I define the soul as the behavior mechanism of the individual person, operating on patterns associated to the mammalian class of animals. This mechanism is not in the $D spacetime of our perceptions. It exists and is real in a different spacetime coordinate system, oriented to dimension time differently than the body is oriented.
Why all of these attempts to limit us to our human bodies and God to His human form? That is a direct mischaracterization, so I will merely dismiss it as unworthy of discussion.
Mothers give bodies to their children’s souls. They do not create the souls. That is a human requirement for our existence in this world. My soul will continue when my human body is gone. As touched upon previously above, the spacetime coordinate system of your body is not the same one in which your soul develops and exists. Your soul develops as an adjunct to the developing body, since it is the various mechanisms in the body which enable the collection and processing of data. You can verify this distinction with a simple thought experimentL the photons from a distant star arrive at your eyegate after crossing a vast distance, at light speed,but these photons cross the Universe always int he present of their creation, hence we may study the state of the star which created them as it was at the moment the photons were emitted. The star may even have ceased to exist just as the photons arrive at collection points such as your eye or artificial data collectors, but we may study the state of the star when the photons were emitted because those packets of space, time, and energy travel the Universe always remaining in the present of their creation. Whne your eye collects the packet, you brain as an organ being used by your soul constructs a virtual reality which you assume to be the state of things presently. If the data is collected close enough to the source, the assumption is very useful for existence (seeing a tiger far away requires photons to register the scene then your brain being used by the mind of your soul does calculations and arranges a virtual reality; a closer tiger would garner greater caution due to the collected information the mind of your soul has accumulated about tigers).
Mothers lend a gamete to the creation of the first zygote of a new individual. From then on the mother lends a place and the means, for the new individual to build a 'space capsule' and a body, in the water world, for future use in the air world. The mother makes none of the various parts of the new individual after her gamete is used to make that new zygotic individual.
Mary as mother of God simply gave Him His human form. His being is independent of that. Um, no, partly: Mary lent her womb to the gestation period of the new body in earliest stage of life that the Holy Spirit placed in her. It would be speculation only to say that any DNA of Jesus came from Mary; we simply do not have an answer for that one. The Spirit of The Son was with God and was God in the beginning. The behavior mechanism (the soul, the mind, emotions, and will of Jesus the man) came about in same fashion as yours or mine, albeit the Spirit directing that behavior, the seed of 'Godness', caused Him to deal with temptations differently than you or me because His Righteousness remained within Him all through His Life ('He could not sin because His seed remained within Him').Jesus is familiar with grief and temptations and joy and pain like as we are. God planned to be among us as a man, albeit a man with a different power to rule His soul, His behavior mechanism.
The issue comes to this: when Did The Spirit of God enter the Soul of Jesus? The Bible, as far as I have been able to ascertain does not tell us. Some will assume The Spirit of The Son was always with the gestating body. Others who have studied the union of soul and spirit in humans would not agree to that, but would heartily agree that the Spirit of Jesus has always existed, even before a body was provided for Him. We have no data upon which to make such an assumption regarding ourselves. We can use scripture to discern that the union occurs before birth, well before birth, given the circumstances of Mary visiting Elizabeth.
Mary, without any doubt in any Christian mind, gave herself, her body and life, to gestate the body of our Lord. In this, Mary is the mother of the body of The Son of God. She cannot be, ever, the progenitor of God.
Mary. She provided the egg, the DNA, and the milk and love and nurturing that His human body required. That is what we mean by ‘mother’. Anyone who claims otherwise is bearing false witness. I am not aware of any Scripture passage which would support the assertion that Mary provided the DNA used in construction the body of Jesus. Perhaps the catholic tomes contain such an astonishing assertion; could you cite the source?
The reading of this thread lends evidence to the reality that catholic hierarchy may claim it only means Mary was mother to the body of Jesus, but the myriad of title assumptions for Mary nearly all rest upon the calculated ambiguity created by stating Mary is the Mother of God. One must twist the meaning of mother as progenator of the child in order to misuse the meaning of Motherhood. A female can lend her womb to a new individual to whom she has made no gamete donation. She does not make the child, she gives a place and the sustenance while the new human makes the body.
The Bible speaks more to implantation of an already existing new human body. It does not say Mary donated half the DNA for the body, the embryonic Jesus.
“Aside from the fact that I did not say you claimed your spirit or soul has existed forever, it would be interesting to see on what you base the assertion that your soul was created before your conception in you mother’s womb.”
Actually, you did:
“ThaT God can see the end from the beginning does not authorize one to assume everything in existence has been existing since the beginning of everything. Try again.”
This was your response to my saying my soul existed before my body, so what else could you have meant?
Again:
Jeremias (Jeremiah) 1:5
Before I formed thee in the bowels of thy mother, I knew thee: and before thou camest forth out of the womb, I sanctified thee, and made thee a prophet unto the nations.
How could God know me if I didn’t exist? What part of me exists independent of my body? My interpretation of this is that it is my soul. What do you think it means? And why is your interpretation more valid than mine?
As for Mary contributing DNA to Jesus’ human body:
“Behold thou shalt conceive in thy womb.” Not ‘you will implant in your womb’ or ‘you will surrogate in your womb’. Conceiving implies contributing DNA, that is the normal definition. If you want to believe an exception occurred and in this case conception occurred without the DNA contribution of the mother, I believe that the burden of proof is on you for this one. I’d assume the other half came from the Holy Spirit, but there’s no reason God couldn’t have doubled Mary’s and provided a Y. I’d like to see Jesus’ DNA profile. What does spiritual DNA look like?
Love,
O2