MISUNDERSTANDING CALVIN?
I just posted a comment to David Talcott's post of February 07 dealing with Hillsdale College's Dr. Brad Birzer, myth and realism, salvation, faith, works and grace. I paste a portion of it below, as it describes my basic objection to the essential doctrine of Calvinism.
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3) Your position on grace and works and salvation summarizes all that I have always been unable to stomach about the strict Augustinian/Calvinist position. If one claims that salvation is completely dependent upon God, having absolutely nothing to do with a man's response to His grace, then God, and God alone, has directly and personally damned the majority of humanity to be separated from him forever. It would take a lot more than Romans 9 to convince me that this is the correct way to interpret Scripture--it seems to me itself a clear distortion of Scripture (after all, there are other ways of interpreting Romans 9 that are more consistent with the rest of Scripture).
I'm not trying to attack you--I simply do not understand how you can force yourself to believe this. If I'm misunderstanding, please explain. Somehow communicate why you feel you must believe this. It is beyond my comprehension.
Why is it impossible to say simply that man is utterly dependent upon God for salvation, yet that the simple act of depending upon Him is itself an act (an active Faith, if you wish) the absence of which is what damns the damned? Why is it so necessary to insist on a series of doctrines which bear no other logical conclusion but that it is God Himself who damns them, that they were created with absolutely no hope of salvation, that Christ did not die for all men?
Simply say that Salvation is a purely a gift from God. Add only that man has to open his hand to receive it, and the problem disappears. Even say that he cannot open his hand without the help of God's grace--that even in his simple abasement of himself he is dependent upon God, that he cannot even fall at God's feet unless God helps him. Surely this meets the requirement you have that man be able to do nothing to save himself. Surely this is fully consistent with Scripture.
But please, do not say that God damned so much of humanity before He even created us. The very idea makes me retch.
Thursday, February 26, 2004
Wednesday, February 25, 2004
Ok, here's the promised paper. Yes, it's long, but it contains some interesting stuff. Let me know what y'all think.
Many thanks.
Captured in Time and Space
Modern physicists conceive of time within strictly defined parameters—their perception may be crudely characterized by describing time as the fourth dimension of the cosmos, intimately connected with the created order and well within scientific parameters. The concept of time, notwithstanding their theories and data, remains one of the most inscrutable to mankind, sometimes feared, sometimes struggled against, and always heavily used in works of science fiction and speculation.
Theologically speaking, the question of time is one upon which modern Christians have failed to come to a consensus. Within all traditions, confusion may be found. This monastic may be found speaking of hell as timeless (so that Christ’s presence therein at the Harrowing of Hades was witnessed by the damned of all time). That Evangelical may assert that fortune-telling is demonic because the demons, being spiritual beings, operate outside of time (or at least freely within it) and can thus tell the future. And of course there are the Calvinists and Arminians on either side of the inevitable and eternal argument about what it means for God to have pre-destined men to salvation—for all too often both sides seem to assume that said action occurred within time (as is implied by the word pre-destined). And yet, for all this confusion, it is difficult to say that any of these is speaking truly heretically. Inconsistently, yes—but none of them, when pressed, would assert anything other than that God is outside of time and utterly uncircumscribable. They simply do not possess a theology systematic and consistent enough to know what to say when asked what is the relation of time to God, or to matter and creation (or whether there is even a distinction between these latter two).
To find such a consistent theology, one must return to the early centuries of Church History—yet strangely, even there one cannot initially find a straight answer. One may discern a variance, perhaps even a confusion faintly analogous to the modern situation outlined above, in the voices of early Christian thinkers. One cannot doubt that they were faithful Christians—but the question of what effect the Christian faith would have on philosophy and cosmology had yet to play itself out in the minds and hearts of the early saints and Christian thinkers. The matter was complicated by the latent (or not-so-latent) Platonism of the Hellenistic mindset. The world in which the early Christians lived was rife with it—in vocabulary, in rhetoric, in life itself the Platonistic distinctions between matter and spirit were matters of almost unquestioned dogma. In the words of patristics scholar Brooks Otis, as delivered in a paper presented at the Sixth International Conference on Patristic Studies at Oxford in 1971, “to the Platonist, as to the Gnostic, the created, material and temporal world was an inferior copy of the uncreated, immaterial and eternal world of the divine ideas or pleroma. The one was genetic—subject to birth, death, change and time; the other agenetic or changeless and eternal, that which simply is and never becomes or alters” (Otis 329).
As decades and centuries passed and Christians worked more and more to speak in the Hellenistic language of their time, this Platonist schema proved increasingly problematic to them. To the Hellenist, the genetic world and the agenetic were utterly incompatible—thus the Christian was presented with a baffling problem in explaining how genetic men could enter into such an intimate communion with an agenetic God as was insisted upon by fundamental Christian doctrine.
Earlier efforts are fascinating studies in the first Christian engagements with this worldview, a close-up of the struggles of the countless men writing on countless subjects, striving to express in the precise philosophical language of the Greeks an all-consuming Truth absolutely uncontainable by the neat definitions and syllogisms of Aristotle and Plato. For example, in the second century Irenaeus posited that the admittedly imperfect origin of man in creation is simply the beginning of a journey which ends in the man coming to be in some sense himself Uncreated, agenetic. This was made possible by the Incarnation of Christ, as in the Athanasian formula “God became man so that man might become a god.” Within the Platonic schema, however, this idea would imply that men can in some fashion grow outside of time.
His contemporary Origen went farther than that, suggesting instead that all souls are pre-existent and hence naturally agenetic. Brooks Otis summarizes Origen’s system of thought nicely:
“He posited an eternal cosmos—a pleroma of rational spirits consisting of the Trinity and all other true minds or logikoi—and a strictly temporal and material cosmos that had been created to hold and deal with the lapsed or derogate logikoi but was not in any sense identical with them. Origen held that all the spirits—except God the Father himself—had been created and therefore, with two exceptions, possessed an inherently unstable nature—since their very beginning was due to a change from nothingness to real existence—but he considered them, even if formally or strictly genetic, to be akin to the Platonic ‘agenetic’ or inherently eternal element of the universe since they were in fact co-eternal with the Father: there had never been a time when his goodness could have been without them and above all without the ‘Son’ (Christ) who was his perpetual agent in the process of their salvation from lapse. Origen’s world was thus quite as unhistorical as Plato’s: while, unlike Plato, he did not think of the genetic order as uncreated, he regarded the whole process as essentially endless or timeless, since the lapsing and returning was continuous and Christ was ever born or reborn to save the lapsed. While God the Father had created everything, including his Logos or son, he nevertheless preserved the Platonic or indeed Gnostic dualism: the souls or spirits who fell were not an integral part of the material-temporal or fallen cosmos. Though their essential instability and freedom made them fall, their essential reason or logos—their possession of the divine image—made them recover and leave the material world” (Otis 330).
To the modern Christian understanding, this “lava lamp” theology is rife with problems, particularly in its denigration of the material order, the implication that all souls are as pre-existent as the Son and Spirit (or, stated conversely, that the Son and Spirit are as genetic as are the souls of humanity and the angels), and the resulting failure to establish any truly meaningful distinction between God and man. But these difficulties were not initially so obviously problematic. Origen’s theology was controversial during his life, it is true, yet his synthesis of Hellenism and Christianity was tremendously effective. Speaking specifically of Origen’s exegetical method, John Meyendorff says, “As an apology for Christianity, Origen’s method proved to be an extraordinary missionary success. Under his influence generations of Greeks accepted the cultural humiliation of having to look for Truth in Jewish Scriptures” (Meyendorff 35). The same words may apply to his entire philosophical system.
At the same time, however, it is possible to blame that very system, and the progressive Hellenization of Christianity which it exemplifies, for the heresies which plagued the Church for the next several centuries, and most particularly for Arianism—Brooks Otis makes a strong case for the accusation.
Arius was seemingly the first to openly and insistently reject Origen’s definition of Christ’s origin as “eternally created by the Father” (aeigenetos) as a rather Plotinian ‘first emanation.’ His objection, like ours, lay in the fact that Origin’s suggestion that ALL spirits (including the angels and humanity) were likewise created in an agenetic manner by emanation, as it were, removes any meaningful distinction between Christ’s nature and ours, so that, once the doctrine of emanations as a means of connecting the agenetic Father with the genetic Spirits is removed, one ends in making all into mere creatures, including the Son and the Spirit. Arius, in articulating this, boldly and insistently, sounded the death-knell of both Origenism and the Platonistic Christianity championed by Origen.
While the decrees of Nicaea rejected Arius’ assertion and established the logical refutation of his doctrine—that Christ is of one essence with the Father, co-eternal with Him, uncreated and never having not-been—they had no philosophical system to back them and explain them. The rejection of Origen’s systematic theology left the Church with a definition, but no explanation of how it could be. The protracted controversy regarding Nicaea that followed the Council itself was a simple consequence of this—fully Christian bishops, priests and laymen were left in a philosophical vacuum following the wholesale abandonment of the systems that had tied the intellectual tenets of the Faith together for the Hellenistic mind. In these systems, says Otis, Christ was able to save by mediating between God the Father and mankind, sharing in the nature of both from the beginning, or perhaps better described as being himself the emanation lying between God and man—and mankind was save-able largely because it was not separated from God by the gulf between genetic and agenetic, but simply by an emanation or two in a progression of basically agenetic beings. The doctrine of homoousios, then, undermined the soteriological framework of an entire generation by its firm establishment of the genetic/agenetic gulf between God and man—and with that, it brought immediately to the fore the question of time and its relation to the two realms. As Otis says, “…if the novelty of the creation were no longer to be disguised by a theory of its eternity, then its very novelty and temporality—its very difference from eternity—had to be accounted for” (Otis 335). It was only with the work of the Cappadocian Fathers that a system was developed to replace Origen and the other early apologists—hence it is only because of their work that the Council of Constantinople in 381 ratified the definitions of Nicaea.
For it was they who first made the distinction between the temporal and non-temporal order the same as that between creation and Creator, in their writings against the heresy of Eunomius (who asserted that Christ was fully genetic). The distinction is common to all three, but it is best articulated by St. Gregory of Nyssa, and it is his works to which Otis refers in his discussion of the Cappadocian conception of time.
Gregory, beginning with the gulf between genetic and agenetic, posits that time is itself the insurmountable limit (diastema, in Greek) between God and Creation—the fourth dimension common to all created beings. Therefore, it is impossible for humans (or angels) ever to completely comprehend God—they exist within Time, God without. Gregory thereby asserted that God is truly and completely, indeed metaphysically, infinite—and did so to a degree unprecedented by those before him. But that very infinity of God gives room for Time itself and the entire created order, led by man exercising his proper priesthood and kingship over Creation, to grow eternally into a greater and greater comprehension of the Infinite Divinity. Man, according to Gregory, is indeed captured in time and space—but that captivity is ultimately flexible, becoming the sine qua non of growth in the knowledge and love of Christ. That which has no boundary, after all, cannot grow.
Thus, in Gregory’s schema, the genetic order ceases to be an evil—Creation is truly good, not a burden or a prison hindering those who are being saved by Christ’s Incarnation, but itself the beneficiary of His saving work through the priesthood of mankind, destined to be eternally inducted into the Divine Perichoresis of Love through Christ, so that God may become All in All. No longer the enemy, but rather the victim, no longer the defeated, but rather the saved, genetic creation is not to become agenetic—rather, the agenetic Logos enters into Creation, enlivens it and enables it to grow in His inexhaustible Love.
This became the linchpin of Orthodox soteriology—God became man so that man could become Divine—but not in such a way that man should achieve Divinity and cease growing, but that he should forever be growing in the image and likeness of Christ, a process having no end because its Great Prototype is, in a very real sense, Infinity Himself. It is a magnificent vision, giving, as Otis says, “a supremely dynamic character to both salvation and creation. For the first time the Church possessed a doctrine that gave meaning to the agenetic-genetic dichotomy of Platonism as well as to the creator-creature dichotomy of the Bible” (Otis 342). It simply required that Platonism shed the idea of the inferiority of the Created order—and to this day, orthodox Christians, whatever their communion, affirm the inherent goodness and redeemability of all Creation, through the Grace of God and the Power of the Incarnation of Christ.
I might well conclude here. All this has at least begun to answer the question of Time in Christian cosmology. But it begs another question: if this doctrine was not defined until the fourth century, if the earliest Fathers of the Church did not understand time in this manner, what is one to say about their orthodoxy? What is one to do with Irenaeus and Origen? They were not Orthodox according to the standards of our day—their ideas, taken to their logical conclusions, produce heresy. The facts create a conundrum for the traditional Christian wishing to hold in honour all the early Fathers of the Church—for their articulations of the Faith appear to conflict.
The matter is difficult, with serious ramifications for the present day (for it affects how one views communions different from his own and their variant doctrinal systems and schemata), but we may give at least the beginning of a response.
The Christian Faith is not a matter of words, doctrines or definitions. It is fundamentally personal, experiential, existential. God descended to earth and became knowable to humanity—as St. John the Theologian writes, our Faith is based on “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled…” (1 John 1:1). The true theologian is one who walks with God in prayer at every moment of the day—only the friend of God can be said to truly know anything about Him. The articulated truths of the Christian Faith, spoken or written, are the words of men who have known God face to face. The Faith is simply the relationship of men with God.
God, of course, is absolute, immutable and perfect. Human language is not. Therefore, however true the Faith of any man may be, the language he uses to speak of his relationship will always be defective. There can be no perfect philosophy, no perfect theology, because there is no perfect language. All these limited words can do is point the way. Some will do so better than others. Some will completely fall off the path and begin pointing to something else. But certainly none will ever be perfect or eternally sufficient.
Thus one can look at the work of Irenaeus, and even Origen, and discern behind their words the Truth of an encounter with God. Their words are not intended to define God, but merely to draw those outside into the sphere of the love and mercy and knowledge of God. Both Irenaeus and Origen succeeded at least in this. Through them, and others like them, Rome herself bent knee before the Creator of all—and thus thousands, even millions, were caught up to the utmost limits of human capacity and stood face to face with Almighty God. Therefore, whatever else we may say about them, only He can judge them.
But with that in mind, we would do well to remember that definitions and creeds do not tell the whole story. If the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed cannot save, then neither can the Westminster Confession damn. All depends on the orientation of the human heart to God. Orthodox would do well to remember this in their encounters with those outside the bounds of the Church. And all should remember that unity in word will follow naturally when all seek God with all their hearts.
Let us therefore pray, and never cease until the Spirit is born with power in our hearts. May God grant it so.
Amen.
Works Cited
Gregory of Nyssa and the Cappadocian Conception of Time: by Brooks Otis in Studia Patristica Volume XIV, edited by Elizabeth A. Livingstone. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1976.
Meyendorff, John. Catholicity and the Church. St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press; Crestwood, New York: 1983.
Many thanks.
Captured in Time and Space
Modern physicists conceive of time within strictly defined parameters—their perception may be crudely characterized by describing time as the fourth dimension of the cosmos, intimately connected with the created order and well within scientific parameters. The concept of time, notwithstanding their theories and data, remains one of the most inscrutable to mankind, sometimes feared, sometimes struggled against, and always heavily used in works of science fiction and speculation.
Theologically speaking, the question of time is one upon which modern Christians have failed to come to a consensus. Within all traditions, confusion may be found. This monastic may be found speaking of hell as timeless (so that Christ’s presence therein at the Harrowing of Hades was witnessed by the damned of all time). That Evangelical may assert that fortune-telling is demonic because the demons, being spiritual beings, operate outside of time (or at least freely within it) and can thus tell the future. And of course there are the Calvinists and Arminians on either side of the inevitable and eternal argument about what it means for God to have pre-destined men to salvation—for all too often both sides seem to assume that said action occurred within time (as is implied by the word pre-destined). And yet, for all this confusion, it is difficult to say that any of these is speaking truly heretically. Inconsistently, yes—but none of them, when pressed, would assert anything other than that God is outside of time and utterly uncircumscribable. They simply do not possess a theology systematic and consistent enough to know what to say when asked what is the relation of time to God, or to matter and creation (or whether there is even a distinction between these latter two).
To find such a consistent theology, one must return to the early centuries of Church History—yet strangely, even there one cannot initially find a straight answer. One may discern a variance, perhaps even a confusion faintly analogous to the modern situation outlined above, in the voices of early Christian thinkers. One cannot doubt that they were faithful Christians—but the question of what effect the Christian faith would have on philosophy and cosmology had yet to play itself out in the minds and hearts of the early saints and Christian thinkers. The matter was complicated by the latent (or not-so-latent) Platonism of the Hellenistic mindset. The world in which the early Christians lived was rife with it—in vocabulary, in rhetoric, in life itself the Platonistic distinctions between matter and spirit were matters of almost unquestioned dogma. In the words of patristics scholar Brooks Otis, as delivered in a paper presented at the Sixth International Conference on Patristic Studies at Oxford in 1971, “to the Platonist, as to the Gnostic, the created, material and temporal world was an inferior copy of the uncreated, immaterial and eternal world of the divine ideas or pleroma. The one was genetic—subject to birth, death, change and time; the other agenetic or changeless and eternal, that which simply is and never becomes or alters” (Otis 329).
As decades and centuries passed and Christians worked more and more to speak in the Hellenistic language of their time, this Platonist schema proved increasingly problematic to them. To the Hellenist, the genetic world and the agenetic were utterly incompatible—thus the Christian was presented with a baffling problem in explaining how genetic men could enter into such an intimate communion with an agenetic God as was insisted upon by fundamental Christian doctrine.
Earlier efforts are fascinating studies in the first Christian engagements with this worldview, a close-up of the struggles of the countless men writing on countless subjects, striving to express in the precise philosophical language of the Greeks an all-consuming Truth absolutely uncontainable by the neat definitions and syllogisms of Aristotle and Plato. For example, in the second century Irenaeus posited that the admittedly imperfect origin of man in creation is simply the beginning of a journey which ends in the man coming to be in some sense himself Uncreated, agenetic. This was made possible by the Incarnation of Christ, as in the Athanasian formula “God became man so that man might become a god.” Within the Platonic schema, however, this idea would imply that men can in some fashion grow outside of time.
His contemporary Origen went farther than that, suggesting instead that all souls are pre-existent and hence naturally agenetic. Brooks Otis summarizes Origen’s system of thought nicely:
“He posited an eternal cosmos—a pleroma of rational spirits consisting of the Trinity and all other true minds or logikoi—and a strictly temporal and material cosmos that had been created to hold and deal with the lapsed or derogate logikoi but was not in any sense identical with them. Origen held that all the spirits—except God the Father himself—had been created and therefore, with two exceptions, possessed an inherently unstable nature—since their very beginning was due to a change from nothingness to real existence—but he considered them, even if formally or strictly genetic, to be akin to the Platonic ‘agenetic’ or inherently eternal element of the universe since they were in fact co-eternal with the Father: there had never been a time when his goodness could have been without them and above all without the ‘Son’ (Christ) who was his perpetual agent in the process of their salvation from lapse. Origen’s world was thus quite as unhistorical as Plato’s: while, unlike Plato, he did not think of the genetic order as uncreated, he regarded the whole process as essentially endless or timeless, since the lapsing and returning was continuous and Christ was ever born or reborn to save the lapsed. While God the Father had created everything, including his Logos or son, he nevertheless preserved the Platonic or indeed Gnostic dualism: the souls or spirits who fell were not an integral part of the material-temporal or fallen cosmos. Though their essential instability and freedom made them fall, their essential reason or logos—their possession of the divine image—made them recover and leave the material world” (Otis 330).
To the modern Christian understanding, this “lava lamp” theology is rife with problems, particularly in its denigration of the material order, the implication that all souls are as pre-existent as the Son and Spirit (or, stated conversely, that the Son and Spirit are as genetic as are the souls of humanity and the angels), and the resulting failure to establish any truly meaningful distinction between God and man. But these difficulties were not initially so obviously problematic. Origen’s theology was controversial during his life, it is true, yet his synthesis of Hellenism and Christianity was tremendously effective. Speaking specifically of Origen’s exegetical method, John Meyendorff says, “As an apology for Christianity, Origen’s method proved to be an extraordinary missionary success. Under his influence generations of Greeks accepted the cultural humiliation of having to look for Truth in Jewish Scriptures” (Meyendorff 35). The same words may apply to his entire philosophical system.
At the same time, however, it is possible to blame that very system, and the progressive Hellenization of Christianity which it exemplifies, for the heresies which plagued the Church for the next several centuries, and most particularly for Arianism—Brooks Otis makes a strong case for the accusation.
Arius was seemingly the first to openly and insistently reject Origen’s definition of Christ’s origin as “eternally created by the Father” (aeigenetos) as a rather Plotinian ‘first emanation.’ His objection, like ours, lay in the fact that Origin’s suggestion that ALL spirits (including the angels and humanity) were likewise created in an agenetic manner by emanation, as it were, removes any meaningful distinction between Christ’s nature and ours, so that, once the doctrine of emanations as a means of connecting the agenetic Father with the genetic Spirits is removed, one ends in making all into mere creatures, including the Son and the Spirit. Arius, in articulating this, boldly and insistently, sounded the death-knell of both Origenism and the Platonistic Christianity championed by Origen.
While the decrees of Nicaea rejected Arius’ assertion and established the logical refutation of his doctrine—that Christ is of one essence with the Father, co-eternal with Him, uncreated and never having not-been—they had no philosophical system to back them and explain them. The rejection of Origen’s systematic theology left the Church with a definition, but no explanation of how it could be. The protracted controversy regarding Nicaea that followed the Council itself was a simple consequence of this—fully Christian bishops, priests and laymen were left in a philosophical vacuum following the wholesale abandonment of the systems that had tied the intellectual tenets of the Faith together for the Hellenistic mind. In these systems, says Otis, Christ was able to save by mediating between God the Father and mankind, sharing in the nature of both from the beginning, or perhaps better described as being himself the emanation lying between God and man—and mankind was save-able largely because it was not separated from God by the gulf between genetic and agenetic, but simply by an emanation or two in a progression of basically agenetic beings. The doctrine of homoousios, then, undermined the soteriological framework of an entire generation by its firm establishment of the genetic/agenetic gulf between God and man—and with that, it brought immediately to the fore the question of time and its relation to the two realms. As Otis says, “…if the novelty of the creation were no longer to be disguised by a theory of its eternity, then its very novelty and temporality—its very difference from eternity—had to be accounted for” (Otis 335). It was only with the work of the Cappadocian Fathers that a system was developed to replace Origen and the other early apologists—hence it is only because of their work that the Council of Constantinople in 381 ratified the definitions of Nicaea.
For it was they who first made the distinction between the temporal and non-temporal order the same as that between creation and Creator, in their writings against the heresy of Eunomius (who asserted that Christ was fully genetic). The distinction is common to all three, but it is best articulated by St. Gregory of Nyssa, and it is his works to which Otis refers in his discussion of the Cappadocian conception of time.
Gregory, beginning with the gulf between genetic and agenetic, posits that time is itself the insurmountable limit (diastema, in Greek) between God and Creation—the fourth dimension common to all created beings. Therefore, it is impossible for humans (or angels) ever to completely comprehend God—they exist within Time, God without. Gregory thereby asserted that God is truly and completely, indeed metaphysically, infinite—and did so to a degree unprecedented by those before him. But that very infinity of God gives room for Time itself and the entire created order, led by man exercising his proper priesthood and kingship over Creation, to grow eternally into a greater and greater comprehension of the Infinite Divinity. Man, according to Gregory, is indeed captured in time and space—but that captivity is ultimately flexible, becoming the sine qua non of growth in the knowledge and love of Christ. That which has no boundary, after all, cannot grow.
Thus, in Gregory’s schema, the genetic order ceases to be an evil—Creation is truly good, not a burden or a prison hindering those who are being saved by Christ’s Incarnation, but itself the beneficiary of His saving work through the priesthood of mankind, destined to be eternally inducted into the Divine Perichoresis of Love through Christ, so that God may become All in All. No longer the enemy, but rather the victim, no longer the defeated, but rather the saved, genetic creation is not to become agenetic—rather, the agenetic Logos enters into Creation, enlivens it and enables it to grow in His inexhaustible Love.
This became the linchpin of Orthodox soteriology—God became man so that man could become Divine—but not in such a way that man should achieve Divinity and cease growing, but that he should forever be growing in the image and likeness of Christ, a process having no end because its Great Prototype is, in a very real sense, Infinity Himself. It is a magnificent vision, giving, as Otis says, “a supremely dynamic character to both salvation and creation. For the first time the Church possessed a doctrine that gave meaning to the agenetic-genetic dichotomy of Platonism as well as to the creator-creature dichotomy of the Bible” (Otis 342). It simply required that Platonism shed the idea of the inferiority of the Created order—and to this day, orthodox Christians, whatever their communion, affirm the inherent goodness and redeemability of all Creation, through the Grace of God and the Power of the Incarnation of Christ.
I might well conclude here. All this has at least begun to answer the question of Time in Christian cosmology. But it begs another question: if this doctrine was not defined until the fourth century, if the earliest Fathers of the Church did not understand time in this manner, what is one to say about their orthodoxy? What is one to do with Irenaeus and Origen? They were not Orthodox according to the standards of our day—their ideas, taken to their logical conclusions, produce heresy. The facts create a conundrum for the traditional Christian wishing to hold in honour all the early Fathers of the Church—for their articulations of the Faith appear to conflict.
The matter is difficult, with serious ramifications for the present day (for it affects how one views communions different from his own and their variant doctrinal systems and schemata), but we may give at least the beginning of a response.
The Christian Faith is not a matter of words, doctrines or definitions. It is fundamentally personal, experiential, existential. God descended to earth and became knowable to humanity—as St. John the Theologian writes, our Faith is based on “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled…” (1 John 1:1). The true theologian is one who walks with God in prayer at every moment of the day—only the friend of God can be said to truly know anything about Him. The articulated truths of the Christian Faith, spoken or written, are the words of men who have known God face to face. The Faith is simply the relationship of men with God.
God, of course, is absolute, immutable and perfect. Human language is not. Therefore, however true the Faith of any man may be, the language he uses to speak of his relationship will always be defective. There can be no perfect philosophy, no perfect theology, because there is no perfect language. All these limited words can do is point the way. Some will do so better than others. Some will completely fall off the path and begin pointing to something else. But certainly none will ever be perfect or eternally sufficient.
Thus one can look at the work of Irenaeus, and even Origen, and discern behind their words the Truth of an encounter with God. Their words are not intended to define God, but merely to draw those outside into the sphere of the love and mercy and knowledge of God. Both Irenaeus and Origen succeeded at least in this. Through them, and others like them, Rome herself bent knee before the Creator of all—and thus thousands, even millions, were caught up to the utmost limits of human capacity and stood face to face with Almighty God. Therefore, whatever else we may say about them, only He can judge them.
But with that in mind, we would do well to remember that definitions and creeds do not tell the whole story. If the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed cannot save, then neither can the Westminster Confession damn. All depends on the orientation of the human heart to God. Orthodox would do well to remember this in their encounters with those outside the bounds of the Church. And all should remember that unity in word will follow naturally when all seek God with all their hearts.
Let us therefore pray, and never cease until the Spirit is born with power in our hearts. May God grant it so.
Amen.
Works Cited
Gregory of Nyssa and the Cappadocian Conception of Time: by Brooks Otis in Studia Patristica Volume XIV, edited by Elizabeth A. Livingstone. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1976.
Meyendorff, John. Catholicity and the Church. St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press; Crestwood, New York: 1983.
Tuesday, February 24, 2004
IN PRELUDIUM
Ok, so I've not posted for a few days. I've got some ideas cooking, but mainly, I just remembered a paper that I wrote for last semester which I promised to post several months ago. I'll be putting that up here hopefully later today, when I have time to edit it. It deals with time and Christian cosmology as it developed over the first four centuries of Church history.
So check back later.
Ok, so I've not posted for a few days. I've got some ideas cooking, but mainly, I just remembered a paper that I wrote for last semester which I promised to post several months ago. I'll be putting that up here hopefully later today, when I have time to edit it. It deals with time and Christian cosmology as it developed over the first four centuries of Church history.
So check back later.
Friday, February 20, 2004
LATE-NIGHT THOUGHTS, AND A DISCLAIMER OF SORTS
I stayed up after my wife went to bed tonight to help a fellow-seminarian study for a Greek exam tomorrow. Then, like a fool, I decided to read through the 56 comments on Seraphim's blog and see what I thought--things have gotten very heated over there, and he asked me to read it and see what I thought. My writing was interrupted by a fire alarm at 1:30--I went to bed after that, so have only had a chance to post this now. I still have a lot of work to do, so I'll try to remain brief.
With accordant brevity, then, I don't think he was out of line. Yet I can see where those who objected found offense, and can sympathize. As Seraphim said himself in his final apology for the extent to which the discussion went, he can as well. He and I are both converts. The issues and problems and difficulties which are created by a strict adherence to the Canons of the Church apply to us as much as to anyone else. When we write about theological issues, here or elsewhere, it is not (at least not only, God forgive us) out of a desire to see ourselves in print--we are grappling as if for our lives with these questions. Certainly we are not sitting in our cloistered little rooms and figuring out what is the letter of the law to which we will soon subject the lowly foolish paeons of middle America, just as soon as we can find a bishop who will give us the official authority to do so. On the contrary, the thought of being the person responsible for directing ANYONE in their walk towards and with God terrifies me. When I write regarding the Church, I am, as it were, thinking aloud, trying to figure out just what one should say to this or that question.
On the other hand, I confess uncertainty and deep uneasiness about the various Canons of the Church. I present a recent dilemma by way of example. Grant for the moment that, as many have said, the Canons and the Church Tradition expressly require that an Orthodox Christian is to be baptized, that this baptism is the laver of regeneration, that as many as have been baptized have put on Christ, that baptism is the only means by which one may become a member of Christ's Church, the strait gate of salvation. Further, grant that the only true baptism is the Orthodox baptism, triple immersion in the name of the Holy Trinity, performed by a legitimate Orthodox priest or bishop--as I indeed believe. Well and good. I have just articulated a standard. This is the Faith of the Apostles. This is the Faith which has established the world. This is the Faith--and the only Faith--of the Orthodox.
Just one problem. I wasn't baptised. I was Chrismated--and that not even according to a complete rule. I was never exorcised. I was never anointed with oil. And now I commune of Christ's Holy Eucharist.
Does that mean I commune to my damnation? Does that mean my salvation is in jeopardy? Is the grace of God withheld from me because of this?
I don't think it is. It makes no sense to me to be baptized now--in so doing I would both be disobeying my bishops and disregarding other Canons of the Church which allow for the reception of converts by Chrismation. But it's a question which demands my attention. So too are the questions of marriage, communion, confession, etc. All too often, I hear conflicting stories. This does not damage my Faith--I know that these conflicting stories are, for the most part, all legitimate expressions of the fundamental, unchanging truth of the Orthodox Faith. The question is simply which expression properly expresses the Faith that is born of a true and full communion with and of and in the Holy Trinity now, in America, in the 21st century. It is undeniable that the manner in which these specifics are approached has changed and continues to change. But the essence remains the same.
Now, I have to admit that this problem didn't really need to concern me so much. In a very large degree, I have brought it upon myself. It is perfectly possible, even perhaps necessary, for a layman in a parish to submit to those over him spiritually--that submission and obedience, even if those over him err, is an act of humility and submission to God through the authorities ordained by God, and hence is an act leading to salvation. But I, and my friends here at the seminary, are forced to ask questions which we would often rather not ask--the kernel of which is, purely and simply, to whom and to what are we to submit? Because the answer to that question will determine how we answer when, should God will that we be ordained, WE are the ones being asked those questions which bear on the salvation of others. And, should we lead others astray, it has been said that it would be better for us to be cast into the sea with a millstone around our necks. Not exactly the sort of thing to take lightly.
So please, do not judge us, do not take umbrage at us when we fail, but rather pray for us. Pray that we abandon our pursuit of this vocation if we find we are not called to it. Pray that we may learn to rightly teach the word of Truth if we are so called. Pray that we may be granted the spiritual insight to discern the right way in these difficult times. And pray that we may remain humble--for that is the most important and the most difficult thing of all.
After all, even baptism will not save a man who thinks himself worthy of the kingdom of heaven. Even communion in the Holy Eucharist will not save a man who does not realize that he is in desparate need of that communion. Even perfect obedience to the Holy Canons will not save a man who thinks that by his obedience he is saved. And if the holiest men to ever live have died with a final plea for God's mercy on their lips, how can we neglect this humility?
May God have mercy on us all.
I stayed up after my wife went to bed tonight to help a fellow-seminarian study for a Greek exam tomorrow. Then, like a fool, I decided to read through the 56 comments on Seraphim's blog and see what I thought--things have gotten very heated over there, and he asked me to read it and see what I thought. My writing was interrupted by a fire alarm at 1:30--I went to bed after that, so have only had a chance to post this now. I still have a lot of work to do, so I'll try to remain brief.
With accordant brevity, then, I don't think he was out of line. Yet I can see where those who objected found offense, and can sympathize. As Seraphim said himself in his final apology for the extent to which the discussion went, he can as well. He and I are both converts. The issues and problems and difficulties which are created by a strict adherence to the Canons of the Church apply to us as much as to anyone else. When we write about theological issues, here or elsewhere, it is not (at least not only, God forgive us) out of a desire to see ourselves in print--we are grappling as if for our lives with these questions. Certainly we are not sitting in our cloistered little rooms and figuring out what is the letter of the law to which we will soon subject the lowly foolish paeons of middle America, just as soon as we can find a bishop who will give us the official authority to do so. On the contrary, the thought of being the person responsible for directing ANYONE in their walk towards and with God terrifies me. When I write regarding the Church, I am, as it were, thinking aloud, trying to figure out just what one should say to this or that question.
On the other hand, I confess uncertainty and deep uneasiness about the various Canons of the Church. I present a recent dilemma by way of example. Grant for the moment that, as many have said, the Canons and the Church Tradition expressly require that an Orthodox Christian is to be baptized, that this baptism is the laver of regeneration, that as many as have been baptized have put on Christ, that baptism is the only means by which one may become a member of Christ's Church, the strait gate of salvation. Further, grant that the only true baptism is the Orthodox baptism, triple immersion in the name of the Holy Trinity, performed by a legitimate Orthodox priest or bishop--as I indeed believe. Well and good. I have just articulated a standard. This is the Faith of the Apostles. This is the Faith which has established the world. This is the Faith--and the only Faith--of the Orthodox.
Just one problem. I wasn't baptised. I was Chrismated--and that not even according to a complete rule. I was never exorcised. I was never anointed with oil. And now I commune of Christ's Holy Eucharist.
Does that mean I commune to my damnation? Does that mean my salvation is in jeopardy? Is the grace of God withheld from me because of this?
I don't think it is. It makes no sense to me to be baptized now--in so doing I would both be disobeying my bishops and disregarding other Canons of the Church which allow for the reception of converts by Chrismation. But it's a question which demands my attention. So too are the questions of marriage, communion, confession, etc. All too often, I hear conflicting stories. This does not damage my Faith--I know that these conflicting stories are, for the most part, all legitimate expressions of the fundamental, unchanging truth of the Orthodox Faith. The question is simply which expression properly expresses the Faith that is born of a true and full communion with and of and in the Holy Trinity now, in America, in the 21st century. It is undeniable that the manner in which these specifics are approached has changed and continues to change. But the essence remains the same.
Now, I have to admit that this problem didn't really need to concern me so much. In a very large degree, I have brought it upon myself. It is perfectly possible, even perhaps necessary, for a layman in a parish to submit to those over him spiritually--that submission and obedience, even if those over him err, is an act of humility and submission to God through the authorities ordained by God, and hence is an act leading to salvation. But I, and my friends here at the seminary, are forced to ask questions which we would often rather not ask--the kernel of which is, purely and simply, to whom and to what are we to submit? Because the answer to that question will determine how we answer when, should God will that we be ordained, WE are the ones being asked those questions which bear on the salvation of others. And, should we lead others astray, it has been said that it would be better for us to be cast into the sea with a millstone around our necks. Not exactly the sort of thing to take lightly.
So please, do not judge us, do not take umbrage at us when we fail, but rather pray for us. Pray that we abandon our pursuit of this vocation if we find we are not called to it. Pray that we may learn to rightly teach the word of Truth if we are so called. Pray that we may be granted the spiritual insight to discern the right way in these difficult times. And pray that we may remain humble--for that is the most important and the most difficult thing of all.
After all, even baptism will not save a man who thinks himself worthy of the kingdom of heaven. Even communion in the Holy Eucharist will not save a man who does not realize that he is in desparate need of that communion. Even perfect obedience to the Holy Canons will not save a man who thinks that by his obedience he is saved. And if the holiest men to ever live have died with a final plea for God's mercy on their lips, how can we neglect this humility?
May God have mercy on us all.
Monday, February 16, 2004
INDIANA JONES CLONE
Check out this article--kindly brought to my attention by Mr. Will Farnham. You gotta love it.
I got to visit that Papyrology department my sophomore year of college with Dr. Holmes' third semester Greek class. I envy the kid the chance to dig around in there. Lucky stiff.
And I like his hat.
Check out this article--kindly brought to my attention by Mr. Will Farnham. You gotta love it.
I got to visit that Papyrology department my sophomore year of college with Dr. Holmes' third semester Greek class. I envy the kid the chance to dig around in there. Lucky stiff.
And I like his hat.
Sunday, February 08, 2004
STRENGTHEN THY HAIR AND BRING HEALTH FORTHWITH TO THY SCALP
I'm going to go out on a limb here and follow in the Ockhamist's footsteps. Larknews is a barrel of laughs.
Check out the new TV filter, made especially for KJV only Christians.
Or, rather, Rise from thy hindquarters, friend, and exert thyself, and choose ye this day where thou shalt click. Forsooth, click above, friend!
Bob should also check out this article, a brilliant expose of the terrifying alliance between an evil regime and Jack Chick.
:)
I'm going to go out on a limb here and follow in the Ockhamist's footsteps. Larknews is a barrel of laughs.
Check out the new TV filter, made especially for KJV only Christians.
Or, rather, Rise from thy hindquarters, friend, and exert thyself, and choose ye this day where thou shalt click. Forsooth, click above, friend!
Bob should also check out this article, a brilliant expose of the terrifying alliance between an evil regime and Jack Chick.
:)
Sunday, February 01, 2004
FINDING MARTYRDOM
"Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were young, you girded yourself and walked where you would; but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will gird you and carry you where you do not wish to go."
The time when a man grows old can come sooner or later. This is sooner.
It is hard to submit and love.
Heru, lavalm!
"Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were young, you girded yourself and walked where you would; but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will gird you and carry you where you do not wish to go."
The time when a man grows old can come sooner or later. This is sooner.
It is hard to submit and love.
Heru, lavalm!
Thursday, January 29, 2004
Saturday, January 24, 2004
Friday, January 23, 2004
THE METANARRATIVE OF CRUCIFIXION
Daniel Silliman has a new post up on defining Postmodern Christianity. I posted a comment attempting my own definition. I submitted it there, and copy it below, by way of sticking my neck out and inviting any who will to take a whack at it.
Thus:
I do not have a good understanding of postmodernism. Nor of the other philosophical systems you mention here.
What I would personally like to say about postmodernism, however, is this. It is the rebellion (initially instinctive) of a few deeply human souls against a philosophical slide into oblivion that began over a thousand years ago and which is now dancing in lockstep towards the brink of destruction with a post-Christian culture and society which began its own decomposition at least as long ago. The postmodernists deny that they are trapped in these systems--they deconstruct them, pick them to pieces, refuse to be taken in. They have a hatred of jargon, of the pat answer, even of philosophical systems. They fear to be trapped by words.
The postmodernist Christian, then, is the man overcome with yearning for the absolute encounter with God, wearied of all the dogmas and formulas and constraints which men have placed upon God for two thousand years, wishing only to encounter in person that simple, undefinable carpenter who WAS the Son of God, and willing to dive unhesitatingly into an oblivion free of definitions and guarantees and intellectual safeguards in the desperate hope that there, in the void devoid of reason, the Creator of reason will bear him up in His ineffable embrace.
But that's just what I WANT to see in postmodern Christianity. You tell me what's really there.
Daniel Silliman has a new post up on defining Postmodern Christianity. I posted a comment attempting my own definition. I submitted it there, and copy it below, by way of sticking my neck out and inviting any who will to take a whack at it.
Thus:
I do not have a good understanding of postmodernism. Nor of the other philosophical systems you mention here.
What I would personally like to say about postmodernism, however, is this. It is the rebellion (initially instinctive) of a few deeply human souls against a philosophical slide into oblivion that began over a thousand years ago and which is now dancing in lockstep towards the brink of destruction with a post-Christian culture and society which began its own decomposition at least as long ago. The postmodernists deny that they are trapped in these systems--they deconstruct them, pick them to pieces, refuse to be taken in. They have a hatred of jargon, of the pat answer, even of philosophical systems. They fear to be trapped by words.
The postmodernist Christian, then, is the man overcome with yearning for the absolute encounter with God, wearied of all the dogmas and formulas and constraints which men have placed upon God for two thousand years, wishing only to encounter in person that simple, undefinable carpenter who WAS the Son of God, and willing to dive unhesitatingly into an oblivion free of definitions and guarantees and intellectual safeguards in the desperate hope that there, in the void devoid of reason, the Creator of reason will bear him up in His ineffable embrace.
But that's just what I WANT to see in postmodern Christianity. You tell me what's really there.
Thursday, January 22, 2004
AND IT BITES THE DUST...
Blog-out is out. It's banished. CommentThis allows unlimited text. It wins. Haloscan is now backup. See posts below for links to them. Silliman said the multiple comment things were confusing--I agree. Just use the first now, and if it's down, use the backup.
That's all folks.
Blog-out is out. It's banished. CommentThis allows unlimited text. It wins. Haloscan is now backup. See posts below for links to them. Silliman said the multiple comment things were confusing--I agree. Just use the first now, and if it's down, use the backup.
That's all folks.
Wednesday, January 21, 2004
MARRIAGE, CHRISTIANITY AND POLITICOS
The boys over at the Evangel Society are raising a ruckus about the Federal Marriage Amendment. They think it's a good idea. I'd like to agree. The argument that marriage should be constitutionally defined as between a man and a woman is appealing. Similarly, I approve of Derek Muller's statement that such a constitution should merely protect the word "marriage," defining it as excusively between a man and a woman, while allowing for individual states to establish civil unions with benefits identical to marriage for two partners of the same gender (whether or not they were sexually involved with one another). I have a certain fondness for the notion that even a Christian government ought not seek to enforce all the niceties of Christian morality, but rather foster an environment conducive to them, allowing for human freedom. So part of me likes the idea.
But I don't know. Something unsettles me about it, and specifically about the ES's campaign for it. My uneasiness is rooted, I suspect, in the fact that I tend to find the entire conservative philosophy of government at best incompletely constructed and articulated, at worst untenable. I have no problem with the idea of an explicitly Christian nation, but am uncertain whether the structure of American government is compatible with such an idea. Even if the structure itself is (or was originally), I do not think it remains so in practice. All the political, cultural and societal signs indicate clearly to me America is emphatically not a Christian nation. Post-Christian, maybe. But not Christian.
In addition, the suggestion that the Constitution should be given the function of a dictionary is already strange to me (however much I might sympathize with the goals which drive that proposal). In light of what I have said above, however, it seems far stranger that, with America as it is, its Constitution should adopt a definition which is so explicitly Christian.
After all, America was not even founded as an explicitly Christian nation. It could have been--but that was actively avoided. To found a nation as explicitly Christian with any degree of consistency requires an alliance with a specific expression of Christianity. Different branches articulate different arguments in different ways in defense of certain principles--the manner in which those arguments are framed would affect the manner in which those principles are applied. It would be possible to do this and still permit religious freedom--in effect to say, as I would (were I given a nation and the power to frame an Orthodox Christian government:
"This nation recognizes the Holy Orthodox Faith as the correct form of worship, the right and ideal manner of life for its citizens and the heavenly prototype which this government is created to emulate. Our citizens are free to live and worship as they will, so long as they do not violate the free life and worship of another, but the laws and practice of this government are built upon the principles of the Holy Orthodox Faith."
But such arguments were not made during the framing of the Constitution (to my knowledge)--rather, the Founders shunned any alliance with a particular expression of Christianity, or even with Christianity at large. Conversely, Christian politicians today make numerous explicit alliances with various expressions of Christianity, seeking to further the cause of those expressions politically, but fail abjectly to create any consistent political philosophy relating the Church and the State. They battle the liberals/atheists/homosexual activists etc. for the reins of power, but have no articulated philosophy for what they mean to do with them should they acquire them. Some of their rhetoric lends itself to grave concern on the part of the American people (which concern is manipulated and heightened by the rhetoric of their political opponents: e.g. The Republicans want to restore the old South, enslave blacks, prosecute homosexuals, etc). Moreover, their arguments are addressed directly to the evangelican Christian community--they're preaching to the choir. Indeed, it seems that Christian Evangelical Conservatism has reduced itself essentially to the function of merely getting out the vote. It is doing little to nothing to convince those outside, offers little to those who are not already in agreement.
And unfortunately, so far, the boys of the Evangel Society are doing little better than their predecessors of past decades and generations, repeating the same tired negative rhetoric and the same stale fearmongering. They and I both believe that a truly Christian nation would be a good place to live for all men--but they are not discussing what precisely that vision would look like, are not presenting that vision to the people. It is difficult to take them as seriously as they would like when they ignore such fundamentals.
This is not an attack, but a critique. I urge them to pay more heed to these matters, to describe what they seek, and why, and why Christians of all stripes and even men of no faith at all should embrace their vision for America. Otherwise they are merely cogs in someone else's machine.
The boys over at the Evangel Society are raising a ruckus about the Federal Marriage Amendment. They think it's a good idea. I'd like to agree. The argument that marriage should be constitutionally defined as between a man and a woman is appealing. Similarly, I approve of Derek Muller's statement that such a constitution should merely protect the word "marriage," defining it as excusively between a man and a woman, while allowing for individual states to establish civil unions with benefits identical to marriage for two partners of the same gender (whether or not they were sexually involved with one another). I have a certain fondness for the notion that even a Christian government ought not seek to enforce all the niceties of Christian morality, but rather foster an environment conducive to them, allowing for human freedom. So part of me likes the idea.
But I don't know. Something unsettles me about it, and specifically about the ES's campaign for it. My uneasiness is rooted, I suspect, in the fact that I tend to find the entire conservative philosophy of government at best incompletely constructed and articulated, at worst untenable. I have no problem with the idea of an explicitly Christian nation, but am uncertain whether the structure of American government is compatible with such an idea. Even if the structure itself is (or was originally), I do not think it remains so in practice. All the political, cultural and societal signs indicate clearly to me America is emphatically not a Christian nation. Post-Christian, maybe. But not Christian.
In addition, the suggestion that the Constitution should be given the function of a dictionary is already strange to me (however much I might sympathize with the goals which drive that proposal). In light of what I have said above, however, it seems far stranger that, with America as it is, its Constitution should adopt a definition which is so explicitly Christian.
After all, America was not even founded as an explicitly Christian nation. It could have been--but that was actively avoided. To found a nation as explicitly Christian with any degree of consistency requires an alliance with a specific expression of Christianity. Different branches articulate different arguments in different ways in defense of certain principles--the manner in which those arguments are framed would affect the manner in which those principles are applied. It would be possible to do this and still permit religious freedom--in effect to say, as I would (were I given a nation and the power to frame an Orthodox Christian government:
"This nation recognizes the Holy Orthodox Faith as the correct form of worship, the right and ideal manner of life for its citizens and the heavenly prototype which this government is created to emulate. Our citizens are free to live and worship as they will, so long as they do not violate the free life and worship of another, but the laws and practice of this government are built upon the principles of the Holy Orthodox Faith."
But such arguments were not made during the framing of the Constitution (to my knowledge)--rather, the Founders shunned any alliance with a particular expression of Christianity, or even with Christianity at large. Conversely, Christian politicians today make numerous explicit alliances with various expressions of Christianity, seeking to further the cause of those expressions politically, but fail abjectly to create any consistent political philosophy relating the Church and the State. They battle the liberals/atheists/homosexual activists etc. for the reins of power, but have no articulated philosophy for what they mean to do with them should they acquire them. Some of their rhetoric lends itself to grave concern on the part of the American people (which concern is manipulated and heightened by the rhetoric of their political opponents: e.g. The Republicans want to restore the old South, enslave blacks, prosecute homosexuals, etc). Moreover, their arguments are addressed directly to the evangelican Christian community--they're preaching to the choir. Indeed, it seems that Christian Evangelical Conservatism has reduced itself essentially to the function of merely getting out the vote. It is doing little to nothing to convince those outside, offers little to those who are not already in agreement.
And unfortunately, so far, the boys of the Evangel Society are doing little better than their predecessors of past decades and generations, repeating the same tired negative rhetoric and the same stale fearmongering. They and I both believe that a truly Christian nation would be a good place to live for all men--but they are not discussing what precisely that vision would look like, are not presenting that vision to the people. It is difficult to take them as seriously as they would like when they ignore such fundamentals.
This is not an attack, but a critique. I urge them to pay more heed to these matters, to describe what they seek, and why, and why Christians of all stripes and even men of no faith at all should embrace their vision for America. Otherwise they are merely cogs in someone else's machine.
COMMENTS ETC
I have added a new comments system, in addition to BlogOut. It is my hope that the Klink Family will get BlogOut working again soon, but it seems prudent to have a backup system up and running. Space with Haloscan is limited to 1000 characters, but at least it's something. Many thanks to both the Klinks and Haloscan--I appreciate the service.
So--ShoutOut if you can, otherwise just comment. Thanks much.
Addendum: Actually, we're going to make this a test. I'm going to put up three comment systems, and we'll see which one gets used the most, which one is working the most, etc. Winner takes all, second place gets to be backup, third place is banished. :) Drop by Comment This! for more info about them.
Ok...enough about comments. Thanks to all who provide said service, though.
I have added a new comments system, in addition to BlogOut. It is my hope that the Klink Family will get BlogOut working again soon, but it seems prudent to have a backup system up and running. Space with Haloscan is limited to 1000 characters, but at least it's something. Many thanks to both the Klinks and Haloscan--I appreciate the service.
So--ShoutOut if you can, otherwise just comment. Thanks much.
Addendum: Actually, we're going to make this a test. I'm going to put up three comment systems, and we'll see which one gets used the most, which one is working the most, etc. Winner takes all, second place gets to be backup, third place is banished. :) Drop by Comment This! for more info about them.
Ok...enough about comments. Thanks to all who provide said service, though.
DANIEL SILLIMAN AND THE SALVATION OF AMERICA
Check this out--Daniel Silliman has an excellent post on his abandonment of political ideology. The sentiment he expresses is one with which I have a great degree of sympathy (though I don't go as far in the opposite direction as he)--do drop by his place and read what he has to say. It's a great little piece.
Check this out--Daniel Silliman has an excellent post on his abandonment of political ideology. The sentiment he expresses is one with which I have a great degree of sympathy (though I don't go as far in the opposite direction as he)--do drop by his place and read what he has to say. It's a great little piece.
Friday, January 16, 2004
BELATED ANNIVERSARY
In the hustle and bustle of travel surrounding my wedding, I managed to neglect mention of two important anniversaries (one much more important than the other, of course). For December 28, the day of the wedding, was also the 23rd birthday of my new wife Elisabeth. Many years to her, and may God bless our union!
It also happened to be the first anniversary of my blog. I include here a link to my first posts ever on that day, now the anniversary date of my marriage (minus one year). As you can see, that first day comprised the majority of my posts for a long while. Some things just don't change very much.
Other things do. In the past month four of my close family have started blogs--and they seem to be updating them with relative regularity as well. My brother Timothy was first, with both an everyday blog and a blog for his more serious thoughts. My brother Caleb followed only three weeks ago with his blog Tankers Anonymous, live from Baghdad. My father joined the fray last week with his Control Freak, intended to serve as a testing area for his thoughts and perhaps, as he hopes, serve as the foundation for a book. Finally, but most importantly, my lovely wife Elisabeth began her blog, Over Afternoon Tea, only a few days ago.
I include links to all these on the sidebar. Please drop by and say hello. They're all worth reading--even if I do say so myself.
In the hustle and bustle of travel surrounding my wedding, I managed to neglect mention of two important anniversaries (one much more important than the other, of course). For December 28, the day of the wedding, was also the 23rd birthday of my new wife Elisabeth. Many years to her, and may God bless our union!
It also happened to be the first anniversary of my blog. I include here a link to my first posts ever on that day, now the anniversary date of my marriage (minus one year). As you can see, that first day comprised the majority of my posts for a long while. Some things just don't change very much.
Other things do. In the past month four of my close family have started blogs--and they seem to be updating them with relative regularity as well. My brother Timothy was first, with both an everyday blog and a blog for his more serious thoughts. My brother Caleb followed only three weeks ago with his blog Tankers Anonymous, live from Baghdad. My father joined the fray last week with his Control Freak, intended to serve as a testing area for his thoughts and perhaps, as he hopes, serve as the foundation for a book. Finally, but most importantly, my lovely wife Elisabeth began her blog, Over Afternoon Tea, only a few days ago.
I include links to all these on the sidebar. Please drop by and say hello. They're all worth reading--even if I do say so myself.
HAIR, ETC, INC.
Mr. Danckaert links to a fairly incredible site that should leave the hair-etics in the ESOB feeling very ashamed. ;) Thence one can find his way to this site, that of the National Beard Registry. Here one can not only read really funny stuff about beards, but even register one's own beard. I just did so. Mr. Danckaert is about to. Join the fun!!
Note--Yoga etc aside, the beard part of these guys' crusade is cool. :)
Mr. Danckaert links to a fairly incredible site that should leave the hair-etics in the ESOB feeling very ashamed. ;) Thence one can find his way to this site, that of the National Beard Registry. Here one can not only read really funny stuff about beards, but even register one's own beard. I just did so. Mr. Danckaert is about to. Join the fun!!
Note--Yoga etc aside, the beard part of these guys' crusade is cool. :)
Thursday, January 15, 2004
SARTRE, GREEK AND CHRISTIANITY--some thoughts scribbled down during the first lecture of the Introduction to New Testament (not that the lecture was boring: on the contrary, it was excellent, but I didn't want to forget what I was thinking). If I misunderstand the language philosophers, Silliman or other critics, drop me a note. Also, please suggest whom and what I might read to get a better idea of what they say.
If language is relative, not absolute, then, if one is to understand a particular argument, text or tale, one must immerse one's self in those works, language and culture to which the first argument/work is relative.
It is this which lends importance to the Greek language, the patristic texts and the Orthodox Church--for this IS the language and these the texts and the culture which give context to the works (including, but not limited to Scripture) which promise life, love and ultimate fulfillment in human life.
Let my language philosopher friends correct me if I am wrong.
This intellectual path, however, is only one way. The other is the ascetic, prayer-filled life of the monastic--and this is the more direct path. Moreover, the intellectual path's only ultimate virtue is that it points to this reality of life possessed by the saintly ascetic. For those whose nature inclines towards academics, it may be an aid, a crutch and even a means by which that might ease the path of others into this life of life-creating death. But it is not essential.
For the language philosophers are right. Words alone mean nothing. Even in context, they can only point the way. The only absolute in human life is the ineffable, inarticulable, incomprehensible encounter with the Absolute God in the depths of one's heart. If we do not seek this, in our study, in our prayer and in our very way of life, our quest is vain and empty.
On a completely different note, I include a few pictures from my wedding. If you'd like to see more, drop by my picture web page.
Our koumbaros Seraphim exchanges the crowns on our heads as His Eminence Metropolitan Nicholas looks on.
My new wife and I appear to be very happy. :)
The clergy, consisting of His Eminence, Father Demetri Tonias of the GOA, Father Dusan Koprivica of the OCA and the Metropolitan's Deacon Theodore, present us.
We few, we happy few, we seminarians...myself and my godfather/koumbaros/very good friend Seraphim Danckaert.
Myself, my new wife Elisabeth Cook and His Eminence Metropolitan Nicholas
Elisabeth and I are married as my parents, brothers and sisters look on (apparently happily, thank God).
For those in the Orthodox blogosphere who have wished to see Seraphim and myself and our bearded-ness, do take particular note of the above. Imagine us in black dresses, and you have the picture perfectly.
If language is relative, not absolute, then, if one is to understand a particular argument, text or tale, one must immerse one's self in those works, language and culture to which the first argument/work is relative.
It is this which lends importance to the Greek language, the patristic texts and the Orthodox Church--for this IS the language and these the texts and the culture which give context to the works (including, but not limited to Scripture) which promise life, love and ultimate fulfillment in human life.
Let my language philosopher friends correct me if I am wrong.
This intellectual path, however, is only one way. The other is the ascetic, prayer-filled life of the monastic--and this is the more direct path. Moreover, the intellectual path's only ultimate virtue is that it points to this reality of life possessed by the saintly ascetic. For those whose nature inclines towards academics, it may be an aid, a crutch and even a means by which that might ease the path of others into this life of life-creating death. But it is not essential.
For the language philosophers are right. Words alone mean nothing. Even in context, they can only point the way. The only absolute in human life is the ineffable, inarticulable, incomprehensible encounter with the Absolute God in the depths of one's heart. If we do not seek this, in our study, in our prayer and in our very way of life, our quest is vain and empty.
On a completely different note, I include a few pictures from my wedding. If you'd like to see more, drop by my picture web page.
Our koumbaros Seraphim exchanges the crowns on our heads as His Eminence Metropolitan Nicholas looks on.
My new wife and I appear to be very happy. :)
The clergy, consisting of His Eminence, Father Demetri Tonias of the GOA, Father Dusan Koprivica of the OCA and the Metropolitan's Deacon Theodore, present us.
We few, we happy few, we seminarians...myself and my godfather/koumbaros/very good friend Seraphim Danckaert.
Myself, my new wife Elisabeth Cook and His Eminence Metropolitan Nicholas
Elisabeth and I are married as my parents, brothers and sisters look on (apparently happily, thank God).
For those in the Orthodox blogosphere who have wished to see Seraphim and myself and our bearded-ness, do take particular note of the above. Imagine us in black dresses, and you have the picture perfectly.
Friday, January 09, 2004
BOMBING REVISITED
David Talcott has just posted wondering why one would want to Google Bomb Hillsdale College, specifically wondering why I would participate in such a thing. I can't speak for the others, but here are my various reasons for participating.
1) It seemed a harmless, humorous thing to do.
2) I was struck by the thought that such a few people might have the power to do such a thing and mess with the Search Engines, and wanted to see if it would work.
3) Expanding on the assertion that such a thing would be, as I said above, "humorous," I like the association of Hillsdale College with the employment section of the Michigan McDonald's website because of the oft-stated joke about what to do with a Hillsdale education.
For those not familiar with the joke, it involves someone with a business degree asking a classics major what he/she intends to do with that degree. The Classics major replies, "Oh, I dunno--mebbe flip burgers at McDonald's." Thereby said liberal education aficionado informs the business major that he's not interested in being rich and just likes classical languages.
This remains my favorite way to indicate that I still like liberal education and dismiss anyone asking what I intend to do with my highly impractical degree. Even though I am now married and fairly low on money, I don't in the least bit regret my choice of major or college. I'd rather flip burgers than not know Greek--and if it ever comes to that, I won't complain.
At least, not too much. ;)
David Talcott has just posted wondering why one would want to Google Bomb Hillsdale College, specifically wondering why I would participate in such a thing. I can't speak for the others, but here are my various reasons for participating.
1) It seemed a harmless, humorous thing to do.
2) I was struck by the thought that such a few people might have the power to do such a thing and mess with the Search Engines, and wanted to see if it would work.
3) Expanding on the assertion that such a thing would be, as I said above, "humorous," I like the association of Hillsdale College with the employment section of the Michigan McDonald's website because of the oft-stated joke about what to do with a Hillsdale education.
For those not familiar with the joke, it involves someone with a business degree asking a classics major what he/she intends to do with that degree. The Classics major replies, "Oh, I dunno--mebbe flip burgers at McDonald's." Thereby said liberal education aficionado informs the business major that he's not interested in being rich and just likes classical languages.
This remains my favorite way to indicate that I still like liberal education and dismiss anyone asking what I intend to do with my highly impractical degree. Even though I am now married and fairly low on money, I don't in the least bit regret my choice of major or college. I'd rather flip burgers than not know Greek--and if it ever comes to that, I won't complain.
At least, not too much. ;)
Thursday, January 08, 2004
BOMBS AWAY
I forgot before. Sorry. I recommend everybody who comes to visit Hillsdale College. Then visit Metzger's or Prizio's to learn why.
This in celebration of my finally having purchased a leather bomber's jacket, as I've wanted to do since I was 4. Oh happy days!!
I forgot before. Sorry. I recommend everybody who comes to visit Hillsdale College. Then visit Metzger's or Prizio's to learn why.
This in celebration of my finally having purchased a leather bomber's jacket, as I've wanted to do since I was 4. Oh happy days!!
COOLEST GIFT EVER
Received in a listing of wedding gifts transported back to my new bride's home by her parents and waiting shipment to us.
"from Stephen & Bethany - Slate round tray - Pope action figure - Pier I Gift receipt"
I would like to call attention to the middle item on that line and say that, if it is What I Think It Is, it is one of the coolest gifts I have ever received. Especially if my new bride's translation of the Latin scroll he's holding is correct.
Good Latin or not, does "Filii Hobenstaufenin osculamini asinum meum" mean what I think it does?
So cool!!
Received in a listing of wedding gifts transported back to my new bride's home by her parents and waiting shipment to us.
"from Stephen & Bethany - Slate round tray - Pope action figure - Pier I Gift receipt"
I would like to call attention to the middle item on that line and say that, if it is What I Think It Is, it is one of the coolest gifts I have ever received. Especially if my new bride's translation of the Latin scroll he's holding is correct.
Good Latin or not, does "Filii Hobenstaufenin osculamini asinum meum" mean what I think it does?
So cool!!
HOUSE OF GUGG
So it begins. We are married, we are one, it is done. Rather, as I said, it begins. May God bless our nascent household and strengthen our union as much as he has already blessed me in my bride. She is more than I have ever deserved.
I will post wedding pictures when I can. This post is primarily intended to prove Stack wrong (though not by much). She estimated 14 days until I returned from the evil alternative universe of No-Blogs-Ville.
The wedding was wonderful. I was wide-eyed and aware throughout it all, but in a sort of self-removed manner. In retrospect I wish very much that I had had just a few minutes to actually sit still in the hours before and contemplate what was about to happen. I kept expecting it to hit me that I was about to get married--it gradually sank in as the service progressed, but never in the bowl-you-over-and-knock-your-socks-off way I was somehow expecting.
Strangely, this has continued--both of us find it a little hard to believe that we're actually married. I find myself referring fairly frequently to the ring on my finger just to confirm that it wasn't a dream. When we returned from the honeymoon, we both found ourselves repeatedly surprised by the thought that, come bedtime, I wasn't going back to my room and she to hers, as before. It still surprises me to wake up next to her. And yet it's the most natural thing in the world.
We were blessed with a very good attendance at the wedding. Much of my family and most of hers attended, the majority of our friends from college, some from here at Holy Cross, etc. Many, of course, were absent--I'd like to pay special mention to a few whose presence I dearly missed. First, my brother Caleb, who spent Christmas on guard duty at the airport in Baghdad and returned to his active combat unit the day after the wedding. You were dearly missed, Caleb. Second, my grandfather Richard and his wife--detained due to the failing health of her father. Third, my housemates from the Beat--variously stuck house-sitting, moving, with family, etc--missed you guys. Drink something in my honour or something. And many others, family and friends who aren't on the top of my head because I'm about to be late to chapel and am preoccupied, but were missed anyway. :)
Notable attendees--His Eminence Nicholas, Metropolitan of Detroit. His last-minute notification that he was coming scared the socks off me and Seraphim (our hair is longer than he likes, and he likes to hit people with longer hair than he likes), but his presence was tremendous, his chanting beautiful, his homily marvelous, and his private advice much appreciated. Also, my old roommate Chad Helmick, with his lovely wife Kristen and newborn child Alyssa. They came a long way, and it was very very good to see them. So too with Konrad la Prade, another old roommate, and his girlfriend Joy Ulrickson. Kons drove from Maryland, Joy from northern Michigan. Thanks for the effort, y'all...it was great to see you. And, of course, my dear family, who got on a train early on the morning of Christmas Day, travelled for two days, cooked, provided the hotel, and actually managed to be at my wedding in Detroit, MI, who-knows-how-many-miles from Flagstaff, Arizona. It was wonderful to see all of you--thanks so much.
And I have to run NOW. More later. Glory to God for all things.
So it begins. We are married, we are one, it is done. Rather, as I said, it begins. May God bless our nascent household and strengthen our union as much as he has already blessed me in my bride. She is more than I have ever deserved.
I will post wedding pictures when I can. This post is primarily intended to prove Stack wrong (though not by much). She estimated 14 days until I returned from the evil alternative universe of No-Blogs-Ville.
The wedding was wonderful. I was wide-eyed and aware throughout it all, but in a sort of self-removed manner. In retrospect I wish very much that I had had just a few minutes to actually sit still in the hours before and contemplate what was about to happen. I kept expecting it to hit me that I was about to get married--it gradually sank in as the service progressed, but never in the bowl-you-over-and-knock-your-socks-off way I was somehow expecting.
Strangely, this has continued--both of us find it a little hard to believe that we're actually married. I find myself referring fairly frequently to the ring on my finger just to confirm that it wasn't a dream. When we returned from the honeymoon, we both found ourselves repeatedly surprised by the thought that, come bedtime, I wasn't going back to my room and she to hers, as before. It still surprises me to wake up next to her. And yet it's the most natural thing in the world.
We were blessed with a very good attendance at the wedding. Much of my family and most of hers attended, the majority of our friends from college, some from here at Holy Cross, etc. Many, of course, were absent--I'd like to pay special mention to a few whose presence I dearly missed. First, my brother Caleb, who spent Christmas on guard duty at the airport in Baghdad and returned to his active combat unit the day after the wedding. You were dearly missed, Caleb. Second, my grandfather Richard and his wife--detained due to the failing health of her father. Third, my housemates from the Beat--variously stuck house-sitting, moving, with family, etc--missed you guys. Drink something in my honour or something. And many others, family and friends who aren't on the top of my head because I'm about to be late to chapel and am preoccupied, but were missed anyway. :)
Notable attendees--His Eminence Nicholas, Metropolitan of Detroit. His last-minute notification that he was coming scared the socks off me and Seraphim (our hair is longer than he likes, and he likes to hit people with longer hair than he likes), but his presence was tremendous, his chanting beautiful, his homily marvelous, and his private advice much appreciated. Also, my old roommate Chad Helmick, with his lovely wife Kristen and newborn child Alyssa. They came a long way, and it was very very good to see them. So too with Konrad la Prade, another old roommate, and his girlfriend Joy Ulrickson. Kons drove from Maryland, Joy from northern Michigan. Thanks for the effort, y'all...it was great to see you. And, of course, my dear family, who got on a train early on the morning of Christmas Day, travelled for two days, cooked, provided the hotel, and actually managed to be at my wedding in Detroit, MI, who-knows-how-many-miles from Flagstaff, Arizona. It was wonderful to see all of you--thanks so much.
And I have to run NOW. More later. Glory to God for all things.
Wednesday, December 24, 2003
Tuesday, December 23, 2003
WEDDINGS AND TANKS
Two things.
1) My brother Caleb, currently soldiering in Iraq, just started a blog. He named it Tankers Anonymous. It's funny. It's my brother's. It's a very good thing. Drop by and see him...he gets to leave the Middle East in March or April and is trying to kill time, as he's bored a lot. So hopefully he'll post fairly frequently. I'll drop him an email at some point so he can install a comments system. That'll be even more fun. Do check it out.
2) I'm getting married on Sunday. Therefore, I'm apparently having a bachelor party thrown for me on Friday, that evening (around 6 or 7), at the Beat (187 N. West St.) in Hillsdale, MI. Anyone who reads my blog and likes me (or even not) is welcome to attend, if they can make it out there. Seraphim is supposed to be the one with more information about what is planned, but he seems to be out of touch again blog-wise. Hopefully he'll come back soon with some more info. If not, just show up. It'll be fun whatever happens.
3) Silliman, I'll call you about when my flight gets in. I can still count on you for pickup, right?
That's it for tonight. Things are busy around here. We're moving stuff into the apartment, are almost done, Elisabeth's already living there, I'm in a guest room in the dorm sleeping on the floor, and it's high time we get married. Expect a long absence from the blog next week...I will be away from my computer and don't intend to seek out another one. Hopefully I'll post before we leave on Friday, but if not, I wish everyone a merry and blessed Christmas.
Two things.
1) My brother Caleb, currently soldiering in Iraq, just started a blog. He named it Tankers Anonymous. It's funny. It's my brother's. It's a very good thing. Drop by and see him...he gets to leave the Middle East in March or April and is trying to kill time, as he's bored a lot. So hopefully he'll post fairly frequently. I'll drop him an email at some point so he can install a comments system. That'll be even more fun. Do check it out.
2) I'm getting married on Sunday. Therefore, I'm apparently having a bachelor party thrown for me on Friday, that evening (around 6 or 7), at the Beat (187 N. West St.) in Hillsdale, MI. Anyone who reads my blog and likes me (or even not) is welcome to attend, if they can make it out there. Seraphim is supposed to be the one with more information about what is planned, but he seems to be out of touch again blog-wise. Hopefully he'll come back soon with some more info. If not, just show up. It'll be fun whatever happens.
3) Silliman, I'll call you about when my flight gets in. I can still count on you for pickup, right?
That's it for tonight. Things are busy around here. We're moving stuff into the apartment, are almost done, Elisabeth's already living there, I'm in a guest room in the dorm sleeping on the floor, and it's high time we get married. Expect a long absence from the blog next week...I will be away from my computer and don't intend to seek out another one. Hopefully I'll post before we leave on Friday, but if not, I wish everyone a merry and blessed Christmas.
Sunday, December 21, 2003
ADDENDUM, LONG NEGLECTED
I should add that my brother Timothy has started a blog (at my suggestion). Those who know my writing as it was before I went to Hillsdale will be amazed at the stylistic family resemblance. Bravo to Tim for blogging, keep it up, etc...glad to have you around.
I should add that my brother Timothy has started a blog (at my suggestion). Those who know my writing as it was before I went to Hillsdale will be amazed at the stylistic family resemblance. Bravo to Tim for blogging, keep it up, etc...glad to have you around.
THEY ARE ALL DEAD, SIRE...
At first I thought it must be finals, but not everyone has that excuse. Then I thought it must be travel after finals or before Christmas, but the people who were traveling are home now. Perhaps everyone has simply written their brains out and there's nothing left to go onto the keyboard but a few random splatters of gray matter. Even Silliman is gone, afk for days and days in an ironic celebration of blogging, travelling countless miles to see a Straussian Jerub-Baal. He at least is still posting--but only once a day.
Doc Ock is also still active, crying insanity at world healthcare.
But Metzger is dead, sucked into the whirling vortex of lies, deceit and titillating advertisements that is modern television--the Blue Knight did not go quietly, but, laid flat upon his back by a crippling wound thereto, has gone into that dark night.
Seraphim has been reduced to posting excerpts from papers he did not to write. We sat and procrastinated and commisserated and complained together before finally spewing out tripe and claiming the completion of mediocrity.
Hugger has left us with a submissive farewell, running headlong into the arms of the Holy Father of Rome.
~Gauche is presumably enjoying a cold one in hell--I wonder if there's some way to list him on his own list of hibernatory bloggers (and to simultaneously remove myself).
Caitlin has posted nothing for weeks--leaving nearly defunct one of the more consistently soothing blogs in the 'sphere.
Bethany is with Silliman, enjoying a last journey before departing to do the Lord's work in Darkest Africa.
Talcott has left us to be entertained by a flexible fork after promising to dethrone the Pope--we are not impressed, but wish him a blessed Nativity nonetheless.
The Wiley Woodsman is as quiet as ever lately, spending his time in contemplation of his approaching nuptials, perhaps meditating on Love and the great four-poster of the Unsentimental Sentiment.
Master Golding's unflappability has been flapped by the great monster of Law School (and it's evil sidekick Torts, whatever that be)--we are left with allusions to unending and unbearable songs from the Master of Mice and Men. Where now the gun and the lockpick? Where is the homebrew that was flowing?
The Man without the Blonde 'Fro is locked in an epic battle with Mac 'ware, both hard and soft--and none may tell the outcome of their struggle. 'Cause he's not posting.
Stack is, presumably, still counting days until my wedding--but she hasn't notified anyone about it, and her blog lies quiet as she laughs about cynical editors afk in Canada
The Love of Her Life has been eaten by cockroaches in vengeance for the prematurely squashed life of Cheeko. I wonder what they did with his new pink velour pants.
Da Konz is still listening to Bob Dylan, still writing sonnets, still tell stories about the Highlands. Actually he's at home, getting ready to come to my wedding--I accidentally hung up on him last night when my cell phone battery went dead. Sorry 'bout that, buddy. Call me back and we'll finish the conversation.
And me...well, I have nothing much to say, or don't want to take the time to make myself think, being tired of typing after the 60 pages of writing I finished last week--so I'm resorting to making fun of everyone else for not posting, just to avoid being consigned to Prizio's Cold Place in Hell, where I already am despite my frequent posting of late, and where he can't consign me because he's there himself.
So, to sum up, we are all dead.
At first I thought it must be finals, but not everyone has that excuse. Then I thought it must be travel after finals or before Christmas, but the people who were traveling are home now. Perhaps everyone has simply written their brains out and there's nothing left to go onto the keyboard but a few random splatters of gray matter. Even Silliman is gone, afk for days and days in an ironic celebration of blogging, travelling countless miles to see a Straussian Jerub-Baal. He at least is still posting--but only once a day.
Doc Ock is also still active, crying insanity at world healthcare.
But Metzger is dead, sucked into the whirling vortex of lies, deceit and titillating advertisements that is modern television--the Blue Knight did not go quietly, but, laid flat upon his back by a crippling wound thereto, has gone into that dark night.
Seraphim has been reduced to posting excerpts from papers he did not to write. We sat and procrastinated and commisserated and complained together before finally spewing out tripe and claiming the completion of mediocrity.
Hugger has left us with a submissive farewell, running headlong into the arms of the Holy Father of Rome.
~Gauche is presumably enjoying a cold one in hell--I wonder if there's some way to list him on his own list of hibernatory bloggers (and to simultaneously remove myself).
Caitlin has posted nothing for weeks--leaving nearly defunct one of the more consistently soothing blogs in the 'sphere.
Bethany is with Silliman, enjoying a last journey before departing to do the Lord's work in Darkest Africa.
Talcott has left us to be entertained by a flexible fork after promising to dethrone the Pope--we are not impressed, but wish him a blessed Nativity nonetheless.
The Wiley Woodsman is as quiet as ever lately, spending his time in contemplation of his approaching nuptials, perhaps meditating on Love and the great four-poster of the Unsentimental Sentiment.
Master Golding's unflappability has been flapped by the great monster of Law School (and it's evil sidekick Torts, whatever that be)--we are left with allusions to unending and unbearable songs from the Master of Mice and Men. Where now the gun and the lockpick? Where is the homebrew that was flowing?
The Man without the Blonde 'Fro is locked in an epic battle with Mac 'ware, both hard and soft--and none may tell the outcome of their struggle. 'Cause he's not posting.
Stack is, presumably, still counting days until my wedding--but she hasn't notified anyone about it, and her blog lies quiet as she laughs about cynical editors afk in Canada
The Love of Her Life has been eaten by cockroaches in vengeance for the prematurely squashed life of Cheeko. I wonder what they did with his new pink velour pants.
Da Konz is still listening to Bob Dylan, still writing sonnets, still tell stories about the Highlands. Actually he's at home, getting ready to come to my wedding--I accidentally hung up on him last night when my cell phone battery went dead. Sorry 'bout that, buddy. Call me back and we'll finish the conversation.
And me...well, I have nothing much to say, or don't want to take the time to make myself think, being tired of typing after the 60 pages of writing I finished last week--so I'm resorting to making fun of everyone else for not posting, just to avoid being consigned to Prizio's Cold Place in Hell, where I already am despite my frequent posting of late, and where he can't consign me because he's there himself.
So, to sum up, we are all dead.
Friday, December 19, 2003
HE'S BIG, I'M LITTLE...
David Talcott has joined the mob, taking up his blogging sling against the Goliath of the Catholic Church. I look forward to seeing more of what he writes--go check him out.
David Talcott has joined the mob, taking up his blogging sling against the Goliath of the Catholic Church. I look forward to seeing more of what he writes--go check him out.
Tuesday, December 16, 2003
GAINFULLY ENGAGED
This is a nice article--the best part is this little story: "After his first day of kindergarten, Orville Wright skipped school every morning for a month. Instead, he and a friend would hide in a barn three houses away to take apart and re-assemble a sewing machine.
When his teacher told young Orville's parents that he hadn't been to school, they didn't punish him. 'They felt he was gainfully engaged,' Hudec recalled. It was the start of a lifelong love of tinkering."
I love it!
This is a nice article--the best part is this little story: "After his first day of kindergarten, Orville Wright skipped school every morning for a month. Instead, he and a friend would hide in a barn three houses away to take apart and re-assemble a sewing machine.
When his teacher told young Orville's parents that he hadn't been to school, they didn't punish him. 'They felt he was gainfully engaged,' Hudec recalled. It was the start of a lifelong love of tinkering."
I love it!
MIDNIGHT SURPRISES
In other newsHugger has decided to convert to Roman Catholicism. I am surprised. I was not expecting that. Admittedly I am out of the loop, but I am still surprised.
Insofar as I can, however, I congratulate him on his decision. It is a good thing to submit.
In other newsHugger has decided to convert to Roman Catholicism. I am surprised. I was not expecting that. Admittedly I am out of the loop, but I am still surprised.
Insofar as I can, however, I congratulate him on his decision. It is a good thing to submit.
FROM THE PAPER MILL
So I was Googling for info for my paper and found this nice link. It has a bombastic style, but it's kinda fun, and I like the part about learning more languages. :)
So I was Googling for info for my paper and found this nice link. It has a bombastic style, but it's kinda fun, and I like the part about learning more languages. :)
Friday, December 12, 2003
FASCINATING
Check this out. Iran's Vice President Mohammad Ali Abtahi has a blog! I think this is cool. ;)
I don't know much about Iran. I don't really know much about Islam in general. I should fix that sometime.
Check this out. Iran's Vice President Mohammad Ali Abtahi has a blog! I think this is cool. ;)
I don't know much about Iran. I don't really know much about Islam in general. I should fix that sometime.
TRANSFORMATION
Sometimes I encounter a simple phrase, an incidental aside buried in another argument, and realize that I have just changed my mind about something terribly important.
I love it when that happens. It just did.
I now oppose the death penalty. Why? I just read this in a comment of Prizio's:
"(I oppose the death penalty, for example, in favor of life imprisonment, for specifically and exclusively Christian reasons: I want to give each soul as long as possible to come to know Christ and be redeemed.)"
What can I say? He's right. I don't know how I missed it before. Our God has given us great mercy. How can we refuse to mete out the same? Most especially when the salvation of a human soul is on the line.
Sometimes I encounter a simple phrase, an incidental aside buried in another argument, and realize that I have just changed my mind about something terribly important.
I love it when that happens. It just did.
I now oppose the death penalty. Why? I just read this in a comment of Prizio's:
"(I oppose the death penalty, for example, in favor of life imprisonment, for specifically and exclusively Christian reasons: I want to give each soul as long as possible to come to know Christ and be redeemed.)"
What can I say? He's right. I don't know how I missed it before. Our God has given us great mercy. How can we refuse to mete out the same? Most especially when the salvation of a human soul is on the line.
NATURE AND GRACE
Here is a quote absolutely packed with implications. I suspect it holds the key to many of my musings of late. From the Triads of St. Gregory Palamas.
"Just as in legal marriage, the pleasure derived from procreation cannot exactly be called a gift of God, because it is carnal and constitutes a gift of nature and not of grace (even though that nature has been created by God); even so the knowledge that comes from profane education, even if well used, is a gift of nature, and not of grace--a gift which God accords to all without exception through nature, and which one can develop by exercise. This last point--that no one acquires it without effort and exercise--is an evident proof that it is a question of a natural, not a spiritual, gift."
More on precisely what I think those implications are later.
Here is a quote absolutely packed with implications. I suspect it holds the key to many of my musings of late. From the Triads of St. Gregory Palamas.
"Just as in legal marriage, the pleasure derived from procreation cannot exactly be called a gift of God, because it is carnal and constitutes a gift of nature and not of grace (even though that nature has been created by God); even so the knowledge that comes from profane education, even if well used, is a gift of nature, and not of grace--a gift which God accords to all without exception through nature, and which one can develop by exercise. This last point--that no one acquires it without effort and exercise--is an evident proof that it is a question of a natural, not a spiritual, gift."
More on precisely what I think those implications are later.
Wednesday, December 10, 2003
GOING TO THE CHAPEL
Right...so I'm about to go up to the Chapel here at Holy Cross for Vespers. Moreover, in two and a half weeks I'm going to the chapel in the sense meant by the old song. With which fact I am richly blessed. But what I really mean to do here is weigh in on this whole gay marriage thing.
My thinking is very under-developed on this at the moment. There are a number of different "arenas" that meet and conflict on this issue. My libertarian, live-and-let-live instinct says that the homosexual desire to gain the legal benefits that come from marriage (if that's what drives them) is legitimate--that is to say, I can even see a place for permitting two people who are NOT practicing homosexuality to contract together to hold property in common, be taxed together, etc. Such relationships are rare (I don't think I've ever even heard of it, come to think of it), but theoretically possible. At any rate--I'm inclined to be willing to grant that if someone wants it--I just don't want to hear about what they do behind closed doors. That's between them and God.
Now--calling that union or contract or whatever "marriage" is a completely different issue. However...there are many marriages today which are little more than legalized fornication. To Yoda-ize the issue: "Having-sex-and-holding-common-property-do-not-a-true-marriage-make." A true marriage is a spiritual, emotional, psychological AND physical union between two people, found only in a simultaneous spiritual, emotionial, psychological AND physical union with God in Christ through the Holy Spirit. The state cannot make such marriages. To call a homosexual union a marriage in this sense is, to me, nonsensical. I know full well that such people as Metzger disagree with me. I'd love to talk more about that, but suffice to say, Christian marriage in my opinion is limited to a man and a woman. There may be holy relationships (non-sexual) between members of the same sex, but they are not marriages. IMHO, of course. And in the opinion of the Church to which I submit. So I can't really negotiate this. Even if I wanted to. Which I don't. Anyway...
In the modern day, this true marriage and the contractual idea of marriage are conflated. Example--I had a friend who cohabited with his girlfriend for several months. (for various reasons, I do not condemn him--primarily because that's not my place, but also because he and she did what they did in good conscience. That in case he reads this--I don't want him to think I condemn him for this--'cause I don't. Anyway...) His family (and hers, I presume) went ballistic. All was made right with them, however, when they had a little ceremony performed by a JP. This is silly to me. The state grants to a clergyman the function of the magistrate in matters of matrimony--the Church does not grant the function of the priesthood to the magistrates. Nor should it.
But I have to go now, so I'll wrap this up, and hone the ideas further later. I don't like the idea of gay marriage being legalized, but if it is, I'm not going to lose much sleep over it. I already distinguish between legal marriage and Christian marriage. The faithful Christian churches throughout America will have to make the same distinction, clearly and forthrightly, to their people and to the public. The Orthodox Church already does anyway. It will just have to clarify once again to make sure people understand.
Christianity was born in a hostile, non-Christian environment. I wouldn't say that I welcome the current process of return to that state of affairs, but neither do I fear it. It'll probably be good for us.
'Nuff said--I'm off to chapel. Hopefully this will foster some discussion. As I said above, I'm not certain about much of this--just musing.
Right...so I'm about to go up to the Chapel here at Holy Cross for Vespers. Moreover, in two and a half weeks I'm going to the chapel in the sense meant by the old song. With which fact I am richly blessed. But what I really mean to do here is weigh in on this whole gay marriage thing.
My thinking is very under-developed on this at the moment. There are a number of different "arenas" that meet and conflict on this issue. My libertarian, live-and-let-live instinct says that the homosexual desire to gain the legal benefits that come from marriage (if that's what drives them) is legitimate--that is to say, I can even see a place for permitting two people who are NOT practicing homosexuality to contract together to hold property in common, be taxed together, etc. Such relationships are rare (I don't think I've ever even heard of it, come to think of it), but theoretically possible. At any rate--I'm inclined to be willing to grant that if someone wants it--I just don't want to hear about what they do behind closed doors. That's between them and God.
Now--calling that union or contract or whatever "marriage" is a completely different issue. However...there are many marriages today which are little more than legalized fornication. To Yoda-ize the issue: "Having-sex-and-holding-common-property-do-not-a-true-marriage-make." A true marriage is a spiritual, emotional, psychological AND physical union between two people, found only in a simultaneous spiritual, emotionial, psychological AND physical union with God in Christ through the Holy Spirit. The state cannot make such marriages. To call a homosexual union a marriage in this sense is, to me, nonsensical. I know full well that such people as Metzger disagree with me. I'd love to talk more about that, but suffice to say, Christian marriage in my opinion is limited to a man and a woman. There may be holy relationships (non-sexual) between members of the same sex, but they are not marriages. IMHO, of course. And in the opinion of the Church to which I submit. So I can't really negotiate this. Even if I wanted to. Which I don't. Anyway...
In the modern day, this true marriage and the contractual idea of marriage are conflated. Example--I had a friend who cohabited with his girlfriend for several months. (for various reasons, I do not condemn him--primarily because that's not my place, but also because he and she did what they did in good conscience. That in case he reads this--I don't want him to think I condemn him for this--'cause I don't. Anyway...) His family (and hers, I presume) went ballistic. All was made right with them, however, when they had a little ceremony performed by a JP. This is silly to me. The state grants to a clergyman the function of the magistrate in matters of matrimony--the Church does not grant the function of the priesthood to the magistrates. Nor should it.
But I have to go now, so I'll wrap this up, and hone the ideas further later. I don't like the idea of gay marriage being legalized, but if it is, I'm not going to lose much sleep over it. I already distinguish between legal marriage and Christian marriage. The faithful Christian churches throughout America will have to make the same distinction, clearly and forthrightly, to their people and to the public. The Orthodox Church already does anyway. It will just have to clarify once again to make sure people understand.
Christianity was born in a hostile, non-Christian environment. I wouldn't say that I welcome the current process of return to that state of affairs, but neither do I fear it. It'll probably be good for us.
'Nuff said--I'm off to chapel. Hopefully this will foster some discussion. As I said above, I'm not certain about much of this--just musing.
Monday, December 08, 2003
CIRCLES OF HELL
It's been too long since I've read/thought about Dante. So long, in fact, that I've forgotten how many circles of hell he has. However many it is, he missed one. There is a circle reserved for lazy bloggers--a circle in which I very often reside. But this time I realized where I was and took notes. This time I can describe the deepest circle of hell, the torture-chamber of the lapsed blogger.
It's called O'Hare International Airport, and it lives in Chicago. It sucks in the unsuspecting blogger and traps him far from internet access in a barren wasteland, where the only rest is fitful and the dreams are punctuated with a repetition ad nauseum of one damnatory formula.
"Welcome to Chicago's O'Hare International Airport. For reasons of safety and for the sake of your health, we'd like to remind you that this is a non-smoking facility. The circle around the first concourse is also non-smoking. There are smoking areas in the circle around the second concourse. You may suck your nicotine while your posterior freezes there if you so desire."
Those were strange dreams. And I don't even smoke.
It's been too long since I've read/thought about Dante. So long, in fact, that I've forgotten how many circles of hell he has. However many it is, he missed one. There is a circle reserved for lazy bloggers--a circle in which I very often reside. But this time I realized where I was and took notes. This time I can describe the deepest circle of hell, the torture-chamber of the lapsed blogger.
It's called O'Hare International Airport, and it lives in Chicago. It sucks in the unsuspecting blogger and traps him far from internet access in a barren wasteland, where the only rest is fitful and the dreams are punctuated with a repetition ad nauseum of one damnatory formula.
"Welcome to Chicago's O'Hare International Airport. For reasons of safety and for the sake of your health, we'd like to remind you that this is a non-smoking facility. The circle around the first concourse is also non-smoking. There are smoking areas in the circle around the second concourse. You may suck your nicotine while your posterior freezes there if you so desire."
Those were strange dreams. And I don't even smoke.
Wednesday, December 03, 2003
Monday, December 01, 2003
HELLO DECEMBER
I'm tired.
Stupid Thanksgiving traffic.
Stupid New Jersey Turnpike.
Stupid New York City.
Stupid paper due tomorrow that I haven't started yet.
Stupid me.
In other news, I'm getting married in four weeks. Panic and joy are beginning to battle for my attention. I don't have time for either.
I'll be in Michigan getting the marriage license Thursday. I don't fly out until Sunday. Anyone who wants to meet up with me (I'd love to see anybody), email me (greekgugg@yahoo.com) or call me (260) 466-8013. Or leave a comment here.
Hasta.
I'm tired.
Stupid Thanksgiving traffic.
Stupid New Jersey Turnpike.
Stupid New York City.
Stupid paper due tomorrow that I haven't started yet.
Stupid me.
In other news, I'm getting married in four weeks. Panic and joy are beginning to battle for my attention. I don't have time for either.
I'll be in Michigan getting the marriage license Thursday. I don't fly out until Sunday. Anyone who wants to meet up with me (I'd love to see anybody), email me (greekgugg@yahoo.com) or call me (260) 466-8013. Or leave a comment here.
Hasta.
Monday, November 24, 2003
O HOLY MARTYR INTERCEDE FOR US...
Greek Orthodox priests I've spoken with have asserted that, unlike in the Catholic Church, Orthodox sainthood begins at the popular level, with those who knew the reposed holy man or woman and knew their manner of life beginning to request their intercessions, commemorate the date of their repose, etc--that the official recognition of a saint by the Church authorities is merely a ratification of a veneration already long practiced by the people.
This seems to be a prime example of such a thing. It's a New York Times story about a Russian Orthodox army private in Chechnya seven years ago who was beheaded after refusing to renounce the Christian Faith or remove his baptismal cross, despite the threats of his Muslim captors. His mother later learned of the story of his death, and, as it spread, people throughout Russia began to commemorate him as a martyr.
Apparently, however, the Russian Orthodox Church authorities are objecting. I'm not quite sure why. Such an objection doesn't jive with what my Greek Orthodox priest said. Moreover, martyrs are commemorated immediately after their witness is done (to the best of my understanding). One of the few American saints (indeed the only one born on North American soil), Peter the Aleut, was martyred by Spanish Jesuits--and the monk-saint Herman of Alaska recognized him as a saint immediately after hearing the story. Similar things happened with the ancient martyrs, such as Polycarp, Ignatius, etc. Perhaps the story got it wrong and the Russian Church officials are objecting to the likely excesses of popular devotion. Or perhaps they're just on a power trip. *sigh*
Setting that strange bit aside, I appreciate the fact that, for the most part, the devotion to this martyr seems fairly distinct from any blind patriotic support for the Russian army's presence in Chechnya. Here's this quote from a Russian army officer. "The kids in Chechnya, they feel they've been abandoned by the state and abandoned by their commanders," he told the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets. "They don't know who to appeal to for help, but they understand that Zhenya is one of them."
Here's one of the icons that has been painted of him.
Greek Orthodox priests I've spoken with have asserted that, unlike in the Catholic Church, Orthodox sainthood begins at the popular level, with those who knew the reposed holy man or woman and knew their manner of life beginning to request their intercessions, commemorate the date of their repose, etc--that the official recognition of a saint by the Church authorities is merely a ratification of a veneration already long practiced by the people.
This seems to be a prime example of such a thing. It's a New York Times story about a Russian Orthodox army private in Chechnya seven years ago who was beheaded after refusing to renounce the Christian Faith or remove his baptismal cross, despite the threats of his Muslim captors. His mother later learned of the story of his death, and, as it spread, people throughout Russia began to commemorate him as a martyr.
Apparently, however, the Russian Orthodox Church authorities are objecting. I'm not quite sure why. Such an objection doesn't jive with what my Greek Orthodox priest said. Moreover, martyrs are commemorated immediately after their witness is done (to the best of my understanding). One of the few American saints (indeed the only one born on North American soil), Peter the Aleut, was martyred by Spanish Jesuits--and the monk-saint Herman of Alaska recognized him as a saint immediately after hearing the story. Similar things happened with the ancient martyrs, such as Polycarp, Ignatius, etc. Perhaps the story got it wrong and the Russian Church officials are objecting to the likely excesses of popular devotion. Or perhaps they're just on a power trip. *sigh*
Setting that strange bit aside, I appreciate the fact that, for the most part, the devotion to this martyr seems fairly distinct from any blind patriotic support for the Russian army's presence in Chechnya. Here's this quote from a Russian army officer. "The kids in Chechnya, they feel they've been abandoned by the state and abandoned by their commanders," he told the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets. "They don't know who to appeal to for help, but they understand that Zhenya is one of them."
Here's one of the icons that has been painted of him.
Sunday, November 23, 2003
YA SNOOZE, YA LOSE
So I stopped checking the news every half-hour for a few hours, and look what I missed. So Shevardnadze (try saying that 10 times really fast) is out, Georgia has a new president, and things are interesting. I still don't know what the Georgian Orthodox Church thinks of all this. But the US likes it, it seems.
But, even if the world goes on without me watching, I'm going to go snooze now. Don't wake me up till 5. Even if the world ends.
So I stopped checking the news every half-hour for a few hours, and look what I missed. So Shevardnadze (try saying that 10 times really fast) is out, Georgia has a new president, and things are interesting. I still don't know what the Georgian Orthodox Church thinks of all this. But the US likes it, it seems.
But, even if the world goes on without me watching, I'm going to go snooze now. Don't wake me up till 5. Even if the world ends.
Doggone it, I'm trying to write a paper, but my 'net searches keep bringing up interesting things. The link in the post below is a blog kept by a recent Catholic convert (he looks like he's Eastern Rite) who is considering monasticism. This site is a Mormon discussion board, it seems, discussing whether or not the Catholics and Mormons agree that the human soul that is made like Christ will become uncreated (something which St. Irenaeus taught, apparently). Fascinating--especially seeing the way the LDS folks think.
Ok...back to my paper.
Ok...back to my paper.
This piece on the current unrest in Georgia is intriguing. I'm very curious what the religious leaders in the country are saying...from what little I know, Georgia is very strongly and devoutly Orthodox. I'm curious how that interacts with the politics.
And now, I'm going to bed.
And now, I'm going to bed.
Here's a nice little piece on the future of the Middle East. Nothing really new, but an interesting summary of some things. See what you think
Saturday, November 22, 2003
THE FUTURE BRIDE CHECKS IN
So my lovely almost-wife, officially dubbed Mrs. Gugg by the Danckaerts, just took the little personality thing. Her compatibility rating with me destroys any possibility for anything between me and Metzger. I'm saved!!
On the other hand, her similarity rating with Metzger is a little disconcerting, I must say. But that's ok.
Welcome her to the blogosphere, if you would please. :)
How compatible are you and your friends?
So my lovely almost-wife, officially dubbed Mrs. Gugg by the Danckaerts, just took the little personality thing. Her compatibility rating with me destroys any possibility for anything between me and Metzger. I'm saved!!
On the other hand, her similarity rating with Metzger is a little disconcerting, I must say. But that's ok.
Welcome her to the blogosphere, if you would please. :)
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A METAPHOR FOR THE INNER SPIRITUAL BATTLE?? ~or~ TAMING THE INNER MAMMOTH
Finally, I am posting some pictures. I got some pictures from two summers online at pbase, and hence am now putting them here so people can see what I look like. The hair-etics of the Ecumenical Council of Orthodox Bloggers should note that this picture was taken a year and a half ago--my hair has not been cut since, and that is the most trimmed my beard has ever been. Those who actually want to see my ugly mug can see it more closely over to the left. The picture above is, of course, the graduation photo of myself and my bride-to-be (to be married in just barely over a month!!!! AAAAAHHHHH!!!).
The above picture was taken in a park in Barcelona. That was a fun trip. :) All the locals were down below saying I was going to die in Spanish. When it came time to try to get down, I almost believed them.
As I said, all sorts of fun.
Finally, I am posting some pictures. I got some pictures from two summers online at pbase, and hence am now putting them here so people can see what I look like. The hair-etics of the Ecumenical Council of Orthodox Bloggers should note that this picture was taken a year and a half ago--my hair has not been cut since, and that is the most trimmed my beard has ever been. Those who actually want to see my ugly mug can see it more closely over to the left. The picture above is, of course, the graduation photo of myself and my bride-to-be (to be married in just barely over a month!!!! AAAAAHHHHH!!!).
The above picture was taken in a park in Barcelona. That was a fun trip. :) All the locals were down below saying I was going to die in Spanish. When it came time to try to get down, I almost believed them.
As I said, all sorts of fun.
Friday, November 21, 2003
Emotions
Konrad LaPrade is posting again. I am very happy.
In other news,Konrad LaPrade is posting again on Xanga. I am very sad.
Also, I am both happy and sad. I am therefore confused.
Which reminds me, Bob, of your mother's use of the word.
Which in turn reminds me of all that I am missing at the Beat.
*sigh*
I miss those guys.
Konrad LaPrade is posting again. I am very happy.
In other news,Konrad LaPrade is posting again on Xanga. I am very sad.
Also, I am both happy and sad. I am therefore confused.
Which reminds me, Bob, of your mother's use of the word.
Which in turn reminds me of all that I am missing at the Beat.
*sigh*
I miss those guys.
In other news, my reliable little Prizm is in the shop right now. It had been making weird sounds and not accelerating so well for the past few months, but inconsistently enough that I could never catch it while asking mechanics about it. Turns out it needed a new clutch. Grrrr...that's what I get for teaching two girls to drive a stick. Fortunately, I'm marrying one of them, so I get to use her money to fix it. ;) Which is good, because it's costing me like $650.
Did I get ripped off, Bob?
I hope not...dunno if I'd be able to live with myself if I did.
Anyway, I'm picking it up tomorrow, and hopefully all will be well, because I have to drive down to DC and my future in-laws' place next week for Thanksgiving.
So if I'm incommunicado for a few days, that's why--don't consign me to hell again, Prizio.
Did I get ripped off, Bob?
I hope not...dunno if I'd be able to live with myself if I did.
Anyway, I'm picking it up tomorrow, and hopefully all will be well, because I have to drive down to DC and my future in-laws' place next week for Thanksgiving.
So if I'm incommunicado for a few days, that's why--don't consign me to hell again, Prizio.
BE AFRAID--BE VERY AFRAID
Apparently I had all the wrong best friends at Hillsdale. Humph. I wonder what this means.
In other news, I'm going to see if I can get the other guys at the Beat to join in this little crazy thing--visit the BeatBlog to help me encourage them.
How compatible are you and your friends?
The really funny thing is, I just spent four hours today taking the manditory psychological evaluation for prospective seminarians here at Holy Cross. I am very happy to spend the evening using such silly questions for fun. It makes me feel better, somehow.
Apparently I had all the wrong best friends at Hillsdale. Humph. I wonder what this means.
In other news, I'm going to see if I can get the other guys at the Beat to join in this little crazy thing--visit the BeatBlog to help me encourage them.
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The really funny thing is, I just spent four hours today taking the manditory psychological evaluation for prospective seminarians here at Holy Cross. I am very happy to spend the evening using such silly questions for fun. It makes me feel better, somehow.
Thursday, November 20, 2003
Wednesday, November 19, 2003
EXPLODING PIDGEONHOLES
Ok...I'm confused. I thought Slate.com was liberal. But this piece doesn't read liberal. Matter of fact, it reads in a more unbiased, open-minded way than anything I've read for a long while. Skeptics in the blogosphere should note that I'm not asserting anything about the supposed Iraq-bin Laden connection. Just commenting on the piece and on the associated news.
Silliman--did Slate become conservative when I wasn't looking?
Ok...I'm confused. I thought Slate.com was liberal. But this piece doesn't read liberal. Matter of fact, it reads in a more unbiased, open-minded way than anything I've read for a long while. Skeptics in the blogosphere should note that I'm not asserting anything about the supposed Iraq-bin Laden connection. Just commenting on the piece and on the associated news.
Silliman--did Slate become conservative when I wasn't looking?
Sunday, November 16, 2003
Saturday, November 15, 2003
YOU KNOW WHAT DANCING LEADS TO...
"There was no slithering going on, only students, some about as rigid as rakes, watching their feet as they tried to master some basic steps."
I have déjà vu...
"There was no slithering going on, only students, some about as rigid as rakes, watching their feet as they tried to master some basic steps."
I have déjà vu...
Thursday, November 13, 2003
INCENDIARY BLOGGING
Award for most incendiary post this week goes to Karl Thienes of St. Stephen's Musings over on the Orthodox side of the tracks. His post on the Matrix Trilogy and the legitimacy of Christian patronage of the arts in general (but specifically movies with sexual content or violence) has polarized the Orthodox Blogosphere. The comments section to this moment boasts 34 (lengthy) comments since the post went up on the 11th. I'm sure there are more to come. Kudos to Karl for making us think and further commendations for maintaining a careful balance between extremes. I look forward to more from him and the others.
Myself, I may even re-post my final movies dissertation from last spring if I get a chance (with current thoughts included). We'll see. I have a paper due tomorrow. Fortunately, I've found a way to incorporate my recent posts on language, philosophy and theology into the paper, so that means I'm almost done already. :)
Hasta!
Award for most incendiary post this week goes to Karl Thienes of St. Stephen's Musings over on the Orthodox side of the tracks. His post on the Matrix Trilogy and the legitimacy of Christian patronage of the arts in general (but specifically movies with sexual content or violence) has polarized the Orthodox Blogosphere. The comments section to this moment boasts 34 (lengthy) comments since the post went up on the 11th. I'm sure there are more to come. Kudos to Karl for making us think and further commendations for maintaining a careful balance between extremes. I look forward to more from him and the others.
Myself, I may even re-post my final movies dissertation from last spring if I get a chance (with current thoughts included). We'll see. I have a paper due tomorrow. Fortunately, I've found a way to incorporate my recent posts on language, philosophy and theology into the paper, so that means I'm almost done already. :)
Hasta!
Tuesday, November 11, 2003
NOW THAT'S NEWS!!
Some days the flowers bloom, the sun shines and all is well with the world. On such days, nearly comatose bloggers return to the 'net and old college friends become fathers.
It's a beautiful thing when both happen at once. Mr. D has returned, and as his first announcement back he bears witness to the birth of my old roommate's first child.
Pictures of the lovely Miss Alyssa Rachelle Helmick are posted here. Heartiest and very Excited Congratulations to Chad and Kristen.
And now, to bed!
Some days the flowers bloom, the sun shines and all is well with the world. On such days, nearly comatose bloggers return to the 'net and old college friends become fathers.
It's a beautiful thing when both happen at once. Mr. D has returned, and as his first announcement back he bears witness to the birth of my old roommate's first child.
Pictures of the lovely Miss Alyssa Rachelle Helmick are posted here. Heartiest and very Excited Congratulations to Chad and Kristen.
And now, to bed!
Saturday, November 08, 2003
BROWN AND STURDY FOREVER!!
I just can't resist posting this link. I spent my college days being mildly teased for my preferred attire: a flannel shirt and a pair of brown Cabelas work pants. And now, just after I finally leave that look behind for black slacks and a button up shirt, it becomes trendy.
*sigh* I am forever damned to be out of fashion. For which, come to think of it, I'm grateful.
And I am glad that my generation is at least in part rejecting the ludicrous fashions of the day and putting comfort first. That should leave more time for the more important things in life.
I just can't resist posting this link. I spent my college days being mildly teased for my preferred attire: a flannel shirt and a pair of brown Cabelas work pants. And now, just after I finally leave that look behind for black slacks and a button up shirt, it becomes trendy.
*sigh* I am forever damned to be out of fashion. For which, come to think of it, I'm grateful.
And I am glad that my generation is at least in part rejecting the ludicrous fashions of the day and putting comfort first. That should leave more time for the more important things in life.
Friday, November 07, 2003
I have written this in an attempt to speak in some fashion to Metzger's particular issues with me. But this clarifies what I say below. Hence I submit it for all.
Dear Jonathan,
I appreciate your charity in removing your first post. I had no desire to offend. On the contrary, you nearly top the list of those with whom I would like to speak about this. Because you especially, along with Sam and Prizio, somehow exemplify what is needed. All three of you have in some sense rejected the faith in which you were raised, and all three of you have to a significant degree still clung to it. I do not blame any of you--those things which drove you drove me as well. I deeply regret that our separate paths have caused me to become, in any sense at all, your enemy. I simultaneously consider it a weighty compliment that you consider me worthy to be called your arch-nemesis--it implies that you detect in me enough honesty, authenticity and genuine desire for truth that you think it worth your while to express your disagreement with me (unless it simply expresses the fact that I managed to piss you off, in which case, I'm not sure what to say). But if it is the former, I like to think I have at least enough Christian charity to return the favor. Which is a roundabout way of saying that, for all I speak of Christianity and the superiority of the Orthodox faith, you shame me in your love for others.
I am, at the moment, trying to find a way around the label of heresy which the Orthodox in this country throw around perhaps too loosely at all who are not Greek, Russian or wearing a strange enough hat. It is not a comfortable label to throw. Nor is it charitable, and seldom is it profitable or edifying. I doubt, indeed, that I have ever heard it used in a helpful or edifying manner. The term seems only to have a limited usefulness in excluding certain doctrines which are antithetical either in and of themselves or in their consequences to the fundamental, unchanging Christian Faith.
But I do consider the Christian Faith to be unchanging. This is fundamental--but what I mean by it needs explaining. I do not assert, for example, that the Nicene Creed was the Christian expression of faith from the beginning. I do say, however, that it is precisely that, an Expression of Faith--that Creeds may change, but the Faith does not, being, fundamentally, the encounter of men with the immutable God. Or, put another way, men change, but God does not.
Therefore, as our ideas develop and shift, as our cultures evolve or devolve, our encounter with God may change, or, at least, the words we use to describe that encounter. For the encounter itself comes when we are most like God--so perhaps this is a common experience that transcends words and culture, being a mystical experience, devoid of image and form and defying description. Or, put even another way, the Faith is unchanging in the sense that a Christian man of prayer today shares something deeply fundamental to his being with Christian men of prayer of old--there is a relational identification between myself (if I am living my life existing in communion with God) and the Apostle Paul or Peter. I am sure the Scriptural quotes relevant to this are obvious--statements such as God is the same yesterday, today and forever, Paul's statement that, "For me, to live is Christ..." or "It is not I who lives, but Christ that lives in me," or John's statement that "everyone that loves is born of God and knows God..."
So the Faith is unchanging, immutable, indescribable. But just so it must be described, clothed in human terms, just as the uncircumscribable Son of God was circumscribed, was clothed in human flesh and in created time. For the Christian faith is a Faith of and in Incarnational Revelation--that the unknowable God posited by philosophy made Himself known, that the Infinite Truth became somehow comprehensible to the finite mind. Christians have maintained from the beginning that the essence of Christianity is found in the experiential encounter with God--but in that encounter, God enters the realm of human experience, and becomes someone of Whom we can speak in accurate or inaccurate terms--even if those terms are limited their accuracy, even if all that can be said of God with anything approaching complete accuracy is that He Is.
It is precisely this faith, this confidence (that it is possible to speak of God at least to a limited degree), which is represented and exemplified by the Scriptures. The Old Testament uses Hebrew language to describe the encounter of the Hebrew people with the God who revealed Himself to their forefathers, called them out of Egypt and spoke to them through the prophets. The New Testament speaks in Greek of the same God, revealed in the flesh in the person of Jesus Christ. But, though it is written in Greek, it is written by Hebrews, steeped in Hebrew culture, history and language. It represents a transition point--from Hebrew to Greek. It is at once the last expression of the revelation of God in Hebrew and the first in Greek, analogous to what a Greek might write in English today--the words would be English, but would be mere English translations of Greek ideas, meaningless removed from their context (as indeed most English-speakers find such writings today). We know that the Scripture was similarly meaningless to the Hellenistic philosophers of the day. To understand them required that on, in some sense, though still speaking Greek, become Hebrew. As the first century drew to an end it became clear that it was impractical and untenable for the Church to make this demand of the Greco-Roman society in which it lived.
The Gospel of John is, indeed, in many ways the first effort we can see to speak to the Hellenistic world in its own terms--Christ is spoken of as the Logos. And we're off to the races...from this point onward Christianity is dedicated to bringing the Gospel to the people, not in bringing people to the Gospel.
The second century of the Christian era is characterized by the efforts of Christian apologists and writers to make the Christian Faith, something intrinsically connected with Hebrew history, language and culture, comprehensible to the Hellenistic mind. From very early on, this effort took the form of re-articulating the Gospel in the terms of Hellenistic philosophy, of answering the questions of the philosophers from the Christian perspective and of following the first Christian articulations in this medium through to their logical conclusions, constructing an entire cosmology in competition with and in apposition to the systems of Plato, Aristotle and later, Plotinus. These efforts reached their culmination in the work of Origen in Alexandria.
This system can, for all intents and purposes, be characterized as the perfect syncretistic melding of Christianity and neo-Platonism. Which is to say, Origen got some things very, very wrong. One does not wish to be trite in an oversimplification of his ideas, but his lava-lamp idea of pre-existent souls constantly and eternally drawing closer to God as they heat up spiritually and lapsing again down to the material world as they cool seems at first glance to have almost no relation to the most basic of Christian doctrines. Yet Origen headed the catechetical school in Alexandria, influenced generations of Church hierarchs and theologians, and was only condemned for very specific heresies (including the above) several centuries later.
Indeed, at the time, Origen was a standard of Orthodoxy. His philosophical system was hailed as perfect and adopted almost universally throughout Africa and much of the Eastern Church. For he was the culmination of that first generation of Christian philosophers, the originator of the best philosophical system Christianity had possessed since John committed Christianity to this engagement with Hellenism with his adoption of the term �Logos.�
In the century and a half following Origen�s death, however, more and more pillars of his carefully constructed philosophical system were discarded as Christians more carefully considered their ramifications and decided they were, at best, defective (at worst incompatible with reality and Scripture). But no cohesive system arose to replace it, creating a meltdown of sorts in Christian doctrine, a crisis of belief, culminating in the Arian crisis, which simultaneously was the culmination of the Church�s rejection of Origen.
Arius was seemingly the first to openly and insistently reject Origen�s definition of Christ�s origin (no pun intended) as �eternally created by the Father� as the sort of first emanation (cf. Plotinus, etc). The problem lies in the fact that Origin�s creation of ALL spirits by emanation, as it were, removes any meaningful distinction between Christ�s nature and ours�but once the doctrine of emanations as a means of connecting the agenetic Father with the genetic Spirits is removed, one ends in making all into mere creatures, including the Son and the Spirit. Arius, in articulating this, boldly and insistently, sounded the death-knell of Origenism. *Note* The philosophical, theological and political issues behind this entire issue are complex (too much so for examination here), but let it suffice to say for the moment that there�s a lot more going on than I�m saying. I have a paper due on this in a few weeks, which I will post, hopefully filling in the picture. *End Note*
While the decrees of Nicaea rejected Arius� assertion and established the logical refutation of his doctrine, that rather than a created being, Christ is of one essence with the Father, co-eternal with Him, uncreated and never having not-been, they had no philosophical system to back them, to explain them, etc. The protracted controversy regarding Nicaea that followed the Council itself was a simple consequence of this�fully Christian bishops, priests and laymen were left in a philosophical vacuum following this wholesale abandonment of the systems that had tied the intellectual tenets of the faith together for the Hellenistic mind. It was only with the work of the Cappadocian Fathers that a system was developed to replace Origen and the other early apologists.
Their great and lasting contribution was the creation of a system incorporating the Nicene definitions, the tradition of the Church and the best of Hellenistic philosophy into a single, seamless system, at once fully consistent with the inner life of the Church and the reality of her encounter with God, nonetheless treating and adopting the best of philosophy with such faithfulness to its fundamental kernel (the illumination of Socrates, Plato and Plotinus that had spawned it) that many even of the philosophers of the day held them in high regard.
Its perfection is indicated by the fact that, in the Greek-speaking, still Hellenistic East, the Cappadocians� system perseveres to this day as the standard of Orthodoxy. Other theologians have written, of course, but they have merely filled in less developed portions of the Cappadocians� system. One could even attribute the supposed stagnancy of Byzantine intellectual thought (an accusation often leveled against the later Eastern Roman Empire) to this�after the Cappadocians, there was little to say. The definition of Christianity in the Greek language was complete, the energies of Byzantium�s intellectuals directed elsewhere. As much had been said about God as could be understood by the rational mind�to discover more was the arena of the mystic, the hesychast, the man of prayer. Words and ideas had reached their limit�more could not be learned without shedding these transient things and delving into the blinding darkness of God Himself.
Such a system, however, was not developed in the West. I say that not in any attack upon Augustine, Aquinas or any of the other theologian-philosophers with whom the Latin West has been graced. Their work was good�but the very existence of the subsequent philosophers and theologians, of the Renaissance, of the Protestant Reformation and, in more modern times, of the parallel developments of modernism/post-modernism on the one hand and the denominational explosion on the other bear witness to the imperfect nature of Christianity�s Western philosophical clothing.
This can, I think, probably be attributed to external pressures. There was a lengthy period of peace and security in the Eastern Roman Empire which provided the environment necessary for a protracted discussion. But Augustine himself only scarcely outlived the fall of Rome in 410, and whatever one may say of the centuries following, they were not an age of peace and security. Indeed, there has been no opportunity for Christianity in the West to regroup and re-examine the philosophical system clothing the Faith since the fall of Rome. Or rather, on the rare occasions that the opportunity has presented itself, it has led to more schisms, more divisions and more confusion.
In modern America, this theological meltdown has reached its apogee�but it is here, in this time and place of peace, prosperity and security, that we Christians of all stripes are finally presented with the crucible we have needed for so long. It is far past time for a Western culture to develop a consistent philosophy of Christianity that can finally give an answer to all the controversies that have plagued us for so long. I am convinced that there is a way to resolve the questions that divide us, whether they be ecclesiology, soteriology, Christology�even the question of free will seems within reach.
I see all the pieces moving towards this very conclusion. The English-speaking world is full of those who have experienced in themselves the failure of the Church in the West to answer the fundamental questions, those who have at once left the Church and still cling to it despite themselves. It is at peace (in that its lands are not ravaged by war), secure, with energy to spare for intellectual pursuits. It possesses an unparalleled knowledge of the past, an unequaled ability to look with clear sight at the 20 centuries which lie behind us and understand them in their virtues and their faults. It is an age of hope and despair united, an age in which people are willing to surrender ancient feuds and pet ideas. And it is an age in which finally the Christian-philosophical traditions of East and West are co-existent in one land, speaking one language, experiencing one culture, facing common enemies. All of Christianity is gathered here, in person or by proxy. There will be no better time than this.
Dear Jonathan,
I appreciate your charity in removing your first post. I had no desire to offend. On the contrary, you nearly top the list of those with whom I would like to speak about this. Because you especially, along with Sam and Prizio, somehow exemplify what is needed. All three of you have in some sense rejected the faith in which you were raised, and all three of you have to a significant degree still clung to it. I do not blame any of you--those things which drove you drove me as well. I deeply regret that our separate paths have caused me to become, in any sense at all, your enemy. I simultaneously consider it a weighty compliment that you consider me worthy to be called your arch-nemesis--it implies that you detect in me enough honesty, authenticity and genuine desire for truth that you think it worth your while to express your disagreement with me (unless it simply expresses the fact that I managed to piss you off, in which case, I'm not sure what to say). But if it is the former, I like to think I have at least enough Christian charity to return the favor. Which is a roundabout way of saying that, for all I speak of Christianity and the superiority of the Orthodox faith, you shame me in your love for others.
I am, at the moment, trying to find a way around the label of heresy which the Orthodox in this country throw around perhaps too loosely at all who are not Greek, Russian or wearing a strange enough hat. It is not a comfortable label to throw. Nor is it charitable, and seldom is it profitable or edifying. I doubt, indeed, that I have ever heard it used in a helpful or edifying manner. The term seems only to have a limited usefulness in excluding certain doctrines which are antithetical either in and of themselves or in their consequences to the fundamental, unchanging Christian Faith.
But I do consider the Christian Faith to be unchanging. This is fundamental--but what I mean by it needs explaining. I do not assert, for example, that the Nicene Creed was the Christian expression of faith from the beginning. I do say, however, that it is precisely that, an Expression of Faith--that Creeds may change, but the Faith does not, being, fundamentally, the encounter of men with the immutable God. Or, put another way, men change, but God does not.
Therefore, as our ideas develop and shift, as our cultures evolve or devolve, our encounter with God may change, or, at least, the words we use to describe that encounter. For the encounter itself comes when we are most like God--so perhaps this is a common experience that transcends words and culture, being a mystical experience, devoid of image and form and defying description. Or, put even another way, the Faith is unchanging in the sense that a Christian man of prayer today shares something deeply fundamental to his being with Christian men of prayer of old--there is a relational identification between myself (if I am living my life existing in communion with God) and the Apostle Paul or Peter. I am sure the Scriptural quotes relevant to this are obvious--statements such as God is the same yesterday, today and forever, Paul's statement that, "For me, to live is Christ..." or "It is not I who lives, but Christ that lives in me," or John's statement that "everyone that loves is born of God and knows God..."
So the Faith is unchanging, immutable, indescribable. But just so it must be described, clothed in human terms, just as the uncircumscribable Son of God was circumscribed, was clothed in human flesh and in created time. For the Christian faith is a Faith of and in Incarnational Revelation--that the unknowable God posited by philosophy made Himself known, that the Infinite Truth became somehow comprehensible to the finite mind. Christians have maintained from the beginning that the essence of Christianity is found in the experiential encounter with God--but in that encounter, God enters the realm of human experience, and becomes someone of Whom we can speak in accurate or inaccurate terms--even if those terms are limited their accuracy, even if all that can be said of God with anything approaching complete accuracy is that He Is.
It is precisely this faith, this confidence (that it is possible to speak of God at least to a limited degree), which is represented and exemplified by the Scriptures. The Old Testament uses Hebrew language to describe the encounter of the Hebrew people with the God who revealed Himself to their forefathers, called them out of Egypt and spoke to them through the prophets. The New Testament speaks in Greek of the same God, revealed in the flesh in the person of Jesus Christ. But, though it is written in Greek, it is written by Hebrews, steeped in Hebrew culture, history and language. It represents a transition point--from Hebrew to Greek. It is at once the last expression of the revelation of God in Hebrew and the first in Greek, analogous to what a Greek might write in English today--the words would be English, but would be mere English translations of Greek ideas, meaningless removed from their context (as indeed most English-speakers find such writings today). We know that the Scripture was similarly meaningless to the Hellenistic philosophers of the day. To understand them required that on, in some sense, though still speaking Greek, become Hebrew. As the first century drew to an end it became clear that it was impractical and untenable for the Church to make this demand of the Greco-Roman society in which it lived.
The Gospel of John is, indeed, in many ways the first effort we can see to speak to the Hellenistic world in its own terms--Christ is spoken of as the Logos. And we're off to the races...from this point onward Christianity is dedicated to bringing the Gospel to the people, not in bringing people to the Gospel.
The second century of the Christian era is characterized by the efforts of Christian apologists and writers to make the Christian Faith, something intrinsically connected with Hebrew history, language and culture, comprehensible to the Hellenistic mind. From very early on, this effort took the form of re-articulating the Gospel in the terms of Hellenistic philosophy, of answering the questions of the philosophers from the Christian perspective and of following the first Christian articulations in this medium through to their logical conclusions, constructing an entire cosmology in competition with and in apposition to the systems of Plato, Aristotle and later, Plotinus. These efforts reached their culmination in the work of Origen in Alexandria.
This system can, for all intents and purposes, be characterized as the perfect syncretistic melding of Christianity and neo-Platonism. Which is to say, Origen got some things very, very wrong. One does not wish to be trite in an oversimplification of his ideas, but his lava-lamp idea of pre-existent souls constantly and eternally drawing closer to God as they heat up spiritually and lapsing again down to the material world as they cool seems at first glance to have almost no relation to the most basic of Christian doctrines. Yet Origen headed the catechetical school in Alexandria, influenced generations of Church hierarchs and theologians, and was only condemned for very specific heresies (including the above) several centuries later.
Indeed, at the time, Origen was a standard of Orthodoxy. His philosophical system was hailed as perfect and adopted almost universally throughout Africa and much of the Eastern Church. For he was the culmination of that first generation of Christian philosophers, the originator of the best philosophical system Christianity had possessed since John committed Christianity to this engagement with Hellenism with his adoption of the term �Logos.�
In the century and a half following Origen�s death, however, more and more pillars of his carefully constructed philosophical system were discarded as Christians more carefully considered their ramifications and decided they were, at best, defective (at worst incompatible with reality and Scripture). But no cohesive system arose to replace it, creating a meltdown of sorts in Christian doctrine, a crisis of belief, culminating in the Arian crisis, which simultaneously was the culmination of the Church�s rejection of Origen.
Arius was seemingly the first to openly and insistently reject Origen�s definition of Christ�s origin (no pun intended) as �eternally created by the Father� as the sort of first emanation (cf. Plotinus, etc). The problem lies in the fact that Origin�s creation of ALL spirits by emanation, as it were, removes any meaningful distinction between Christ�s nature and ours�but once the doctrine of emanations as a means of connecting the agenetic Father with the genetic Spirits is removed, one ends in making all into mere creatures, including the Son and the Spirit. Arius, in articulating this, boldly and insistently, sounded the death-knell of Origenism. *Note* The philosophical, theological and political issues behind this entire issue are complex (too much so for examination here), but let it suffice to say for the moment that there�s a lot more going on than I�m saying. I have a paper due on this in a few weeks, which I will post, hopefully filling in the picture. *End Note*
While the decrees of Nicaea rejected Arius� assertion and established the logical refutation of his doctrine, that rather than a created being, Christ is of one essence with the Father, co-eternal with Him, uncreated and never having not-been, they had no philosophical system to back them, to explain them, etc. The protracted controversy regarding Nicaea that followed the Council itself was a simple consequence of this�fully Christian bishops, priests and laymen were left in a philosophical vacuum following this wholesale abandonment of the systems that had tied the intellectual tenets of the faith together for the Hellenistic mind. It was only with the work of the Cappadocian Fathers that a system was developed to replace Origen and the other early apologists.
Their great and lasting contribution was the creation of a system incorporating the Nicene definitions, the tradition of the Church and the best of Hellenistic philosophy into a single, seamless system, at once fully consistent with the inner life of the Church and the reality of her encounter with God, nonetheless treating and adopting the best of philosophy with such faithfulness to its fundamental kernel (the illumination of Socrates, Plato and Plotinus that had spawned it) that many even of the philosophers of the day held them in high regard.
Its perfection is indicated by the fact that, in the Greek-speaking, still Hellenistic East, the Cappadocians� system perseveres to this day as the standard of Orthodoxy. Other theologians have written, of course, but they have merely filled in less developed portions of the Cappadocians� system. One could even attribute the supposed stagnancy of Byzantine intellectual thought (an accusation often leveled against the later Eastern Roman Empire) to this�after the Cappadocians, there was little to say. The definition of Christianity in the Greek language was complete, the energies of Byzantium�s intellectuals directed elsewhere. As much had been said about God as could be understood by the rational mind�to discover more was the arena of the mystic, the hesychast, the man of prayer. Words and ideas had reached their limit�more could not be learned without shedding these transient things and delving into the blinding darkness of God Himself.
Such a system, however, was not developed in the West. I say that not in any attack upon Augustine, Aquinas or any of the other theologian-philosophers with whom the Latin West has been graced. Their work was good�but the very existence of the subsequent philosophers and theologians, of the Renaissance, of the Protestant Reformation and, in more modern times, of the parallel developments of modernism/post-modernism on the one hand and the denominational explosion on the other bear witness to the imperfect nature of Christianity�s Western philosophical clothing.
This can, I think, probably be attributed to external pressures. There was a lengthy period of peace and security in the Eastern Roman Empire which provided the environment necessary for a protracted discussion. But Augustine himself only scarcely outlived the fall of Rome in 410, and whatever one may say of the centuries following, they were not an age of peace and security. Indeed, there has been no opportunity for Christianity in the West to regroup and re-examine the philosophical system clothing the Faith since the fall of Rome. Or rather, on the rare occasions that the opportunity has presented itself, it has led to more schisms, more divisions and more confusion.
In modern America, this theological meltdown has reached its apogee�but it is here, in this time and place of peace, prosperity and security, that we Christians of all stripes are finally presented with the crucible we have needed for so long. It is far past time for a Western culture to develop a consistent philosophy of Christianity that can finally give an answer to all the controversies that have plagued us for so long. I am convinced that there is a way to resolve the questions that divide us, whether they be ecclesiology, soteriology, Christology�even the question of free will seems within reach.
I see all the pieces moving towards this very conclusion. The English-speaking world is full of those who have experienced in themselves the failure of the Church in the West to answer the fundamental questions, those who have at once left the Church and still cling to it despite themselves. It is at peace (in that its lands are not ravaged by war), secure, with energy to spare for intellectual pursuits. It possesses an unparalleled knowledge of the past, an unequaled ability to look with clear sight at the 20 centuries which lie behind us and understand them in their virtues and their faults. It is an age of hope and despair united, an age in which people are willing to surrender ancient feuds and pet ideas. And it is an age in which finally the Christian-philosophical traditions of East and West are co-existent in one land, speaking one language, experiencing one culture, facing common enemies. All of Christianity is gathered here, in person or by proxy. There will be no better time than this.
TO ROPE THE MOON
It's always interesting when a scientist promises the moon to the waiting world. Especially when he does so literally. And most especially when it's actually believable. I eagerly await further developments on this front.
It's always interesting when a scientist promises the moon to the waiting world. Especially when he does so literally. And most especially when it's actually believable. I eagerly await further developments on this front.
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