined as a brand as the LDS church. There is no one genuinely or authoritatively “Christian” belief about the nature of the soul or the meaning of death.

There are a handful of core Christian concepts, but even they have a range of expressions. “The Christian teaching” on anything doesn’t exist, at least not beyond a few catchphrases.

[Limnor]

Quite apart from any debate about whether Mormonism counts as a form of Christianity, I think it’s a mistake to think of them as peer categories. Christianity is larger, older, and less tightly controlled.

It’s clear what some Christian denominations teach. The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, for example, is pretty specific about a lot of things, right down to that em-dash. The Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church, on the other hand, is less clear about its precise teachings, just as it is less fussy about its official name, because after all everyone knows who the Catholics are. You can be a Thomist or a Jesuit or a Dominican, and disagree with the others on enough things to get you disfellowshipped from a small Protestant denomination, and still be a good Catholic. Or you can be an Anglican, and thereby part of a global church with around 100 million members, while having doctrinal views anywhere from Pentecostal to Catholic to Quaker.

One Christian tradition that really is pretty common, if not universal, is to insist that one’s own particular flavor of Christianity is Christianity. People who have come from a community like Mormonism shouldn’t be fooled, though. “Christianity” is not nearly as precisely defined as a brand as the LDS church. There is no one genuinely or authoritatively “Christian” belief about the nature of the soul or the meaning of death.

There are a handful of core Christian concepts, but even they have a range of expressions. “The Christian teaching” on anything doesn’t exist, at least not beyond a few catchphrases.

I agree with this. Asking a single individual to speak for all of Christendom is a large task and I hope I never give the impression of attempting to do so. I wouldn’t want that responsibility lol But I do enjoy thinking through these things and what they mean to me personally.

I think that’s part of what you’re getting at, and is reflective of the largely individual nature of the Christian relationship with God, even though that idea itself isn’t an officially defined doctrine. The Nicene Creed is probably about as close as Christianity comes to a shared universal baseline.

[MG 2.0]

I am a born sceptic and have always wondered how things like clothes, buildings, rooms, library books, and other physical things exist in the spiritual realm. Where did the materials come from to create clothes, paper, books, etc.? Who made them? Do they have clothing and paper mills in heaven? This is the kind of crap that used to keep me up a night. Then I became an atheist and stopped worrying.

You forgot to add one thing to the list. Do God and Jesus have to visit a Heavenly Haircuts/Hairclips Shop to get their hair cut and beards trimmed? Heaven isn't carbon based is it? Decay and all that.

Regards,
MG

[Gadianton]

That’s also why resurrection is important theologically. Paul doesn’t explain the continuity issue we have been discussing by describing an “immortal” part of us. If souls were naturally immortal, resurrection would be less significant, but Paul places a great amount of worth in resurrection. “If the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised” only makes sense if death is a real enemy, not just a transition from one state of being to another.

I just happened upon a reddit threat that led me to Oscar Cullman, who went down this path.

But that is no reason for denying a radical difference between the Christian expectation of the resurrection of the dead and the Greek belief in the immortality of the soul. However sincere our admiration for both views, it cannot allow us to pretend, against our profound conviction and against the exegetical evidence, that they are compatible.

The influences as I understand them are first, the Israelite tradition, which is no afterlife. The Sadducees are right. There is an existential angst here -- real risk as you note. But not personal angst. Personal blessings are long life and posterity. The idea of a resurrection does not begin as personal, but with the restoration of the city of Jerusalem. The dead will rise and reoccupy the city. Indeterminant dead people, not anybody in particular. It's about the restoration of God's great community of Israel that was destroyed by other nations. By the time Job comes along and says, "yet in my flesh shall I see God" Hebrew tradition has jumped the shark and it's full on pagan corruption.

And then the Platonic influence via the Pharisees is the other influence. Paul is a Pharisee. Since we discussed Aquinas, it's worth noting that Plato's idea of soul is very different. Aristotle rejected the Platonic realm, where your disembodied reason and desires originate. I agree with you and Cullman that there is a tension here. But I think it's much worse than merely resurrection not being very triumphant. This world is a distortion of the divine world of forms in Platonism. In the world of forms, somewhere, there's a perfect triangle. Try as you might, a perfect triangle will never be created in this world. And so the problem with resurrection is why? Why would you even want to go there? Wouldn't it be better to shed the imperfect physical and dwell with the ideal triangles?

[Limnor]

And so the problem with resurrection is why? Why would you even want to go there? Wouldn't it be better to shed the imperfect physical and dwell with the ideal triangles?

This has been a really good exchange, Gad, thank you. I’ve thought about this a lot as well, and think the question really boils down to “why not just create perfection in the first place?” I think that is the next logical step along this line of reasoning, and I think that’s what you are gently asking.

I think it has to do with pure holiness dwelling in the world, which is how I read the New Testament as answering the question.

But I think to get to that conclusion it is important to first understand Paul and Plato as distinct arguments prior to seeking similarities or differences.

“Why not just create perfection in the first place?” within the Platonic view assumes a static perfection: the perfect triangle already exists, complete and whole.

Paul’s view of “perfection” outside of God is teleological, not static—it’s something that is reached, not something that simply is (yes, I believe Joseph and his companions borrowed from this and created their own spin). But a different, Pauline idea—contra Joseph—is creation isn’t perfect because it isn’t finished, it’s unfinished because it’s meant to be transformed.

Where holiness comes in, within what I read as Pauline thought, is God’s life entering and transforming the world.

So the idea is not that souls escape matter in a Platonic model, it’s that God dwells in flesh, suffers, dies, and then raises that flesh. Resurrection isn’t a return to a flawed copy of perfection, it’s the avenue for pure holiness to dwell in the world without destroying it.

That also explains why death has to be real. I think Mormon thought actually brushes up against this bit—if perfection without testing was the way, there would be no true freedom—I think in this view, God chose to redeem a world that could genuinely resist Him rather than just start over à la Matrix style.

So, to me, it’s not so much “God failed and fixed it later,” nor is it “matter is bad and must be escaped.” It’s closer to: holiness is not imposed; it is revealed and received. Resurrection is the victory that creates the way for God to dwell fully in the world He made—and still call it good.

[Limnor]

Maybe a better explanation is from Jesus Himself: “No one puts new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the wine will burst the skins—and the wine is destroyed, and so are the skins. But new wine is for fresh wineskins.”

[Gadianton]

"Why not just create perfection in the first place?" is a good question, not what I was thinking, I was just thinking about the general tension. I suppose this would be the first question to ask if you'd accepted a platonic soul inhabits a corrupted flesh body, and now wonder if the soul is free after death. You couldn't say "yes" to that without explaining why the flesh was needed in the first place. It seems like we'd only worry about such a thing in the de facto case that we happen to be in the flesh -- there must be a reason because God did it. Had we never been in the flesh, trying to imagine the benefits of creating flesh is hard.

According to the Bible, God did create perfection in the first place, he created the Garden of Eden. There's no death in the Garden. Resurrection just reverses that ideal. You could also argue that the garden is static. But merging with Platonism causes weird effects. How much more perfect is a triangle in the Garden of Eden then in the fallen world?

[huckelberry]

"Why not just create perfection in the first place?" is a good question, not what I was thinking, I was just thinking about the general tension. I suppose this would be the first question to ask if you'd accepted a platonic soul inhabits a corrupted flesh body, and now wonder if the soul is free after death. You couldn't say "yes" to that without explaining why the flesh was needed in the first place. It seems like we'd only worry about such a thing in the de facto case that we happen to be in the flesh -- there must be a reason because God did it. Had we never been in the flesh, trying to imagine the benefits of creating flesh is hard.

According to the Bible, God did create perfection in the first place, he created the Garden of Eden. There's no death in the Garden. Resurrection just reverses that ideal. You could also argue that the garden is static. But merging with Platonism causes weird effects. How much more perfect is a triangle in the Garden of Eden then in the fallen world?

I do not think I have ever thought Eden represented perfection. To note the obvious there were snakes and fallible people. It was enclosed and limited and unstable.

[Limnor]

I agree with Huck and think it’s important to capture exactly what the text says—Genesis describes creation as “very good,” but not perfect. That difference matters, because “very good” is an evaluation and considered judgment within the story, not a claim about the ideal. If “very good” becomes “perfect,” the rest of your paragraph almost has to follow.

Your point about Platonism is solid. Once you adopt the “soul in corrupted flesh”, you almost have to ask why flesh was needed at all, and whether the soul is freer after death. But those questions aren’t being generated by Genesis itself.

So I’d agree, the problem is really what happens when a story about created goodness and restored life is asked to answer questions generated by Platonic abstraction.