Theology by Johannes Argentus
During the IV to VI centuries, the Christian doctrine of the Trinity was formulated using primari... more During the IV to VI centuries, the Christian doctrine of the Trinity was formulated using primarily three Greek terms: ousía, hypostasis and prósōpon. Of those, hypostasis is unique for two reasons: first, it is the only one present in the NT (Heb 1:3), and secondly, it was used successively in two mutually incompatible senses: in Nicaea as synonym of, and to provide precision for, ousía, and from the Cappadocian Fathers onwards as synonym of, and to provide precision for, prósōpon. In this article I will examine the introduction of the terms ousía and hypostasis in the Greek philosophical discourse and the development of their meaning, focusing on the meaning of hypostasis which was current at the time when Heb 1:3 was written, the issues at play in the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, and the use by the Church of the terms ousía, hypostasis and prósōpon to provide a precise formulation of that doctrine.
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Partiendo de que en teología trinitaria tomista la Persona del Padre sigue (lógicamente, no tempo... more Partiendo de que en teología trinitaria tomista la Persona del Padre sigue (lógicamente, no temporalmente) a la acción de engendrar, y recordando que, como definió el Concilio Ecuménico Letrán IV, el sujeto de la acción de engendrar es el Padre y no la esencia divina: "la sustancia, esencia o naturaleza divina [...] ni engendra, ni es engendrado, ni procede; sino que el Padre es el que engendra; el Hijo, el que es engendrado, y el Espíritu Santo, el que procede", muestro que en esa teología el sujeto de la acción sigue a la acción, por lo que esa teología se basa en contradecir el principio tomista "agere sequitur esse", mientras que la teología trinitaria bonaventurana se basa en aplicarlo. Luego noto que S. Tomás, al citar 2 veces la afirmación de Boecio de que "la relación multiplica la trinidad de personas", apoyó la posición bonaventurana de que la Primera Persona es inicialmente (en sentido lógico, no temporal) pre-relacional porque la multiplicación debe partir de al menos 1 para dar un resultado distinto de 0. Seguidamente estudio la diferencia entre ambas teologías trinitarias partiendo de las emanaciones y originaciones que fundan las relaciones. Finalmente estudio la posición de ambas teologías ante la cuestión de si los monoteístas no cristianos adoran al mismo Dios, mostrando que la bonaventurana está de acuerdo con lo que Jesús dice en Jn 8,54 mientras que la tomista no lo está.
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En comparación con la explicación del Misterio de la Santísima Trinidad a partir de la esencia, s... more En comparación con la explicación del Misterio de la Santísima Trinidad a partir de la esencia, sustancia o naturaleza divina, propuesta por S. Agustín y desarrollada por S. Tomás de Aquino, la explicación de ese Misterio a partir de la Hipóstasis del Padre, propuesta por los Padres de Oriente y desarrollada por S. Buenaventura de Bagnoregio, sobre todo al proponer entender la noción de innascibilidad del Padre en un sentido positivo de plenitud fontal, refleja de manera más fiel y directa los textos del NT y del credo Niceno-Constantinopolitano, permite entender mejor el Misterio, y permite resolver fácilmente dos cuestiones cuya resolución en la otra explicación implica que en el Hijo y el Espíritu Santo habría potencialidades no actualizadas. Por otro lado, el entendimiento desarrollado en Occidente de la generación del Hijo por vía intelectual, y de la procesión del Espíritu Santo por vía de amor, refleja de manera fiel y directa el texto del NT y es necesario para entender el Misterio. Por lo tanto, propongo en este trabajo una síntesis de la teología sobre la Santísima Trinidad de los Padres de Oriente desarrollada por S. Buenaventura por un lado, y de la de S. Agustín desarrollada por S. Tomás por el otro, que a mi juicio es totalmente fiel a la Escritura y el Magisterio de la Iglesia Católica sobre el tema, resuelve custiones pendientes, y facilita la comprensión del Misterio - en cuanto esa comprensión es posible en esta vida - y la percepción de la ortodoxia de la doctrina del Filioque.
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En este artículo examino los tres posibles modos de la inhabitación trinitaria en el alma del hom... more En este artículo examino los tres posibles modos de la inhabitación trinitaria en el alma del hombre justificado que han sido propuestos por los teólogos, esto es presencia operativa, presencia intencional, y presencia cuasi-formal, y propongo que la inhabitación trinitaria se realiza de los tres modos a la vez, a partir de lo cual muestro que la participación de la vida divina y la inhabitación por presencia cuasi-formal del Hijo y del Espíritu Santo a través de la gracia santificante y de la caridad respectivamente son exactamente la misma realidad, correspondiendo la inhabitación por presencia operativa a la causa eficiente de esa realidad, y la inhabitación por presencia intencional al efecto.
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Dado que el término "Logos" con que el Apóstol S. Juan designa al Hijo de Dios al comienzo de su ... more Dado que el término "Logos" con que el Apóstol S. Juan designa al Hijo de Dios al comienzo de su Evangelio, al comienzo de su primera Carta y en el Apocalipsis (Ap 19,13) tenía dos sentidos en el contexto cultural griego en el que S. Juan vivía, "palabra" y "razón", ¿debe entenderse el término "Logos" como nombre del Hijo de Dios en ambos sentidos o en uno solo de ellos, y en ese caso, en cuál?
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While Christians agree that by his passion Christ made satisfaction for our sins to God, there ar... more While Christians agree that by his passion Christ made satisfaction for our sins to God, there are two possible positions regarding what exactly in Jesus' passion satisfied God: either Jesus' loving obedience or his suffering, shedding of blood, and death per se. After showing that Catholic authoritative sources support the first position, I search for a Biblical-only answer. Given that, according to the Letter to the Hebrews, the sacrifices of the Mosaic Law were prefigurations of Jesus’ sacrifice, I try to discern what in those sacrifices pleased God. Was it the suffering, blood and death of the victim in themselves, or was it the obedience and love of the offerer? The answer is clear in 1 Samuel, Micah, Hosea and Isaiah: God did not want animal sacrifices per se but knowledge of Him and hesed: loyal, obedient love to Him together with loyal, merciful love to neighbours. Moreover, since that obedient love comes from the knowledge of God, it was truly "by his knowledge" of God that the LORD's Servant justified many (Is 53:11).
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Any philosophical framework compatible with Christianity should be able to explain at a philosoph... more Any philosophical framework compatible with Christianity should be able to explain at a philosophical level why Jesus' human nature is not a human person. I briefly review the explanations of this fact proposed by Scotus and Suarez out of their rejection of the real distinction between essence and esse, and find them wholly unsatisfactory from the philosophical viewpoint. I then review the solutions proposed within the Thomistic school, and select the proposed by Billot.
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En este artículo evalúo distintas posibles explicaciones a nivel filosófico de la unión hipostáti... more En este artículo evalúo distintas posibles explicaciones a nivel filosófico de la unión hipostática de la Persona del Verbo con la naturaleza humana y hallo que la única satisfactoria es la que sostiene que la Persona del Hijo, que al igual que cada Persona divina es la Esencia divina
(dogma de fe católica), la cual a su vez es el Acto de Ser Subsistente (concepto tomista), es el acto de ser del alma de Cristo. De esta explicación extraigo dos consecuencias: el Hijo de Dios asumió la carne por medio del alma, y el cuerpo de Jesús se separó de la divinidad al morir, y estuvo separado de ella hasta la Resurrección, posición ésta última que, si bien minoritaria, fue sostenida por S. Ambrosio y S. Hilario.
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Epistemology of faith by Johannes Argentus
I examine the "complete" definition of faith, involving both personal and propositional faith, an... more I examine the "complete" definition of faith, involving both personal and propositional faith, and the four steps that are logically necessary to arrive to explicit propositional faith in response to divine Revelation, which is the "strict" traditional definition of faith. Then I focus on the medium of divine Revelation, whose identification is the third of those steps. I propose the thesis that holding the foundational knowledge on theism and on the medium of divine Revelation, even when it is based on rationally apprehensible data, requires, at least for a significant subset of people, "an act of the intellect assenting to the ... truth by command of the will moved by God through grace", where the specificity of my thesis is "moved by God through grace", and thus is a kind of propositional faith distinct from its "strict" definition, which leads me to propose a "broad" definition of propositional faith.
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I propose a conceptual framework for studying the epistemic path to explicit propositional faith,... more I propose a conceptual framework for studying the epistemic path to explicit propositional faith, i.e. assent-based knowledge in response to divine Revelation. For that purpose I define the notions of revelatory epistemic state (the set of revealed propositions known by faith), revelatory epistemic position (the medium of divine Revelation acknowledged), and revelatory epistemological position (the criteria for determining whether a purported medium of divine Revelation is actually so). I further define, for any revelatory tradition, the antecedent epistemological position (ARELP) that is required to be able to arrive to explicit propositional faith according to that tradition and the consequent epistemological position (CRELP) that results from that faith. I state the ARELP which is required for Christianity (R4C-ARELP) and the Christian epistemic position, and then study a possible Jewish CRELP which is incompatible with the R4C-ARELP, showing that it is false in the framework of the Biblical Israelite faith. Finally I compare Biblical Israel's and the Church's divinely-mandated consequent epistemological positions, and give a principled reason why only the latter places the faithful in a state of epistemic insulation which excludes the possibility of a future public divine Revelation.
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This article is a response to Professor Daniel Boyarin's argument, presented lately in 2018, that... more This article is a response to Professor Daniel Boyarin's argument, presented lately in 2018, that what Ignatius of Antioch calls Ioudaismos in his letters to the Magnesians and to the Philadelphians "has nothing to do with anything that we would call Judaism, since for Ignatius Christianismos and Ioudaismos both are species of what we would call Christianity." The basis of my thesis is that a Christian or a Jew lives according to Christianismos or Ioudaismos in the sense of ways of life (praxis) because they believe that God has revealed that it is His will that they live this or that way (epistemic state), which in turn they do because they believe that the medium of divine Revelation is this or that (epistemic position). Thus, both Christianismos and Ioudaismos consist inseparably of a way of life (praxis), a system of beliefs in divinely revealed truths (epistemic state), and a foundational belief in the medium of divine Revelation (epistemic position), so that what Ignatius calls Ioudaismos is definitely not Christianity, since it does not adopt the Christian epistemic position, according to which what God revealed through Jesus has precedence over what He had previously revealed through Moses and the prophets. Rather, the epistemic position of Ignatius' opponents qualifies as first-century Judaism, just as the epistemic position of present-day noahides (though not their praxis) qualifies as Rabbinic Judaism.
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Natural theology by Johannes Argentus
Ante cinco hechos comprobados sobre el universo y el hombre, cada ser humano puede adoptar una de... more Ante cinco hechos comprobados sobre el universo y el hombre, cada ser humano puede adoptar una de dos posiciones posibles, una de las cuales explica racionalmente esos hechos, y la otra simplemente los acepta como "brute facts". Las posiciones son totalmente opuestas en dos aspectos: explicación y sentido, tanto del universo como, mucho más importante, de la vida humana.
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It is well established that holding the PSR is a requirement for the classical arguments for the ... more It is well established that holding the PSR is a requirement for the classical arguments for the existence of God [1]. I hereby propose the thesis that holding the PSR is equivalent to, or presupposes, holding theism. Not necessarily full-fledged classical theism, but at least a basic, less clear-cut version thereof.
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I show that the modal cosmological argument, or argument from contingency, is just the principle ... more I show that the modal cosmological argument, or argument from contingency, is just the principle of efficient causality, and that the latter is based on just the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR).
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The Kalam Cosmological argument in Craig & Sinclair (2009) posits as its 2nd premise that the uni... more The Kalam Cosmological argument in Craig & Sinclair (2009) posits as its 2nd premise that the universe began to exist, a proposition that can be substantiated either on the basis of physical evidence or by a subsidiary argument. We show that the two premises of the subsidiary argument require the existence of God. Regarding the 2nd premise, we show that, for a finite eternally cyclic universe to imply the existence of an actual infinite, we need to posit that God exists and creates a finite number of souls in each cycle. Regarding the 1st premise, we show that the argument for the metaphysical impossibility of the existence of an actual infinite number of entities 1) relies on an intuition and is wholly subjective and 2) is based on the assumption of a Creator God, because only in that case the existence of an actual infinite number of entities does not make metaphysical sense.
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NT exegesis by Johannes Argentus
NT scholar and Christian apologist Michael R. Licona, in his 2010 book "The Resurrection of Jesus... more NT scholar and Christian apologist Michael R. Licona, in his 2010 book "The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach", interpreted the passage in Mt 27:52-53 about the raising of many saints at the time of Jesus' death as a poetic device written with eschatological Jewish texts in mind. Here I argue that it is a historical account written with three scriptural passages in mind: the prophecy in Eze 37:12-14, of which it is a precise literal fulfillment whatever the identity of the raised saints, the Massacre of the Innocents in Mt 2:16-18, of which it is a non-specific undoing in the general case of that identity and a specific undoing in the identity case according to the hypothesis I present here, and the prophecy in Jer 31:16-17 (which follows immediately the prophecy quoted in Mt 2:18), of which it is a precise literal fulfillment in the identity case according to my hypothesis, which is that the saints resurrected in Mt 27:52 were precisely the children killed in Mt 2:16. Finally, I show that this hypothesis allows to overcome neatly and easily all difficulties posed by the passage.
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El estudioso del NT y apologista cristiano Michael R. Licona, en su libro "The Resurrection of Je... more El estudioso del NT y apologista cristiano Michael R. Licona, en su libro "The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach" publicado en 2010, interpretó el pasaje en Mt 27,52-53 sobre la resurrección de muchos santos al momento de la muerte de Jesús como un recurso poético escrito con textos escatológicos judíos en mente. Aquí yo argumento que el pasaje es una narración histórica escrita con tres pasajes de la Sagrada Escritura en mente: la profecía en Eze 37,12-14, de la cual es un cumplimiento literal preciso cualquiera sea la identidad de los santos resucitados, la Matanza de los Inocentes en Mt 2,16-18, de la cual es un deshacer no específico en el caso general de esa identidad y un deshacer específico en el caso de identidad según la hipótesis que presento aquí, y la profecía en Jer 31,16-17 (la cual sigue inmediatamente a la profecía citada en Mt 2,18), de la cual es un cumplimiento literal preciso en el caso de identidad según mi hipótesis, la cual es que los santos resucitados en Mt 27,52 fueron precisamente los niños asesinados en Mt 2,16. Finalmente, muestro que esta hipótesis permite superar limpia y fácilmente todas las dificultades planteadas por el pasaje.
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I argue that historical context well-known to both Luke and Theophilus is the key to a correct un... more I argue that historical context well-known to both Luke and Theophilus is the key to a correct understanding of Luke 2:2, and that the context in question is pointed to unequivocally by Acts 5:37. Thus, whether "most excellent Theophilus" was Theophilus ben Ananus, the Jewish High Priest in 37-41 AD, or an Antiochian Gentile of high social standing, or Paul's attorney in his first trial in Rome around 62 AD, he knew that the census ordered by Quirinius in 6 AD was for tax purposes and that in any such census the people to be registered were not expected to travel but to do exactly the opposite: stay in their homes and wait for the census officer. Thus Luke is just stating that the census which prompted Joseph and Mary to travel to Bethlehem was not the one ordered by Quirinius, and his motive for stating that is to prevent Theophilus' logical objection to the notion of people travelling in response to a Roman census of imperial subjects for taxation purposes.
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Towards the end of chapter 9 of St. John's Gospel, which narrates the healing by Jesus of a man b... more Towards the end of chapter 9 of St. John's Gospel, which narrates the healing by Jesus of a man born blind, there is a dialogue between Jesus and the healed man (H), during which Jesus asks whether H believes in the Son of Man, H responds by asking who the Son of Man is, Jesus answers identifying Himself as the Son of Man, and H responds by expressing his faith and falling to the ground before Jesus in worship of Him. In this work I argue that, in order to undestand H's question and subsequent worship response, it is necessary to consider H's epistemic state regarding Jesus at the moment of asking his question, which consists of either his knowledge or his ignorance of each of 3 facts: F1: that he is talking with Jesus, F2: that Jesus is the Son of Man, and F3: that the Son of Man is a divine Person incarnate, and therefore worthy of worship. Since in 9:36 H must ignore at least one of these facts (or otherwise he would not have asked the question), there are 3 possible epistemic states of H in 9:36, each of which gives rise to a respective scenario comprising the meaning for H of his question, the meaning for H of Jesus' answer, and the motive of credibility for H of Jesus' answer. I study each scenario and evaluate its probability and theological acceptability, concluding that the first (AFAIK never considered before) is highly probable and theologically perfect, the second is extremely unlikely and theologically acceptable, and the third (notably the one usually assumed) is highly probable but theologically unacceptable.
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On March 7, 2010, Professor J. H. H. Weiler of New York University School of Law delivered an Era... more On March 7, 2010, Professor J. H. H. Weiler of New York University School of Law delivered an Erasmus Lecture on the subject "The trial of Jesus", of which an adapted version was posted as an article in First Things in June 2010 [1]. This article is a response to the hypothesis that Prof. Weiler presented in his 2010 article and in his responses to the letters on the article sent by several First Things' readers [2]. The article is structured as a series of 12 theses.
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Theology by Johannes Argentus
(dogma de fe católica), la cual a su vez es el Acto de Ser Subsistente (concepto tomista), es el acto de ser del alma de Cristo. De esta explicación extraigo dos consecuencias: el Hijo de Dios asumió la carne por medio del alma, y el cuerpo de Jesús se separó de la divinidad al morir, y estuvo separado de ella hasta la Resurrección, posición ésta última que, si bien minoritaria, fue sostenida por S. Ambrosio y S. Hilario.
Epistemology of faith by Johannes Argentus
Natural theology by Johannes Argentus
NT exegesis by Johannes Argentus
(dogma de fe católica), la cual a su vez es el Acto de Ser Subsistente (concepto tomista), es el acto de ser del alma de Cristo. De esta explicación extraigo dos consecuencias: el Hijo de Dios asumió la carne por medio del alma, y el cuerpo de Jesús se separó de la divinidad al morir, y estuvo separado de ella hasta la Resurrección, posición ésta última que, si bien minoritaria, fue sostenida por S. Ambrosio y S. Hilario.