Delete comment from: Edward Feser
@Timocrates:
This is fun. :-)
> I wouldn't be too quick to endow sin with mind. Sin is like to nothingness or non-being; we therefore have less reason to endow it with being, especially being as mind which is a very good perfection of being. I would not want to be a mindless animal much less a lifeless rock, though arguably it is better to be a rock than not be at all.
I am partial to Augustine's "Privation Theory of Evil", so your allusion to that is well-taken. But then we return to whether we even have a mind when we are enslaved to sin. What happened to the mind when Paul said, "I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died."? And what did he mean by "And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked..."? What is it that happens to the mind when "God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus..."?
On your model, what is killed by sin, what does law target, and what is raised from the dead? What is buried and raised with Christ?
> As to the mind of Christ, here there is no difficulty I think, because we speak of men being like minded all the time.
That seems like too shallow of a unity to account for e.g. Eph 4:1–7. The metaphor in the NT is that we are the body and Christ the head. This seems much more than "like minded":
>> ... the Head, from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God. (Col 1:19)
After all, surely there is a depth of unity in Mt 5:43–48, Jn 13:34–35, Jn 17:20–23 that transcends the kind of unity in the world? Isn't that what Jesus is getting at? So I'm really not happy with the phrase "like minded". It doesn't seem to capture the deep unity (and resultant glory) that the Trinity has, which we share in.
Mar 2, 2015, 3:50:26 PM
Posted to Descartes’ “indivisibility” argument