At 10:20 AM 30/01/02 +1000, Richard Kouchoo wrote:
>However I have an objection to this line of reasoning since its
>implications are
>not very comforting. The special, instantaneous creation of the soul is
>absolutely necessary, doctrinally speaking. Without it, Christ's death and
>resurrection are pointless, since the meaning of sin and specifically,
>original
>sin, as Christian tradition has envisaged it for the past two millennia,
>becomes
>redundant. 'A process' of original sin is completely alien to Christian
>theology
>and Tielhard's ideas are more in line with patheism than Christianity.
>
>My two cents.
>Richard.
I don't know about Teilhard's ideas in this respect. But I cannot see how
"original" sin becomes a process, depending on the way God created
man. Also, on what do you base the creation of the"soul"? If on Gen.2
where it is based on the stem "nephesh", why not "soul" in Gen.1 where it
is translated "living being"? Or Lev.17:11 where it is translated in the
NIV with life; and then in verse 12 with "none". In Lev. it is equated
with blood.
What I say here has been discussed in the reformed churches in the
Netherlands. Prof,Vollenhoven (Philosophy at the Free University in
Amsterdam) confessed near the end of his life that already in 1918 he did
not want to preach about texts in which the word "soul" appeared in
translation. In 1942 he had already explained to us why, namely that it
seemed that the translation of the word "nephesh" (and others like "heart"
and "spirit", not only the word "soul") depended more on the feeling of how
the translator felt about "man" than about the literal meaning of the
word. He spent three hours on comparing texts in the original languages
with us. Also, several preachers started discussing and the result was
that more preachers started researching and coming to the conclusion, that
in the Bible man was a unity, sometimes designated as "soul", that is
"living being." When man dies, he will be resurrected when Jesus comes
back. Time does not exist for him in between.
Rather than by followers of Teilhard, they were Reformed people, now not
even in the United Reforming Churches, but in the Liberated Churches thrown
out by the Reformed Church, for entirely different reasons, namely
church-order related. Some I met her again in Canada in the Canadian
Reformed Churches. All believe, that salvation only comes through Jesus
Christ, all believe that God created man.
Jan de K.
Jan de K.
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