comments:
relates it to the idea of the two acts of Plotinus Ah, that makes sense. I've never got into Plotinus. Back in the day, an atheist friend of mine invited me to a Bible study he started(!). Of all the theists there, I was by far the most rational/empirical, as my atheist friend would understand those terms. It probably helps that I had a very hard time socializing when I was young. I don't see why it would follow that divine impassibility should require that we can't suffer while serving others. The question is whether God can suffer while serving others. Can we imitate God in so doing, or can we only imitate the non-God aspect of Jesus? It might help to note that parents can suffer without anything being done to their bodies. Orthodoxy is a far more cosmic religion than other views of Christianity, understanding all of creation to be meant to be going through the same process of salvation alongside mankind, and all of creation to be imaged in the divine mind with its logoi or thought-forms. I'm glad some Christians make Romans 8:16–25 mean something. I never got the sense that Protestants or Catholics were able to recognize the magnitude of that passage. And that is part of how we are made in the image of God, with the likeness of God being how much we can integrate the cosmos together within our soul, just as God holds together the cosmos within the soul of Christ. That's kind of a bold statement. It seems like God is expecting us to actually imitate Colossians 1:15–20 and Hebrews 1:1–3, at least to the extent that finite creatures can. I've been starting to think in that direction, especially after concluding that Job 40:6–14 is a challenge for us to meet, not something only God ought to do. But it certainly gets closer to theosis than I think many non-Orthodox are willing to go! I am very against foundationalism, closer to coherentism, although not quite. My view of epistemology is that it is all recursive without any vicious circularity, just as all of reality is recursively imaging (or sinfully failing to image) all of the rest of reality. Heh, that's actually my inclination as well. I don't see how Yahweh can be ʿezer or how Jesus can diakonēsai without the ability to work more subtly than we can presently cognize. Foundationalism to me is an attempt to gain existential safety via intellectual certainty—rather antithetical to Psalm 46. Stoicheia is just a word meaning a basic principle, which in no way necessitates foundationalism, just as I can speak of God as a foundation without believing in foundationalism. Yeah I haven't exhaustively searched for how stoicheia was used. I am pretty sure that Socrates used it in a foundationalist sense. But whether that carries over to the NT, I don't know. Paul's certainly against them! What is your view exactly? Your flair says agapist. Your username is familiar so I think I may have spoken to you some years ago about it, but I don't remember. I'm a fairly little-o orthodox Christian, drawing deeply on Christian traditions. Perhaps my most radical thought is that I think Christians would find it glorious to engage in what I call agape inquiry. It would parallel scientific inquiry in some ways, especially the bit where stuff learned here might just be applicable over there. So we need a way to get it from point A to B that isn't just pastor's conferences. I actually believe in the priesthood of all believers, so all could engage in agape inquiry rather than just the properly qualified. Where science steers clear of the idiosyncratic individual, agape inquiry would of course focus on idiosyncratic individuals giving of themselves to each other. There exists I believe a contradiction at the heart of modernity, between a liberalism which says the individual matters, and politics and economics which drowns that individual unless she links arms with enough others in a ways which look rather illiberal. I exposed the epistemological version of this contradiction in a recent comment. Trust in science is little different from Greek trust in logos, a logos which says: "Necessity does not allow itself to be persuaded." (Metaphysics, V § 5) The Hebrew notion is very different: trust in will, will which can be persuaded. Even by the King of Nineveh, or at least his people who believed Jonah. I suspect most are terrified of will. Too much will means fascism, apparently. This even shows up in fears of "Christian perfectionism", which can only exist because those judged more-perfect are not more like Christ. Theosis for all, I say. We may have spoken, but I haven't saved any links. I did comment on your post An Omnipotent God cannot limit his own power. Generally, I struggle to track with Eastern Orthodox people when they shift much past first gear. Or do you believe God changes? I actually try not to say much about God's nature. Rather, I would ask what is required for God to be reliable to us, according to what God has promised. (Not whatever nonsense we impose on God and then expect from God, like you see from Job's friends. Also: God need not respect Plato's Form of the Good.) Continuing: The way I would explain it is, I can push your body, I can punch you, I can hug you, and in doing all of these things your soul would participate and in a co-extensive sense "suffer" with your body, but when I push your body I'm not pushing your soul, and when I punch your body I'm not punching your soul. In the same way, God in his divine nature can co-extensively "suffer" with us, or with his human flesh, but does not ever suffer or become moved passively. There is absolutely a communication of properties in the incarnation such that the divinity suffers in some way with his flesh in some way like the soul suffers with the flesh. Ah, this reminds me of early Christian teachings that being a slave doesn't particularly get in the way of following Jesus. It also links up nicely with Alistair McFadyen 2000 Bound to Sin: Abuse, Holocaust and the Christian Doctrine of Sin, where he talks about the victimized sometimes aligning themselves with the abuse, and thereby corrupting their wills. Psalm 50:16–21 is a nice foil. And curiously (or divinely), I listened to half of Nate Buzz and Ari Lamm on Jacob vs. Esau and Israel vs. Shechem last night. One of them contends that Jacob was passive until he meets up with Esau and wrestles with, well, exactly whom is contentious! This focus on passivity has special meaning for me, as I'm the youngest of four with my next sibling five years older than I. What you're saying here seems to be at arbitrary variance with WP: Impassibility. What I see in that article is a hatred of emotion. And yet, can 'emotion' really be connected so strongly to pathos and thymos in the NT? I'm thinking that those emotionally weak are vulnerable to emotional manipulation and those who are intellectually weak are vulnerable to intellectual manipulation. Any idea that one can execute a James 3-style mastery of the tongue solely with intellectual strength is silliness to my ears. But I'll have to read impassibility as if it is what you describe here, and see if that makes better sense of the sources. Even if that would require moderate intellectual reworking to make room for healthy emotion. Because God is truth itself, and truth must be experienced, specifically in the Orthodox Church where his presence lies. Natural Theology presupposes a standpoint of God removed from our experience of existence, a God transcendent and unknowable, and thus distorts it. So I'm a Protestant and really Über-Protestant since I'm non-denominational. I'm increasingly aware of the traditional ahistoricity of Protestantism. But I also have some experience with Chosen People Syndrome, among Christians, Jews, and others. I do think it's the fire with which God chooses to play, since the strength to refuse assimilation into a larger group easily goes too far. And if any sect of Christianity had the superiority that so many claim, there are plenty of scriptural criteria one would expect to see far more prominently there, than in any other sect. And I'm happy to treat churches as hospitals and look for derivatives rather than absolute values, even higher-order derivatives. Judge trees by their fruit, yes? Perhaps where I'm most Protestant is my utter disconnection from "saints". I don't really see any eschatological place in scripture for such discrimination. Rather, we have Moses' hope in Numbers 11: “Are you jealous on my account? If only all Yahweh’s people were prophets and Yahweh would place his Spirit on them!” And we have the call in Hebrews 12, including a warning against the insistence on human mediation at Sinai. Out of chars …