Divine Duplication

Originally posted by jaywill
Maybe next time you can preface your question with:

"I don't really want to know anything, but ..."

No, you just did not understand his question.

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The duplicate I am talking about is immediate and literal. We have Jesus A, divine according to Christians. Then He is biologically duplicated. So now Jesus B comes into existence. Is he (He?) also divine?

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No.

Originally posted by jaywill
[b]============================

The duplicate I am talking about is immediate and literal. We have Jesus A, divine according to Christians. Then He is biologically duplicated. So now Jesus B comes into existence. Is he (He?) also divine?

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No.[/b]

Why not?

I think you will find me too verbose for your liking. I wrote too much for your tastes.

I consider this as your question:


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If Jesus's body were physically duplicated in every particular, would the mind, and possibly spirit, attached to the body of the duplicate Jesus be divine also?
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A few reasons come to mind. And you want conciseness "Sorry I asked" Right? So don't get annoyed then if I leave out something for the sake of brevity. Agreed?


1.) His body is in heaven at the right hand of the Majesty. Can't get to it. See Romans 8:34.

2.) Man cannot replace God's spiritual purposes with human technology. Otherwise we probably would have been back to Eden long ago.

3.) We don't even really know what the mind is let alone the human spirit or even the human soul. We certainly don't know enough about the immaterial aspects of human life to make duplicate copies of anyone.

4.) I don't think cloning even actually represents a physical exact copy of a person let alone a spiritual one.

5.) There is no proof that two cloned individuals would act, think, imagine, desire, dislike, want, in the exact same manner in an exact simultaneous way.

6.) Christ's divinity is not something under the control of any human inventions. Neither is His humanity for that matter.

Man's munipulating chemistry and genetics could not produce God. There is no reason why it should produce God - man or God incarnate.

7.) Man probably would not reproduce someone like Jesus anyway. Why would they want to turn away from thier god Charles Darwin to worship One who claims to be Son of God?

8.) Man is unrighteous. Out of the unrighteous a Righteous One is not able to come.

IF the inventor is unrighteous why should we expect that the invention would be Righteous?

IF be more typical for man to duplicate some evil person than for him to duplicate Christ.

9.) Man's tools cannot manipulate eternal life. And Christ was the incarnation of eternal life into a man.

10.) Given a list of possible historical people to "duplicate" if such were possible, Jesus would probably be preempted by Einstien, Thomas Jefferson, maybe Mayrln Monroe or Elves Presley.

People are usually more concerned with who will get their enemy off their back or make them more money.


Don't expect the Righteous One to come out of the invention of the unrighteous mankind.

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Now I have a question for you.

IF God said that He could reproduce essentially Jesus in your personality as a free gift - would you receive this gift?

Or would you reject this gift ?

Originally posted by jaywill
I think you will find me too verbose for your liking. I wrote too much for your tastes.

I consider this as your question:


=============================
If Jesus's body were physically duplicated in every particular, would the mind, and possibly spirit, attached to the body of the duplicate Jesus be divine also?
============================== as a free gift - would you receive this gift?

Or would you reject this gift ?

Wow, I do not think even one of those reasons actually addresses Pawno's hypothetical. It's a hypothetical, jaywill. We suppose that some exact physical duplicate of Jesus has come into being, it really doesn't matter how it comes into being (maybe humans created the duplicate, or maybe God or Jesus himself created the exact physical duplicate, or maybe some atoms just somehow self-assembled into an exact physical duplicate of Jesus, or maybe the duplicate just popped into existence under no explanation -- who cares how it comes into existence). The question is, is the exact physical duplicate (or the mind thereof or whatever may emerge from the physical substrate) divine? Not one of your numbered responses actually addresses the question.

I think your 5) probably comes closest to actually addressing it; but even there, it is not clear that you are addressing the question of divinity (whatever that means).

Originally posted by jaywill
I think you will find me too verbose for your liking. I wrote too much for your tastes.

Or would you reject this gift ?

As LemonJello intimates, it's not the verbosity of your responses that annoys me, but their irrelevance, or at least their tangentiality. It's more important, evidently, that you witness for Christ, than that you address my questions directly. Still, maybe your heart is in the right place.

To answer your question: I am unclear as to what is meant by "Jesus in your personality". However, if it means something accepting a more virtuous disposition, the answer might well be yes, as I have problems being as virtuous as I aspire to me. But then, maybe I don't really aspire to be, at the cost entailed: persistent arduous effort. Or maybe I am sufficiently virtuous, but am inclined to neurotically denigrate myself. I can't say for sure. I always think that a truly virtuous person should be something like a St. Francis of Assisi utilitarian, don't you? If you endorse this pressing standard--and I can't see a reason not to in principle--a lot of moral issues which traditionally generate outrage and controversy seem like small potatoes in comparison.

Originally posted by Pawnokeyhole
Why not?

Still not satisfied with my answers? Yes I do tend to be verbose.

Consider this, The initial birth of Christ in the virgin woman was a miracle of God. We cannot duplicate the miracle of God.

If you had sample DNA and were able to clone Jesus in some way, it still would not be a duplication of the miracle of the incarnation.

Now don't press me further or I'll get verbose on you.

No is my answer. You can't biologically duplicate the incarnation of God into man.

Abraham was perhaps the most famous case of a man trying to "help" God with manmade ingenuity.

God promised him a son. Year after year went by and no son could be produced. He and Sarah got older and older.

Finally, enough was enough. Abraham decided to take action and have a son through Hagar the female slave. He produced Ishmael. The rest is history.

God accepted the miraculous birth of Isaac through to old Sarah as the fulfillment of His promise. God rejected Ishmael as the promised seed.

The question posed here about biologically duplicating Jesus is really a modern day high tech Ishmael idea.

Originally posted by jaywill
Still not satisfied with my answers? Yes I do tend to be verbose.

Consider this, The initial birth of Christ in the virgin woman was a miracle of God. We cannot duplicate the miracle of God.

If you had sample DNA and were able to clone Jesus in some way, it still would not be a duplication of the miracle of the incarnation.

Now don't press me ...[text shortened]... you.

No is my answer. You can't biologically duplicate the incarnation of God into man.

Suppose God created Jesus 1, and He was divine.

Then God created Jesus 2, who was a perfect physical duplicate.

And then God annihilated Jesus 1.

Wouldn't Jesus 2 do just as good as Jesus 1 for any purpose, moral or spiritual?

If not, why not?

Don't just assert your opinion; give a reason for it.

Originally posted by Pawnokeyhole
Suppose God created Jesus 1, and He was divine.

Then God created Jesus 2, who was a perfect physical duplicate.

And then God annihilated Jesus 1.

Wouldn't Jesus 2 do just as good as Jesus 1 for any purpose, moral or spiritual?

If not, why not?

Don't just assert your opinion; give a reason for it.

I have no opinion to express on that.

I guess I am more interested in what God did do rather than hypotheticals.

Originally posted by jaywill
Abraham was perhaps the most famous case of a man trying to "help" God with manmade ingenuity.

God promised him a son. Year after year went by and no son could be produced. He and Sarah got older and older.

Finally, enough was enough. Abraham decided to take action and have a son through Hagar the female slave. He produced Ishmael. The rest is histor ...[text shortened]... ere about biologically duplicating Jesus is really a modern day high tech [b]Ishmael idea.[/b]

You know that story birthed the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim movement, right?

Originally posted by Pawnokeyhole
Suppose God created Jesus 1, and He was divine.

Then God created Jesus 2, who was a perfect physical duplicate.

And then God annihilated Jesus 1.

Wouldn't Jesus 2 do just as good as Jesus 1 for any purpose, moral or spiritual?

If not, why not?

Don't just assert your opinion; give a reason for it.

Yes.

In the interest of keeping down my own problems of verbosity, I will borrow from Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Jesus #2 in your thought experiment can potentially:

[Act] in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

From the beginning I think, the church has recognized that, while Jesus (#1) is the Christ, the Christ is not strictly the historical Jesus (#1). In fact, the Greek word sometimes translated as “only-begotten” (monogenete) means unique, but not exclusive. In your thought experiment, how is one to say that Jesus #1 is more unique than Jesus #2?

But, as Hopkins poetically points out, the Christ is present in all of our individual uniquenesses. This is what the historical Jesus realized and was (in theological terms: sacramentally) pointing to. Anyone who realizes their own begottenness from/by/through the logos tou theou is—at least en potentia—the Christ. That Jesus was “specially born” (for those who put a lot of weight on that) does not change the point. As the opening verses of the Gospel of John state, everything (and everyone) that has been begotten (egeneto) is begotten from/by/through the Logos.

The point is not to “believe” in just the historical particularism of Jesus of Nazareth; the point is to realize the universality present in every such particularity. St. Paul addressed this paradox of the universal and the particular when he said: zo de ouketi ego, ze de en emoi Christos (Galatians 2:20).

A Christology that stops at the historical Jesus is a Christology stuck in corporeal particularism.

I actually do not think that that is jaywill’s Christology. Based on past discussions, I think jaywill “overweights” the historical particularism of Jesus; I think and that he thinks I “overweight” the universality of the so-called “cosmic Christ”. We each weight differently the elements of the Chalcedonian paradox. That does not mean that we ignore the other side in the scales.

So, he says, “No”; I say, “Yes, of course, what’s the problem?”

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Someone recently on here noted—once again—how various Christians define each other out of being “true Christians ™” by applying differential criteria. I have more than once been charged with trying to turn the Christ into the Buddha (but never with trying to turn Jesus into Siddhartha Gautama!). Practicing certain forms of spiritual expression is not the problem; unconditional and uncritical adherence to the form—rather than what the form is pointing toward beyond itself—is the problem. When that happens, the particular signs and their linguistic/conceptual meaning(s) (signifieds) become more important than the actual (ineffable) referent. The map becomes more important than the territory; people begin to define the territory according to the map, rather than the other way ‘round. And that is really the definition of idolatry. (And, before anyone jumps up and down in a snit—I am not saying that anybody on here falls into that; I am only saying where I think the danger lies.)

I see now that an error I have made in the past is to see the “Christic” paradigm (form) of spiritual expression as fundamentally more idolatrous than a Zen Buddhist paradigm (form). Fundamentally, it is not; on the other hand, either can be.

I am not going to bother to throw in further caveats (about “supernaturalism” and the like) for folks on here who do not know me. I have now already managed to present a suitably verbose post...

Originally posted by scherzo
You know that story birthed the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim movement, right?

I think something like this may have happened.

Hagar encouraged her son Ishmael -

"Don't you ever forget. You are the son of the prophet Abraham. You were the promised son to the prophet Abraham. You must remember that always."

Now that is just my imagination. But I think that the mom of Ishmeal firmly planted in his mind that he was a prophet's son by the will of God with great promises associated with him.

Actually God did say that He would bless Ishmael and twelve princes would come from him. BUT His covenant with Abraham would be through Isaac.

The old saying is that the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. I think the two moms Sarah and Hagar were really influencial.

God did seem to let the Arab nations be the riches in the world. IN a sense kind of saying "I am going to give you all most of the oil under your lands." So to speak.

But the Messiah of the world will be a Jew. The Jews think he is still to come though. So who invokes more of my sympathy? Good question.

I am more into theology than international politics though. I tend to vote Democratic.