Soteriology, Missiology and Ecclesiology

Metaphysical Overview

The nephilim should not exist. By way of analogy: The child born out of wedlock has right to a married mother and father. His/her parents, however, are not married, and God does not intervene in human history to fix this. Occasionally God rectifies this, in part, by giving the child adoptive parents who take the place of the biological parents who were not able to do so. That is not guaranteed however, and even when it does happen, is sometimes not a perfect solution. Analogy is always suspect - it always fails to explain at least as much as it explains. The point is that the just as the child in my example did not experience justice, in this life, the nephilim stand even further outside of the direct path of salvation history, in this life. God will deal with them separately from humanity.

Do the nephilim have a future looking forward to salvation, united with God? History shows that some are capable of heroic virtue, and reason tells us that a just God will reward this. God has not, however, chosen to reveal to us what He intends for to be the common, or average, fate of the nephilim. Certainly He has allowed His angels to deal with them much more harshly than He allows any in the spiritual world, fallen or unfallen, to deal with humanity.

Free Will

The history of man's interaction with angelic beings demonstrates that even unfallen angels have a limited perspective on Divine Providence and Will, and thus make choices based on limited information. More, they are aware that their perspective is limited, and their information incomplete. They thus struggle with choices. Not like humanity does - humanity struggles with if they should do right. Angels struggle with the question what is right. The unfallen angel always does what that angel perceives as right, but may perceive poorly. We know this because angels have apologised to particular humans, at particular times and places, for having done so in the past. Angelic choices may thus be sub-optimal.

The nephilim inherit part of their nature from the angels that made them, and in part from humanity. When studying the nephilim it is important to remember this complex and combined inheritance, as it shades the ways in which they experience choices, growth, and change in a variety of ways. It is clearly apparent to those of who have studied the interactions between the nephilim and the Church that the nephilim do experience, and benefit from, grace, including in at least some instances sacramental graces. It is equally apparent that the effects of grace on them are not always precisely identical to those that would be seen in a full human. As most reliable data on nephilim behaviour comes from Church records, and thus after the introduction of sacraments into the life of the communities being chronicled, it is frequently difficult to determine what the base nephilim behaviour looks like. Since in almost every age the nephilim have lived their lives at least partially separated from the full human communities, it is equally difficult to determine what nephilim behaviour might look like if they fully integrated themselves into the Christian community. This is further complicated by the fact that it is not always possible to know who, with any degree of certainty, is in fact a nephil and who a human, unless history records reliable evidence of the individual performing magic.

Revelation

It is of course known that Revelation is complete, closed, and unalterable with the Ascension. The nephilim at least appear to form the sole exception to this, precisely because, as noted above, they are not the objects of Revelation (they are not human) - it is not to them that God was revealing Himself. Not that He would not have done so if the nephilim had not "piggybacked" on humanity's knowledge, but simply that Revelation is for humanity. This exception, to the extent that it is an exception at all, is that Angels have been somewhat willing to reveal to Church officials some details of how nephilim work that nephilim themselves, and, by extension, humanity, would be otherwise unable to discover. It is important to note that while the Church does use this private revelation as a reliable source, nothing revealed has in any way contradicted, expanded upon, or in any other way changed the content of the Church's magisterium, its Sacred Tradition, and/or the deposit of faith in any way that affects humanity. Only details concerning the nephilim have been revealed in this way, and that only very rarely. Much has been left to Church to discover through observation and inference.

Thus this commission does not consider this to be a real exception, in that this information is not relevant to the work of humanity's salvation. It is, or rather has been, relevant to the ability of particular persons of nephilim decent to survive encounters with Church officials. The commission comes to this conclusion in part because there are no the official magisterial pronouncements to the universal Church by the Pope, or any of the Ecumenical Councils, concerning the nephilim that concern the nephilim or depend up the extra information revealed about them in any way. In keeping with this tradition, the commission recommends against publishing the conclusions outlined in this document except as a historical overview of positions taken by particular tribunals, bishops, and others with judicial authority who have, and may in the future be again called to, adjudicate particular cases involving one or more nephilim.

Original Sin

Humanity inherits the effects of Adam's first sin, in that all humans are born already deprived from grace.¹ There is remarkably little verifiable information known about angels, and the Church Fathers themselves debate about the proper translation of the the word "nephilim." This commission has chosen to concur with those who have used this word to denote those individuals who have inherited a hybrid nature strongly influenced by that of the angels, and who descend, or at least appear to have descended, in some unknown way, from the actions of the (fallen) angels upon a human female resulting in pregnancy. That there are children born of human mothers who have "extra-human" capability, typically (and hereafter) described as "magic" after the mother has experienced prolonged voluntary contact with fallen angels is a reliably documented fact. How precisely these children have come into existence is much debated, and different scholars have put forth different theories, not always as theories.

This commission has come to the conclusion that the nephilim experience the affects of concupiscence very differently from humanity. Firstly in that the there seems to be a far wider amount of variation in the degree to which nephilim experience concupiscence than humanity experiences. Most humans fall into fairly uniform ranges of temptation from concupiscence, which may be either exacerbated by or ameliorated by the vices and virtues that individual has cultivated in his or her life. This does not appear to hold true of the nephilim. There appears to be vast differences between the effects of concupiscence in different nephilim populations, which smaller, but still noticeable differences between individuals.

In some cases the commission has reviewed data that includes sufficient children that we can reliably conclude that these differences are not, or are not solely differences in average virtue and vice, but must represent fundamental differences in the nature of the nephilim themselves. It is worth noting that observational conclusions are supported by, but in no way dependent on, collaborating data from private revelation.

Divine Providence and Justice

In looking at the nephilim it is frequently a challenge to determine what is the effect of their own actions and what is the effect of outside actions upon them. This being true, it is thus entirely impossible for any researcher to know with any degree of certainty what is the effect of Divine action and what is the effect of a (possibly sub-optimal) angelic action. Again by way of analogy, in the Old Testament, even Divinely inspired human authors are frequently imprecise and unclear in differentiating between Divine actions, those actions taken by angels directly upon His commands, and those actions angels may have undertaken upon their own authority. We frequently know these differences only in the light of other parts of Sacred Tradition. If we have needed (and we have) Divine assistance to determine what is in fact Divine action in our own history, it is hardly surprising we struggle to judge this matter when looking at nephilim history.

From private revelation, it is clear that the angels have a great deal of latitude in performing acts of both mercy and justice. It seems equally clear, at least to this commission, that while the angels have either been granted a great deal of free choice, or minimally granted remarkably little clear guidance, and that in either case that they struggle to perceive what, or how, God does what them to do and act with regards to the nephilim. This commission speculates that this confusion is responsible for at least some of the great inconsistencies in result that abound in studying the nephilim community's use of magic. Private revelation would have us classify the results of nephilim magic into three categories:

• Direct results - the nephilim have the power to do things. Some of them are more or less skilled, and so what they achieve is not always what they intend, but it is still directly their action.
• secondary or indirect results - this category covers effects where the nephilim's use of magic did not directly cause the observed effect, but where there is still no outside agency involved. The nephilim has set off a chain reaction or cascade effect that once triggered logically follows its course.
• remote intervention - If private revelation is at all reliable, then it necessarily follows that at least some uses of magic have, and possibly continue to, elicit action upon the part of God Himself, and/or His angels acting upon their own authority. Thus this last category can be subdivided into
  • Divine Justice - God acts as Supreme Judge.
  • Divinely Commanded Justice - God commands one or more angels to act with some degree of clarity
  • Angelic Justice - Angels act upon their own initiative and their own perception of their own authority. This last category's existence is the most illuminating of the three. For it both logically follows and (again if private revelation is taken as true) has been revealed both, that given that the angels can act, so too can that authority to act be misused. Bluntly, the fallen angels can also act, and do.

The commission has noted the following types when it comes to indirect effects, with some of this data coming from observation and some from private revelation:

1. The nephilim were created to mock God. Some of these secondary effects occur because the fallen angels, rightly or wrongly, judge that perverting the nature of one or more nephilim beyond the fact of their existence increases the degree of mockery.
2. At least some unfallen angels believe the reverse, that making the nephilim less like humanity reduces the success of the attempt to mock God's plan of creation. The commission is unclear how common this belief is, or why, given this belief, the unfallen angels only appear to act on it in limited circumstances. It is speculated that there are either real or perceived limits on their authority involved.
3. These first two points have on at least one occasion, and quite possibly several occasions, produced cycles of action, counter-action, and reaction between fallen and unfallen angels, almost always to the detriment of the affected nephilim. The commission speculates (partly because of the tone of some private revelations) that the fact that these cycles are almost always detrimental to the nephilim comes from the fact that at least some of the unfallen angels involved are strongly biased against the very existence of the nephilim (note point two).
4. The nephilim continuously attempt to assert that certain magic is "dark" and other magic "light." It is this commissions' belief that while there is some inherently evil magic, more frequently the angels punish intentions than spells.
5. Consistent with points 1 and 2, inheritable effects are not uncommon, despite the fact that this at times further blurs the ability to know and understand what does and does not have an immortal soul. In other words, over the course of history it has become increasingly difficult to determine where the Church is dealing with a being who can only rightly be a subject and where the Church is dealing with an object that merely has some of the aspects or attributes of a subject.
6. While there are certain mathematical probabilities concerning nephilim inheritance, the complex interaction of their human inheritance, the in-human inheritance, and the inheritable aspects of outside agency upon them makes it in practice impossible to reliably predict precisely how closely a given nephilim child will approach humanity in morphology, intellectual capacity, emotional capacity, or any other metric. It is equally impossible to reliably predict "power" - the raw ability to produce "magical" effects (this is the standard nephilim definition of "power level") except in broad statistical terms.

Sacraments

Any unbiased observer of history must conclude that the nephilim can and do recieve sacramental grace when encountering the sacraments with the right disposition.² It is equally clear that the magic they perform is, or at least can be, affected by prayer and sacramentals, although in both of these cases the probability of observed effects depends much more strongly on the degree to which the person praying or who is using the sacramental is him/herself in a state of grace. As this is frequently hard if not impossible to judge, it is no surprise that the data on the effects of prayer and sacramentals is both far more variable and fair less one-sidedly positive. While in broad terms these things do effect the nephilim and their magic, the nature of the effect may differ. It is unclear in at least some cases how much of this is an intrinsic difference and how much of this is because most if not all nephilim lack the right disposition to receive the grace.

Baptism and Confirmation

We are taught that baptism washes away all sin. The commission has observed no reason to believe this is in any way untrue, or that there is anything to bar or prohibit the nephilim from feeling the full effects of this sacrament. Indeed, the observational data is uniformly in favour of the conclusion that if anything, the nephilim benefit from this sacrament even more than humanity does.

Confirmation strengthens the positive effects of Baptism, further initiating us into the life of grace and into the Church. There is very little reliable data on the effects of Confirmation on the nephilim. While it seems impossible that no nephilim have received it, there does seem to be something that prevents the nephilim from fully engaging with or in the human communities they sometimes reside. Throughout history the nephilim have almost always lived at least partially separate lives. It is thus not entirely impossible that, for reasons unknown, most nephilim have been drawn into these other lives before receiving this sacrament.

From what data the commission does have, it is clear that the sacrament does not in anyway strengthen or enhance the magic the nephilim is capable of. There does seem to be evidence however that the sacrament may reduce the effects of inheritable traits coming from outside intervention upon nephilim populations. The commission stresses that the data here is incredibly incomplete and far from conclusive.

Marriage

Because of the implications of magical contracts, the Church has been forced to question whether nor not being a nephil is inherently an impediment to a sacramental marriage. The Church has not ever ruled formally or officially on this matter, and the commission believes this silence is the wisest possible decision.

That being said, the majority of the commission's members, in reviewing the evidence, believe that this is a case of "right disposition." Indeed, one member speculates that a sacramental marriage validly obtained by a nephil should prevent that individual from being entered into a magical contract that would violate the sanctity of the marriage vows.

The argument of this being a case of disposition is as follows. That the nephilim, being subject to a magical contract, is not capable of a free and total gift of self. Because this gift of self occurs either because of the contract and thus is not fully free, or is not total because of the contract, the marriage is invalid not because there is a nephil involved but because the particular nephil is not capable of entering the state of marriage.

Secondly, because nearly all of the nephilim are aware of magical contracts by the time they reach an age to marry, they fear being subject to them. More than that, they feel unintentionally violating even contracts that might exist. Thus most nephilim, on approaching the alter for marriage, would hold back from a total gift of self, fearing that there might be a contract out there that he or she might need to honour. This holding back would constitute the impediment, not the fact that he or she is a nephilim.

Holy Orders

Like with marriage, the Church has had to wrestle with whether or not a (male) nephil can be ordained. The commission has chosen not to address this question. In the Western Rite, the Pope, specifically speaking as Patriarch of the Western Rite, and not as head of the universal Church, has ruled that they are not to be ordained. That is not to say that the Church has attempted, nor will it attempt, to obsessively check genealogies to ensure that those being ordained are in fact fully human. However, where an individual is known to be of the nephilim, that person is not to be admitted to the sacrament.

Sacraments of Healing

Observational evidence shows that Anointing of the Sick is remarkably effective in and for the nephilim. It is particularly efficacious in curing any and all direct effects of the use of magic by some other nephilim upon the recipient, even where the nephilim themselves believe those effects to be incurable (so called 'dark' magic).

From this, the commission concludes that it is only reasonable to assume that the other sacrament of healing, Reconciliation, is at least minimally effective for the nephilim. Both other sacraments that effect sin directly, baptism and anointing, are more effective. It is illogical to presume no effect simply because we cannot directly observe the state of a nephil's soul to know in the case of reconciliation.

The Holy Eucharist

The commission chose not to explore or speculate on this topic, simply noting Saint Paul's words, that to approach this sacrament unworthily is counterproductive.³