Friday, December 12, 2014
creation & unity
After reading and thinking so much about free will due to these blog posts, I began to consider another part of Augustine's City of God. In Book XIV, Chapter 1, Augustine writes about God: "His first purpose was to give unity to the human race by the likeness of nature. His second purpose was to bind mankind by the bond of peace, through blood relationship, into one harmonious whole." He then briefly talks about creation, and how Adam came from nothing and Eve from him, and that their sin "impaired all of human nature." The sin that Eve committed was so great that it impacted human nature so heavily and in such a widespread manner. If God's purpose was to promote unity, then why, logically, would he impose the idea or threat or test of sin that could destroy all of this work? I understand that in one sense, sin has to exist to justify atrocities that occur, but on the other hand, all of these sins that are committed could technically be avoidable. As God creates the opportunities for these sins to occur, doesn't that simply work in the opposite way of his goal and what he was aiming to achieve, peace and unity?
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I think this is where the God of the Old Testament clashes with the version of God in the New Testament. In the Pentateuch, God is much more imperfect and makes mistakes as we see with Adam and Eve, and the story of Noah. The New Testament and Augustine’s interpretation of it try to go back and perfect God, but that ultimately ends up clashing with the older version creating confusion. The New Testament version tries to make God more omnipresent to be consistent with the idea of divine providence and an afterlife. If you spend your whole life trying to be consistent with God’s goodness, you need God to be prefect and infallible rather than the God more consistent with the Old Testament, which is not concerned with the afterlife.
ReplyDeleteI believe that God made humans belief in free will to test our decisions. The fact that God knows every step we will take doesn't make sense to me because that suggest that humans have no free will. If all those decision we make are just to see where our mind is than we never have the opinion to choose. I know that this is the free will to desire, but if we choose something we desire than we might be doing evil and get punished. Also, in Genesis we see that God punishes everyone with the flood for being evil, so that suggest that there is a good and a bad.
ReplyDeleteTo answer grace's first question, I think that god's "impairing all human nature" for Adam and Eve's sin is actually quite consistent with what St. Augustine says about god, and perhaps even a justification for it. When Ausgtine talks about unity and blood relation, I interoperate it to mean that because all humans have common ancestors, we are somehow responsible for each others' actions.So when adam and eve sinned, it would make sense that (in Augustine's opinion) that everyone would be punished because of the bond between all humans.
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