Tag: Creation

Sunday, 3/16/25

God making the world

As Peter Geach puts it, for Aquinas the claim that God made the world “is more like ‘the minstrel made music’ than ‘the blacksmith made a shoe’”; that is to say, creation is an ongoing activity rather than a once-and-for-all event. While the shoe might continue to exist even if the blacksmith dies, the music necessarily stops when the minstrel stops playing, and the world would necessarily go out of existence if God stopped creating it.

Edward Feser, Aquinas

Sitting with the dead

Walking backwards into our own graves, so filled with denial because we lived not really once thinking that such a thing could one day happen to us. We miss the needed consciousness that sitting with a dead body will sober and sanctify us into. We haven’t been done a favour by having the end of life ushered out of sight.

Part of getting made into a human is the final part. Getting un-made. That preparing for death is not the same as what was before it. Denial is not just a river in Egypt. It’s not my time is not the appropriate mantra of a grown up. One day, any day, it will be my time, is better.

Martin Shaw, On Death

“American Christianity”

After playing whataboutism with the Manicheanism of the Seven Mountain Mandate and shrill progressives like Anne Applebaum, R.R. Reno sums up:

A friend recently argued that “evangelicalism” is a spent label. It gained currency during the postwar era, but cultural changes, not just in American society at large, but within conservative Protestant churches have made the term impossible to define. Better, he said, to speak of “American Christianity,” the free-wheeling, entrepreneurial, and populist form of Bible-only Christianity that has its roots in the Second Great Awakening and was supercharged by the Pentecostal revivals of the twentieth century.

American Christianity has always been deeply embedded in and responsive to the social realities that shape the lives of non-elite Americans. We’re in a populist moment in our politics, because these non-elite Americans have decided to use their votes to fight back. The same thing is happening in our home-grown American Christianity. I may dismiss the reasoning behind the New Apostolic Reformation (not least because it is anti-theological) and rue its blustering political biblicism. But I won’t criticize the activist spirit. Why should the great American tradition of reformist zeal be the sole possession of secular progressives?

R.R. Reno

I tend to agree with the uselessness of the “evangelical” label, though I’m not ready to cede “American Christianity” to the sectarians.

I think I’ve tacitly undertaken to undermine the the free-wheeling, entrepreneurial, populist and anti-intellectual aspects in which, for lack of a better term, American evangelicalism specializes — in hopes that evangelicals who love Christ more than political power will wise up and come take a look at Orthodoxy.

How to work up a crusade

The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of a good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with a good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your behavior “righteous indignation”—this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.

Aldous Huxley via R.R. Reno. Surely this concept is behind Mafia Don’s campaign promise “I am your retribution.”

I’ve known for decades that there’s something corrupt about an economy based on competitive acquisitiveness and the promise of endless growth. The politics of retribution is no less corrupt.

I’m using “corrupt” in the third adjectival sense.

God sees the heart

There was once a monk who lived on Mount Athos, in Karyes. He was drinking and getting drunk every day, scandalizing the pilgrims. After a while he died and this relieved some of the believers who went and told elder Paisios they were pleased that finally this huge problem was resolved.

Father Paisios replied that he knew about the monk’s death, because he saw a whole battalion of angels who came to pick up his soul.

Fr. Stephen Freeman

Relgio-Political wisdom

A devil is no less a devil if the lie he tells flatters you and stands to help you defeat your enemies and achieve power.

Rod Dreher, Something Demonic Is In The Air, 1/13/2021

There’s more than thinking to life

Contemporary western Christianity trained us how to think and what to think; whereas Christ himself, as did Lao Tzu before Him, taught us how not to need to think.

Christ the Eternal Tao

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Saturday, August 11, 2012

  1. Atlantis Found?
  2. John of Damascus on the Incarnation.
  3. Murfreesboro Muslims prevail.
  4. Choose one: self-employment or religious freedom.
  5. Nominalism distilled; drink at your own risk!
  6. Sexualizing Everything.
  7. Good cause, bad argument.
  8. Uncommonly Stupid Product Safety Warnings.

Continue reading “Saturday, August 11, 2012” →

“Let us make man ….”

Father John Behr, Dean of St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, makes “a really interesting and often overlooked distinction” in a Lenten reflection:

… {T]he opening chapter of Genesis … begins, of course, with God issuing all sorts of commands:

“Let there be light.” There was light.

“Let there be a firmament. Let the waters under the heavens be gathered. Let the earth put forth vegetation. Let there be light in the firmament. Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures. Let the earth bring forth living creatures.

This is simply a divine fiat. “Let it be.” And this divine fiat is sufficient to bring all these things into existence. “Let it be. It was. It was good.”

Then having declared everything into existence by a word alone, God then announces His project. Not with an injunction – “Let it be” – but in the subjunctive – “Let us make a human being. Let us make a human being in our image, after our likeness.”

The express intention and the work of God Himself, therefore, is fashioning a human being in His image and likeness. This is the work of God. This is what He sets His mind to do. This is what He specifically deliberates about. This is the divine purpose and the divine resolve.

And this is the only thing which is not followed by the words “And it was so.”

In fact, only at the end – after Pilate unwittingly says “Behold the man,” or more literally, “Behold the human being” (… anthropos) – only then do we hear Christ say “It is finished.”

So the work of God, His intention from all eternity, is to make a human being. This is a project He announces at the very beginning, and this is what He completes in His Pascha.

When we come to the end of Great Lent, and our journey with Christ to Jerusalem, standing by the cross and burying His body, then we will hear at the Doxasticon for Vespers on Holy Saturday, we’ll hear a confirmation of exactly this point. We’ll sing “Moses the Great mystically prefigured this present day, saying “And God blessed the seventh day, for this is the blessed sabbath, this is the day of rest, on which the only-begotten Son of God rested from all His works. Through the economy of death,” it continues, “He kept the sabbath in the flesh, and returning again through the resurrection He granted us eternal life, for He alone is good and loves mankind,” or more literally, loves anthropos, loves the human being.

With the Passion of Christ, the work of God is complete, and the Lord of creation now rests from His works in the virgin tomb on the blessed sabbath, to be the firstborn of the virgin, the firstborn of the dead, whose bretheren we are called to become.

So the project – the work of God Himself – announced at the beginning, is completed at the end by one who is God and man. For every other aspect of creation, all that was needed was a simple divine fiat – “Let it be” – but for the human being to come into existence requires one amongst us who is able to say “Let it be.”

If this is the case, then we have yet to become human.  And as St. Ignatius testifies so resoundingly, we only and finally do so by following Christ to our own martyria, our own witness, and our confession of Him. Giving our own fiat. So only in the future then, are we finally created, being born into life as a human being.

I have formerly echoed Fr. Stephen Freeman in saying I despair of sainthood, but I’m working on becoming a real human being.  Maybe that’s not such a small thing after all. Maybe it’s even a distinction without a difference.

Tofu Tidbits* 12/9/11

  1. A single point of light.
  2. Science and Faith.
  3. Football and Faith.
  4. Decorating Politics with Slogans.
  5. Hormones and Life Savers.
  6. Civil and mature debate my way, you &#!!%^^!.
  7. Danu
  8. Othello

* Temporarily renamed in honor of the Nativity Fast, about which Mystagogy has some more information.

Continue reading “Tofu Tidbits* 12/9/11” →

Sacramental Ontology

Materialism cannot explain the human person, and I suspect that it never will unless an extremely reductionist view of the human person becomes standard issue.

But what if materialism is equally incapable of fully explaining (choose one) matter/nature/creation? What if we need a sacramental ontology of creation?

A sacramental ontology was once assumed by virtually all Christians, says Evangelical Theologian Hans Boersma, both by book and in the current Mars Hill Audio Journal (links you to the site, but audio requires subscription). All things find their reality and identity in the eternal word of God, the Logos who became flesh to reconcile all things.

Much of Western Christianity now shares the assumption that there are barriers between heaven and earth, between the supernatural and the natural, between God and creation. The world, in effect, was independent (once the “watchmaker” had finished and wound it up), worked just fine, and was of no particular, Incarnation-prompting interest to God, until sin messed it up, and that’s why God is sort of interested now. Were it not for sin, God and creation could go their respective ways again.

[Between the writing of the preceding paragraph and its publication, I realized via a podcast (that’s how I multitask on bike rides) that the falsehood that the world is fundamentally independent of God is an echo of the primordial sin, into which the serpent tempted Eve with the the promise that she would be like God — and have no further need of Him.]

Mars Hill’s Ken Myers and Boersma acknowledge that they’re exploring a different, and historic Christian view, as they must since they’re exploring patristic writings and finding the “sacramental ontology” there.

Boersma is part of a movement of Nouvelle Théologie, which like neo-Orthodoxy before it is grasping for something its proponents sense has been lost.

This is a hopeful sign, as is Rob Bell’s questioning, in Love Wins, of whether a Hell to which an angry God consigns people who’ve never uttered the prescribed pieties, is really quite so central as Evangelicalism has “traditionally” held.

Such dabblers or deep diggers into Patristics may some day realize that they’re not discovering something that’s been lost or suppressed in Christianity, but merely discovering something that was lost in the portion of Christendom that drank deeply at Enlightenment wells and thus entered into a sort of thralldom. That’s why there are knowing winks among Orthodox (and probably Catholic) former Evangelicals when they hear that Wheaton College has opened a Patristics center. We know what tends to happen when people get deep in history.

Moliere’s Monsieur Jourdain famously discovered that he had been speaking prose all his life without knowing it. The late Church History titan, Jaroslav Pelikan, entering Holy Orthodoxy in the last decades of his life, acknowledged that (through his deep steeping in Church history) he had been thinking Orthodoxly for decades already.

Is Hans Boersma or Ken Myers next? Has Myers already made the move, but stayed with Mars Hill Audio’s format to serve as a bridge for others?

Meanwhile, I’ve got another book on my wish list, with a Kindle sample downloaded to whet my appetite.