1.14.2008
I Got a Comment!
Since this comment is buried in an old post, and since I am so long-winded in my answer, I thought it best to use it as my post tonight so others could read it and in case others had a similar question. Let me know what you think.
Mary Anne asked: "Who creates one's soul, then? Is is a mere natural entity? or one that springs from Satan?"
I responded:
Hello Mary Anne,
God is the Creator, and He still is the one to create us, both body and soul. Satan has no part in creation, nor is he capable of creating anything, other than a mess. He is a powerful and potent creature, but he is still only a creature and a twisted and, in the true sense, impotent one, too.
What I am saying is that God creates the soul, and the soul is meant to be a home for Him. The original plan was virginal conception wherein God would provide the fruit; thus, the children would be born His true children and endowed with sanctifying grace. Sanctifying grace is not made to be passed on through physical generation, so once Adam and Eve chose the route of having children through physical generation, children were born without grace. Because they trusted in the wisdom of the serpent to achieve this new life of a son in direct disobedience to the one command, they somehow covenanted themselves to satan. Satan, thus, steals God's spouse and takes us to himself, in some sense. Humanity, then, is stuck in a deed-end relationship with an evil master bent on destroying us without any human hope for escape; this is symbolized when the Israelites were trapped up against the Red Sea with the Egyptian army bearing down upon them to slaughter them...and God saved them through the water of the Red Sea. The passage to a new life, the destruction of the enemy, is what happens in baptism wherein we are born again, born from above, and made God's actual children.
Baptism frees us from our bondage from sin and satan so that we can belong to our new spouse, Jesus. Then we spend the rest of our time in the desert on our way to the Promised Land being fed by the bread from heaven, the Eucharist.
I am not sure I have answered your question.
What I am saying is that the soul is created by God, but it is empty. It is made to house God's life, but we are born without that sanctifying grace. Satan doesn't do any creating; all he does is steal God's spouse, and as such, he has some claim against us so we are not free to go to heaven. Since in baptism we are born again, our old self dies thus breaking the bond we had with the serpent. Baptism frees us to be united to our One True Spouse.
Thanks for reading and your prayers.
Copyright 2007.
All rights reserved.
Mary Anne asked: "Who creates one's soul, then? Is is a mere natural entity? or one that springs from Satan?"
I responded:
Hello Mary Anne,
God is the Creator, and He still is the one to create us, both body and soul. Satan has no part in creation, nor is he capable of creating anything, other than a mess. He is a powerful and potent creature, but he is still only a creature and a twisted and, in the true sense, impotent one, too.
What I am saying is that God creates the soul, and the soul is meant to be a home for Him. The original plan was virginal conception wherein God would provide the fruit; thus, the children would be born His true children and endowed with sanctifying grace. Sanctifying grace is not made to be passed on through physical generation, so once Adam and Eve chose the route of having children through physical generation, children were born without grace. Because they trusted in the wisdom of the serpent to achieve this new life of a son in direct disobedience to the one command, they somehow covenanted themselves to satan. Satan, thus, steals God's spouse and takes us to himself, in some sense. Humanity, then, is stuck in a deed-end relationship with an evil master bent on destroying us without any human hope for escape; this is symbolized when the Israelites were trapped up against the Red Sea with the Egyptian army bearing down upon them to slaughter them...and God saved them through the water of the Red Sea. The passage to a new life, the destruction of the enemy, is what happens in baptism wherein we are born again, born from above, and made God's actual children.
Baptism frees us from our bondage from sin and satan so that we can belong to our new spouse, Jesus. Then we spend the rest of our time in the desert on our way to the Promised Land being fed by the bread from heaven, the Eucharist.
I am not sure I have answered your question.
What I am saying is that the soul is created by God, but it is empty. It is made to house God's life, but we are born without that sanctifying grace. Satan doesn't do any creating; all he does is steal God's spouse, and as such, he has some claim against us so we are not free to go to heaven. Since in baptism we are born again, our old self dies thus breaking the bond we had with the serpent. Baptism frees us to be united to our One True Spouse.
Thanks for reading and your prayers.
Copyright 2007.
All rights reserved.
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Copyright 2007
Thanks for reading.
4 comments:
In your reply to Mary Anne, You said,"The original plan was virginal conception..." There is no place in the Bible or even in Church doctrine that teaches this. We can only speculate about the specifics of the act of disobedience committed by Adam and Eve. To write about speculative theology as if it were doctrine of the Church is wrong and dangerous. In fact, in Scripture, the fall takes place in Genesis chapter 3, but Adam doesn't "know" his wife until Chapter 4. The Old Testament is not a bit shy about telling when someone "knew" his wife. Why would the author use the words "eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge" to describe original sin if it were a sexual act? In fact,in Genesis chapter 1, God tells Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply. The Church has always taught that God allows man and woman to participate in His act of creation by bringing forth new life.
Thank you for taking the time to respond.
"God created man in his image; in the divine image he created him; male and female he created them. God blessed them, saying; "Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it." Genesis 1:27-28.
By reading scripture, one is led to believe that it was after the fall that the "man had relations with his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, 'I have produced a man with the help of the Lord. '" Genesis 4:1. Notice, here, that she says, literally, "with the help of the Lord."
Of course, we are without grace and must be Baptized. We can speculate to our heart's desire, but it is important that we commend Church doctrine and do not waver from it.
Thanks, Anonymous and Mary Anne, for commenting. I certainly understand your hesitancy with what I am saying. I think I have already answered most if not all of your questions and points in previous posts. After reading your comments, I did change my blog's title description to make it more clear that some of what I am writing is a theory.
I have submitted my thoughts to a number of very faithful and educated priests and lay people, and none of them have found any doctrinal error in it. My purpose for writing is to make this information into a book, and I suppose that will be the time to have it officially looked at to get an imprimatur and the nihil obstat (I am not exactly sure of the way that should be done). My theory is not new; it was held by some early Church Fathers and various people throughout history. I do plan to give evidence of what they said sometime in the near future.
Genesis 4:1 is extremely difficult to translate even for the most knowledgeable scholars. The phrase "with the help of" is not in the Hebrew. It literally says, "I have acquired a man the Lord." That could be made sense of in a number of ways. It could also be something like: "I have gotten a man just like the Lord did." Remember, she was trying to be like God; having gotten a man, she has become like God who had made Adam.
There were no chapter breaks in the original documents of the Bible; they were added much later. Genesis 4:1, in my understanding, is a one verse summary of all of what transpired in chapter three; I think it fits better as part of chapter three. The woman only gets her new name, Eve (mother), immediately following the punishments from the Fall; the reason people get new names is that they have become a new reality. She has conceived, and now she is a mother; thus, she needs a new name, and the giver of names provides her one right away.
I encourage you to look back at by earlier writing; I am writing in somewhat of a book format, and to some extent I do progress in a logical sequence. I don't want to repeat myself every step of the way, for that would be too cumbersome. What I write today presupposes some knowledge of what I have already said. I think the first two and a half weeks or so of my posts give a good idea of the flow of my ideas; after that, you could skip around.
Well then, go ahead and pursue it as you see it, always being careful to differentiate between suggestion and doctrine, but personally, as far as speculating is concerned, I think that it could be argued just as well the other way--that they WOULDN'T have sexual relations-- and that that was the reason, or a part of it, for the punishment.
Eve's comments would fit in nicely in the opposite case too, and so would her new name, given at the later time, ha.
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