How to Build a Better Bob

The natural and supernatural are not overlapping planes but intertwined threads. --Dávila

If being precedes action -- which it must, because we must first exist in order to accomplish anything -- then

The Christian should be defined not in terms of what he himself does, but of what God has made him to be. Being a Christian is an ontological fact, resulting from an act of God (Mascall). 

Like a news species or something?

"If any man is in Christ, he is a new creature," and "there is a new creation." 

For real? This reminds me of the title of a post from way back -- something about natural selection and supernatural election. Again, the former only gets us so far -- essentially to a primate capable of hosting a human soul that by definition could not be produced by any amount of genetic shuffling. 

Rather, as mentioned a couple of posts ago, this is a "taking up" of the lower into the higher:

When, in the course of biological evolution some sub-human creature received from the Creator that spiritual soul which made him the first man.... we do not suppose that some sub-human element had to be removed to make room for it.

Rather, it is very much as if the sub-human was assumed into the human.... In other words, not "by the conversion of spirit into ape, but by the taking up of apehood into spirit."

Perhaps we could take this principle all the way down -- for example, biology isn't just an extremely unlikely arrangement of physics, rather, the taking up of insentient matter into Life. You could also say that the first nucleated cell was the taking up of prokaryotes into eukaryotes, or warmblooded animals the taking up of the reptilian into the mammalian.

Here again, as noted in that previous post, each of these things occurs without any destruction in the process. For example, look at our brains: a reptile wrapped in a mammalian mystery inside the enigma of a human neocortex. Moreover, McGilchrist reminds us that the left-right organization goes all the way down. 

So, No Destruction in the Process(es). And yet, Some Disassembly Required, as I put it in the book. For example, post-baptism I look about the same, or maybe a little younger. But they say baptism is both a rebirth and a death -- we die and are reborn "in Christ." 

The Cosmic bar mitzvah.

Good point. What happens in a bar mitzvah? Does it signify an ontological change, or is it just a way to get parents off the hook for the child's transgressions? 

A quick google search indicates that the ceremony not only marks "a child’s new intellectual and moral capabilities," but denotes full "entry of the holy soul in man."

In this sense the day of the Bar Mitzvah is his true birthday, the day on which he becomes a true emissary of G‑d charged with fulfilling the commandments. The word mitzvah in addition to meaning a commandment also has the meaning “connection.” It therefore follows that on the day of Bar Mitzvah, a true connection with G‑d has been established.

So, a real ontological change in the substance.

As for Christianity,

the basis of this ontological change by which a man becomes a Christian is the permanence of the human nature of Christ.... Becoming a Christian means being re-created by being incorporated into the glorified manhood of the ascended Christ (Mascall).

Well, good. Back to the question of supernatural election, "It is not just a matter of re-created men, but of a re-created human race."

Hmm. A new species, only one not brought about by natural selection? One doesn't have to be familiar with the lives of many saints to appreciate that they are as if a "new species" of man. In many ways, they are as different from fallen man as man is to the ape -- again, with no destruction, since grace only perfects nature. 

Arrogant? Presumptuous? Nah:

Nothing is as petty as not admitting how many people we encounter are superior to us. Inequality is an experience of the well-bred soul.

Conversely, equity is the doctrine of the ill-bred and soulless. Thus, the 

The noble one is not the one who thinks he has inferiors, but the one who knows he has superiors.

And respecting our superiors is above all a proof of good taste.  

Ultimately,

The human has the insignificance of a swarm of insects when it is merely human.

 Noted.

The question is, does man's nature "become supernaturalized, first in its essence, then, as man cooperates with grace, in its operations as well?" If being is prior to doing, then signs point to Yes, but let's keep flippin'. 

in baptism there is is a real supernaturalization of our human nature in its essence, which can result, if we co-operate with the grace of God, in a progressive supernaturalization of its operations and in the manifestation of supernatural virtues.

Progressivism, the real kind:

The soul is the task of man.

Orthoparadox: "the Christian is, in one sense, successively becoming what, in another sense, he already is." Like, say, Bob, only better. 

His life as a citizen of Earth continues, but he has a new and greater citizenship in Heaven.

So, we're vertical migrants, as it were? 

man is by nature a similitude of God, albeit an imperfect one, which grace will make perfect by transforming him, so to say, into his true self; the Christian life is a progressive transfiguration into the likeness of God, a realization of the eternal in time, and of the spiritual in the sensible, a transforming illumination of human nature. 

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