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Thirteen Orphans posted:A Jewish friend of mine was taking a theology class and they learned about Calvin. She asked me, almost in tears, “Why do people believe this?” I just sighed and looked her in the eyes and said, “I don’t know.” The way I try to explain American Calvinism to people is by telling them to watch the Coen Brothers version of True Grit. It doesn’t help with words, but as a story I think it communicates how it (Calvinism) can function in visceral way.
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Apr 24, 2024 23:53
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Bar Ran Dun posted:The way I try to explain American Calvinism to people is by telling them to watch the Coen Brothers version of True Grit. It’s also just a really good movie.
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Apr 24, 2024 23:53
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The Coen's best at least if you aren't taken with Stoner-Noir
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Apr 24, 2024 23:55
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Squizzle posted:i think we should really dig in and litigate the value of the french here croissants are alright, everything else can burn
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Apr 25, 2024 01:09
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gently caress baguette, marry kouign-amann, kill croissant
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Apr 25, 2024 01:14
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Impossible to make something bad with choux.
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Apr 25, 2024 01:26
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Squizzle posted:regardless of what you think about time-travel infanticide, everyone has to acknowledge how funny it would be to alter the destiny of this specific person lmao, nicely done
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Apr 25, 2024 01:37
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Ohtori Akio posted:gently caress baguette, marry steak au poivre, kill croissant
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Apr 25, 2024 01:38
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Squizzle posted:regardless of what you think about time-travel infanticide, everyone has to acknowledge how funny it would be to alter the destiny of this specific person
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Apr 25, 2024 01:41
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i wish i was a man and white and french and lived in one of the most bloody, godawful periods in human history just so i can tell everyone that its because they all fuckin suck and have no recourse to not suck and become a goddamned venerated saint for lovely protestants [nb i dont actually wish for none of this]
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Apr 25, 2024 03:15
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pouring one out for Cyril Lucaris, Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinoplequote:If I die, I wish you able to testify that I die an Orthodox Catholic, in the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, as contained in the Confessio Belgica, in my own Confession, and in all Confessions of the Evangelical Churches, which are all alike. I hold in abomination the errors of the Papists and the superstitions of the Greeks; I approve and embrace the doctrine of the most excellent teacher John Calvin and of all who agree with him. And he really did die quote:…the Sultan had him strangled by the Janissaries on 27 June 1638 aboard a ship in the Bosphorus
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Apr 25, 2024 03:50
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Thirteen Orphans posted:A Jewish friend of mine was taking a theology class and they learned about Calvin. She asked me, almost in tears, “Why do people believe this?” I just sighed and looked her in the eyes and said, “I don’t know.” I remember reading about him in history classes and thinking he seemed basically correct about the logical implications of what he would've experienced as pan-Christian orthodoxy (omnipotent God, eternal hell). My understanding, if someone can correct me, is that his reasoning is something like this. 1. God damns people to hell for eternity because God feels it is what they deserve. 2. God already knows everything, so God does not learn information about people or change His opinions about what people deserve. 3. If God damns someone to hell then God must have wanted that person damned to hell since the dawn of the universe. 4. God made that person with total awareness, so God must have made that person to be damned to hell. 5. Each individual person is either heavenbound or hellbound, was always that way, will always be that way, and that's exactly how God wants it. Am I missing something or is that basically Calvin's thinking? Cross-posting an answer I have to someone asking about the role of matzah in Passover. Civilized Fishbot posted:Matzah is so integrated into Passover that it's unfortunately difficult to answer this question without mostly answering "how does Passover happen." Sorry the post is correspondingly really long for this thread. Civilized Fishbot fucked around with this message at 14:34 on Apr 25, 2024 |
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Apr 25, 2024 04:14
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it’s the BREAD OF AFFLICTION bro
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Apr 25, 2024 10:32
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im not a fancy philosophist but it feels like the core problem with calvinism is similar to that of prosperity gospel (and indeed, they're related) if you've got it good then that's clear evidence of your moral righteousness if you're poor and struggling well that's evidence you're not one of the elect
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Apr 25, 2024 22:54
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mmmmm, matza brei
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Apr 27, 2024 16:27
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for the last two weeks I have felt like there is something in my head that is just a yawning endless void hungry to Know Things and I have been shoving philosophy and theology and ontology into it faster and faster to try and keep up, any spare moment I had when I wasn't reading or finding the next thing to read felt confusing and directionless in a way that was beginning to blur my ideas of what "mattered" in a given moment after finishing Morality and Beyond back to back with The New Being over the course of three or four days I am finally experiencing a moment of complete mental satiety and just need to express my relief at this filled the knowledge-void with Tillich. Just word after word of wordy, wordy Tillich
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Apr 27, 2024 23:15
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Civilized Fishbot posted:I remember reading about him in history classes and thinking he seemed basically correct about the logical implications of what he would've experienced as pan-Christian orthodoxy (omnipotent God, eternal hell).
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Apr 27, 2024 23:24
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I like the interpretation shared by (I believe) Gaius Marius under which the total oneness with God and creation of the afterlife is hell if you've rejected God and heaven if you've accepted God.
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Apr 28, 2024 00:36
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Nessus posted:It seems logical, but the implication is that God has created a large number of fully human persons who, from the jump, were destined to literal and eternal torment, and this seems difficult to reconcile with the concept of God being good. It perhaps is easier to reconcile if one says 'this is a theoretically possible outcome, but by the Grace of God, no human has ever been sent to Hell (purgatory, ask your pastor)' or that Hell is simply annihilation and nothingness rather than eternal life. The Confession of Dositheus, Decree 3 posted:We believe the most good God to have from eternity predestinated unto glory those whom He hath chosen, and to have consigned unto condemnation those whom He hath rejected; but not so that He would justify the one, and consign and condemn the other without cause. For that were contrary to the nature of God, who is the common Father of all, and no respecter of persons, and would have all men to be saved, and to come to the knowledge of the truth; {1 Timothy 2:4} but since He foreknew the one would make a right use of their free-will, and the other a wrong, He predestinated the one, or condemned the other. And we understand the use of free-will thus, that the Divine and illuminating grace, and which we call preventing grace, being, as a light to those in darkness, by the Divine goodness imparted to all, to those that are willing to obey this — for it is of use only to the willing, not to the unwilling — and co-operate with it, in what it requireth as necessary to salvation, there is consequently granted particular grace; which, co-operating <115> with us, and enabling us, and making us perseverant in the love of God, that is to say, in performing those good things that God would have us to do, and which His preventing grace admonisheth us that we should do, justifieth us, and maketh us predestinated. But those who will not obey, and co-operate with grace; and, therefore, will not observe those things that God would have us perform, and that abuse in the service of Satan the free-will, which they have received of God to perform voluntarily what is good, are consigned to eternal condemnation. Ohtori Akio posted:I like the interpretation shared by (I believe) Gaius Marius under which the total oneness with God and creation of the afterlife is hell if you've rejected God and heaven if you've accepted God.
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Apr 28, 2024 00:41
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BRD, I don't know if you've read The New Being but it all seemed very Origenistic as I understand his thought through dialog with you. The Logos manifest as the Christ, Jesus the man was sacrificed to Christ the Deity, when the Christ said "I am the truth" he was not speaking of his teachings but of his manifest being. I am reading now a book I found used this morning: "Ultimate Concern: Tillich in Dialogue" which is as promised Tillich being asked questions by students at a seminar in 1965 (!). So what I have been really interested in recently is sussing out the direction his theology had been pointing when he died and I wonder what you think of the dots that I have been connecting here. I think this piece of dialogue is relevant -- the page cuts off the student's question, but they inquire if one can always recognize if one's current concern is ultimate or transitory. So here we see Tillich clearly estranges the idea of a personal God, a God with whom one might have a relationship, from the idea of the Ultimate Divine, what he calls "The Holy" elsewhere in 1965. The God beyond either kind of theism. The God of Israel entered a unique theological covenant with the people of Israel where he was at once personal God and also only and ultimate God; but then once instilled on the throne of the distant, judging God the ability for an individual to experience a personal relationship with him as a God was lost. So because the God of Israel is now the Universal God there is no mediator between the distant God and his earthly people. He was promoted without having anyone to fill his previous position, because his people practiced monotheism. So in this theology there is a huge gap between humanity, and God. The Christos (every time a student calls Jesus "Christ" Tillich takes pains to point out that it is a symbol and a title and means Anointed One and is actually even older than the Greek, it is from Egypt [!]) therefore brings forth two new possibilities: the exoteric opportunity of the return of that personal Deity relationship, where the actions of the Deity provide guidance and intercession, salvation, for the mortal for whom they are a personal God; and I think this is the way many people might experience their relationship with Jesus the Christ, particularly if they often pray to him directly; but also the esoteric understanding of the Christ as "The New Being," one who is fully reunited with the Divine, no longer estranged, "filled up by the Spiritual Presence" in a way that is not, ooh I can't remember which book he says this in, the uniqueness of the Christ was the way the Spirit was in him not fragmentarily but completed, it was "without distortion." Tillich speaks of reconciliation in "Ultimate Concern" as well; he is asked bluntly if we are "made of God" and says he would not have phrased it as such but yes. So then the second nature of the Christ is not to be a personal God who leads one to salvation in the traditional manner, but to offer an entirely new possibility: becoming so closely attuned to the Spirit that one does not need other Gods to help one seek wisdom from the Divine, one can hear its voice, the Spiritual Presence, oneself. And he demonstrates this possibility, "he is the way and the truth", the closer one is to Spirit the more brightly and accurately one reflects it with one's own self. Does this all track correctly to you? e: oh, welp, there is a whole section of "Ultimate Concern" where the professor's questions start triangulating in on that last point exactly, and I think this excerpt answers the part I was most uncertain about exactly quote:DR. TILLICH: Yes, we can say that, because it is often said that the "Jesus likeness" is a telos of every man, an inner aim of every man, and it must, of course, be something that can be reached. LITERALLY A BIRD fucked around with this message at 04:48 on Apr 29, 2024 |
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Apr 29, 2024 01:58
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There’s another symbol for the God beyond God I find useful the “Ineffable Real” which comes from John Hick (who might be interesting to you because of pluralism). Anyway this unreachability of the Father, the Ineffable Real, the God beyond God, the ἀγεννησία (uncreatedness) there’s a folk metaphor I like for this: https://youtu.be/Lr2xmxkoz_U?si=XsgJ5r9iNTGRlccv We are on the other side of an infinite ocean apart from the Father. This gulf is interpersonal and also epistemological. How to be in the world is on the other side of it and we cannot reach it. The universal is on the other side of this gulf. Even knowing ourselves is on the other side. Large portions of theology are trying to deal with, sail out into, this gulf. LITERALLY A BIRD posted:Tillich speaks of reconciliation in "Ultimate Concern" as well; he is asked bluntly if we are "made of God" and says he would not have phrased it as such but yes. The way one will usually see this worded is that we are made up of a mixture of sliced up Being and non-being. LITERALLY A BIRD posted:So then the second nature of the Christ is not to be a personal God who leads one to salvation in the traditional manner, but to offer an entirely new possibility: becoming so closely attuned to the Spirit that one does not need other Gods to help one seek wisdom from the Divine, one can hear its voice, the Spiritual Presence, oneself. And he demonstrates this possibility, "he is the way and the truth", the closer one is to Spirit the more brightly and accurately one reflects it with one's own self. Yes you’ll see that as “New Being”. A human who isn’t sliced up parts of Being and non-being like all the rest of us but that is instead fully united with Being. That’s a human on the far shore of the uncrossable ocean. Because that hypostasis is human, we can a personal relationship with it, and be saved. We can have “New Life” in Christ Jesus and show it to others. https://youtu.be/EShtpW-MVEQ?si=IkRXnbcBZ2EMMV6S The personal Jesus and Jesus the “New Being” are the same. This all to me is the substance of the gospel. LITERALLY A BIRD posted:That second nature gets obscured by the Church organizations because it is a threat to them both earthly (worshippers listening to the voice of the Spirit over the voice of the Church) and ontologically (if theosis is on the table, there is suddenly a short slippery slope to something very much like polytheism). But that doesn't make it not true. What happens is that there ends up being a huge diversity at the beginning. And some of the different roads go harmful places. So they start having to take stances to protect that substance. They aren’t trying to obscure it when they go “We believe in one God”. They’re trying to protect it. It’s not an abstract question for them. It’s: Those folks living there don’t say that. The life in their community centered around Jesus differs in ways X, Y, and Z. We think Y is bad so we need to reject what leads to it by affirming what doesn’t lead to that. They get into fist fights over different parts of it. Then those protective assertions then interacts with that they are Roman. So they legalistically develop these protective statements into formal rules. And the religion has negated emperors cult that the state was held together by, so it’s slotted into the same place as the justification for the state. Then that combined into that breaking the legalistic rules turns into being against the state.
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Apr 29, 2024 04:41
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quote:STUDENT: Dr. Tillich, are you saying then that the snake was good for Eve and Adam? Thanks BRD  I understand apotheosis / deification / the assorted other names for attaining New Being to be very non-Christian ideas -- but simultaneously ones extremely important to the faiths where they are active concerns of the faithful -- and so I needed to be sure I wasn't parsing an idea that wasn't there. One of the papers I read this week was someone's thesis on "Morality and Beyond" where it is confirmed I wasn't misremembering these ideas being extremely bad and pagan among the lay Christians I grew up with.Glenn Graber posted:For one thing, the claim that the essential natures of man and God are identical makes it impossible to preserve the distinction between creature and creator, which has been an indispensable element of orthodox Christian theology (important for the contribution it makes to the feeling of awe and reverence in worship, even if for no other reason). So even if it is explicit in the Gospels by a theologian's reading it's still perceived as heresy by the average Christian, right? The idea of every person having Divine potential, man's telos being the journey of theosis?
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Apr 29, 2024 14:10
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LITERALLY A BIRD posted:So even if it is explicit in the Gospels by a theologian's reading it's still perceived as heresy by the average Christian, right? The idea of every person having Divine potential, man's telos being the journey of theosis? It depends. Many more conservatives folks like C.S. Lewis. Here’s Lewis on theosis: “He came to this world and became a man in order to spread to other men the kind of life He has – by what I call ‘good infection.’ Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else” So theosis isn’t only this mystical progression towards filling up with being and becoming. Lewis is taking about it in terms of moral influence. There’s more than just one way of thinking about the whole thing. Another way to think about it is that anybody… anybody… could make a choice to follow Christ’s sacrifice and be a little Christ. To choose to be for others even unto one’s death. What’s the average Christian? I mean are you going to find this in a prosperity gospel congregation? No. But one might run into it in an evangelical congregation.
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Apr 30, 2024 06:34
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Theosis is a really cool concept that really humanizes belief for me, kind of the same way the idea of saints do (and very interconnected obviously)
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Apr 30, 2024 08:18
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Isn't that analogous to the idea of Perfection in the Holiness movement? Perhaps I'm reading it wrong, but that's how it tracks to me at this early hour.
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Apr 30, 2024 11:06
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LITERALLY A BIRD posted:So even if it is explicit in the Gospels by a theologian's reading it's still perceived as heresy by the average Christian, right? The idea of every person having Divine potential, man's telos being the journey of theosis? I even think--and I believe I've said before--that the Christological conflicts of the first millennium make the most sense in light of theosis. If Jesus is anything less than either human or divine, then we don't really become divine through him. At best, he becomes just an extraneous roadblock between humanity and God (which is ironically what plenty of Protestants think about the saints) rather than the meeting point between them. Azathoth posted:Isn't that analogous to the idea of Perfection in the Holiness movement? Perhaps I'm reading it wrong, but that's how it tracks to me at this early hour.
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Apr 30, 2024 16:34
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Keromaru5 posted:I mean, it's pretty much the big Orthodox teaching--the main reason we're so crazy about St. Gregory Palamas is because of his defense of it through the essence/energies distinction--so "average" really depends on what kind of Christian you're talking about. That's super fair. But okay. So I want to get this straight. Christianity has magic, in the form of gifts of the Spirit. It has apotheosis, in the form of imitating Christ (the phrasing of this form leaves it open to debate on degrees of literalism). Both of these things, however, are theoretically attainable by living humans who study the Word: that is, not the book, but the essential Logos itself. Now in the Gospels it's said clearly that any sort of magical power comes from the Spirit, right? I want to say Acts? It says something like "doesn't matter if you're Jewish or pagan, it all comes from Spirit." And the Christ said, "if you believe in me, you're not believing in me; you're believing in the one who sent me." The Gospels spend a lot of time encouraging people to hear what Spirit has to say to them, if I am recalling/understanding correctly. So my confusion now is in the way mysticism and ritual have been so literally demonized by okay, we will call it American Christianity. I don't really have the words to explain my confusion here. I had a comprehension of the stigma against mysticism/ritual when I thought Christianity just didn't want anything that looked like magic, or could lead to deification, near it with a twelve foot pole but no; you do have both of those things and they are widely and diversely recognized / considered important. So what gives? I guess nobody really has to answer me on this one since it's not a "you guys" problem, that's just where my head is at now 
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Apr 30, 2024 20:10
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LITERALLY A BIRD posted:That's super fair. I think this is essentially historical rather than textual. Christianity has a very long history of encountering non-Christian ritual practice and having to choose how to evangelize it: syncretism, acculturation, or elimination, for instance. The strain of thinking to just eliminate those practices never died, and in some cases I do think it was good to eliminate some specific practices. Like human sacrifice is genuinely bad, to use the stereotypical example. But that leaves us with a Christianity that is not always ready to recognize that of our practice which is in common with other religions. The centerpiece of our faith is a human sacrifice, for instance.
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Apr 30, 2024 20:26
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LITERALLY A BIRD posted:So my confusion now is in the way mysticism and ritual have been so literally demonized by okay, we will call it American Christianity. I don't really have the words to explain my confusion here. I had a comprehension of the stigma against mysticism/ritual when I thought Christianity just didn't want anything that looked like magic, or could lead to deification, near it with a twelve foot pole but no; you do have both of those things and they are widely and diversely recognized / considered important. So what gives? Modernity, a lot of it is harmful synthesis with modernity. Some of it is intentional manipulation and distortion for political ends. Some of it is Protestantism and is epistemological. Some of its ontological (materialism vs idealism). Some of it is all Spirit with no theology or history. Some of it is reaction to a revival of the way the stoics viewed the Logos. The theonomy which was a synthesis of antiquity and Christianity of the Middle Ages broke. There isn’t a new one. A new one wouldn’t be a good thing. It’s a mess.
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Apr 30, 2024 20:44
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I think a lot of the confusion is that American fundamentalists tend to look at Catholic and Orthodox rituals and sacraments as basically idolatry and sorcery anyway--or at best, "works righteousness." But within Catholicism and Orthodoxy, the rituals serve a vital purpose, and there's a clearer delineation of what's what. I wasn't even aware that fundamentalists were familiar enough with divinization to have an opinion on it. Beyond that, it kind of depends on what you mean by "magic." Miracle-working is well within the purview of the Holy Spirit and the saints, but that's not the same thing as ritual magic, or any of the various -mancies. A lot of the issue with those is with invoking spirits (who are generally assumed by Christians to be demons; at the very least, they're going to have their own agendas) or trying to coax miracles out of inanimate objects (as opposed to miraculous relics, which are empowered by the Holy Spirit--and can't be coaxed). On a side note, I know we talked before about casting lots being permissible, and why. One thing that occurred to me afterwards was that this relies on randomness--unless someone cheats, God is literally the only entity that can affect the outcome, and there's no attempt at coercing him (except inasmuch as anything happens under His watch). So I think that's what helps set that apart from other forms of magic.
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Apr 30, 2024 20:58
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Does that make I Ching kosher, so to speak?
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Apr 30, 2024 21:04
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That's probably a question for someone who knows more about the Jesuit mission to China.
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Apr 30, 2024 21:43
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