[TruthTalk] Spiritual Death

[Judy Taylor]

Good Morning David, you write: Judy wrote: Yes Bill you are the hypocrite on this one and you need to repent.   DM: I haven't been following the posts the last few days, but I read this one this morning.  Judy, please refrain from ad hominem arguments like this. Such only reveals your frustration in being able to communicate and your inability to make your case Biblically.   jt: I don't like it either David but there is some background here that you are not aware of that I will address offline.   I would like to frame what I think Bill's position is in regards to Augustine and you.  Bill is not saying that you have read Augustine.  He is saying that you have been influenced by Augustine and have adopted some of his viewpoints without realizing it.  How?  Because you live in this world and have grown up around ministers and school systems that have been touched by him in one way or another.   jt: Then he is saying the same as what Lance would harp on constantly which is that noone can know what they think they know (if it conflicts with his doctrine) which contradicts scripture itself because it is written "The spiritual man judges ALL things yet he himself is rightly judged by noone" (1 Cor 2:15)   Let me illustrate this with a non-Biblical terms.  If I were to say to you, "Benedict" or "Benedict Arnold," what would form in your mind?  Negative thoughts?  Why?  What do you know about this name?  Who taught it to you?   jt: I don't know much of anything about Benedict Arnold, in fact I just had to ask my husband who he was.  Guy Fawkes would mean more to me since I was raised in the British system and we would have a bonfire on Guy Fawkes day. Now perhaps you can go to some class in grade school where you learned about a traitor, but even many non-educated people have a concept of this name without formal training.  I myself do not know where I adopted the negative thoughts that I have about the name "Benedict," but I am sure that it came through the school system and society along the way.  Ultimately, in our generation, there are some historians responsible for developing the kind of view that we have about this name.  We may never have read this historian ourselves, but through teachers or the news media or some other secondary source, we adopted a concept concerning it.  In other parts of the world that do not share our history, the name "Benedict" has a very positive connotation.  Why?  Different historians shaped the culture.   The point is that Augustine has so influenced our culture and society, that many of his viewpoints become ours through secondary sources.  You may never have read him or even heard of him, but there are many ways in which his views could have come down to you.  Maybe you just heard a minister explain Genesis and use the term, "spiritual death" along with some Augustinian viewpoints.  Perhaps he himself did not even read Augustine directly, but heard the view from someone else.  It may be that at the time, the concept resonated with you and made sense.  It may also be that at the time you were not really paying much attention, but later as you were reading your Bible privately, these ideas came to mind, having first been planted in your mind sometime before.  The third concept is, of course, that the Holy Spirit revealed the truth to you just like he perhaps did to Augustine.   jt: Are you kidding?  At the church I grew up in we heard nothing like that and I personally did not begin to study to show myself approved to God until after I was "born again"   >From my perspective, the question of whether or not Augustine is ultimately responsible for your viewpoint is not really all that important.  It could be that Augustine was right, and that you, independently, saw the same thing and came upon the same language to explain it.    jt: What other way is there to explain what took place in the garden David? Adam did not die physically for 960 more years so unless God lied or changed his mind as JD claims and did not follow through - then Adam died but not physically.   What is important to me is whether the concept is right.  Is this concept of "spiritual death" the best way of understanding the truth of what is being discussed.  For example, did Adam die spiritually that day, is that the best way to understand his death, or did he actually die physically that same day, not in the sense that he immediately dropped dead (we know that did not happen), but in the sense that he was delivered to death, which began working upon him, such that the aging process began and he became subject to disease, sickness, and death from that very point in time.    jt: Well yes, that is the way it works.  Both Adam and the creation were cursed at the same time and the curse is always implemented by the powers of darkness who only work death and destruction.  They never bless.  Actually biology responds to psychology and psychology responds to spirituality.   It could be that if somebody had stabbed his heart with a knife prior to his sin, he would not have died, but if stabbed after he had sinned, he would have dropped dead right there on the spot. In other words, he became mortal immediately on that very day that he sinned.   jt: Prior to Adams sin noone would have wanted to stab anyone's heart Murder was not a reality until after the fall and neither was mortality.   Now if on the other hand Adam died "spiritually" and if people are born spiritually dead and if his spiritual death is passed on through inheritance, there are many implications that such a model would have than if such were not true.  Let's take just the situation of inheritance.  I understand physical inhertiance pretty well, I think, having taught classes on genetics at the university.  What I do not understand is spiritual inheritance, or whether spiritual inheritance even exists in the sense of being passed on from parent to offspring.    jt: It's right there in God's Law. The curse follows from four to ten generations to those that hate Him and blessing to the thousandth generation to those who love Him and walk in His ways.  That is, if we believe God means what He says and says what He means.   I need to go look up some scriptures so will continue this later.........