Busy
week, so not much posting. Just time for a bonkers theological idea of the
week. Apparently the Lutheran theologian Flacius Illyricus, at a debate in
1560, argued that the Fall was a kind of
transubstantiation, in which the Aristotelian substance of humanity was totally
altered from God’s image into Satan’s at the fall, despite preserving the
outward image of God only damaged in the visible person. So while it might
appear outwardly that humanity is capable of good as well as evil, this is an
illusion: behind and beyond all verifiable evidence is a brute fact, namely
that we are totally depraved.
Or to put it another way: a certain
kind of Protestant needs to believe in human corruption so badly that they will
reconstruct the whole of reality, if necessary, to assert it.
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