There is garbage out there .... but how much?

There are two points of this post:
1. There is Christian junk out there, seriously stinky.
2. We are okay with scrutinising the Bible, but not the lenses.

Sadly, I just discovered this, which is sad, but I would say almost certainly symptomatic of other unconfessed elaborations. This is definitely not shining like stars among the warped and crooked as children of God, this is simply being warped and crooked generation. (Phil 2:15)". So the boy who came back from Heaven", did not go anywhere. He made it all up, and admits it, the dying, heaven, meeting Jesus, the Devil, being raised back to life... It casts doubt, of course, on other similar stories (which may of course be true). One thing is definite, they sell loads of copies, because people are desperate for the details of what happens next.

But there is also a quote from the teenager, now 16, who has made the confession. It is very simple and reminds me of my own quest. Never thought I would quote a sixteen year-old on here, but there we go!

"I said I went to heaven because I thought it would get me attention. When I made the claims that I did, I had never read the Bible. People have profited from lies, and continue to. They should read the Bible, which is enough. The Bible is the only source of truth. Anything written by man cannot be infallible."

"The Bible ... is enough... the only source of truth". Sounds like this young guy found God, who could be redeeming for himself something here.

There are so many Christians out there who basically, although sometimes extremely loosely, hold to a Nicene form of trinitarianism (and one key feature of this blog journey has been to discover that there are multiple forms of trinitarianism - in fact I myself am finding myself adopting a non-Nicene form of it, more on that soon). My hypothesis - and this is based in part on my own experience, but also observation of others - is that the Nicene cornerstone of the Christian faith (is it the cornerstone?) is preached, but it goes pretty much unscrutinised. THE BIBLE gets more scrutiny than Nicea, it is respectfully exegeted by believers, seeking to both determine true and original meaning while simultaneously careful to ensure the interpretation does not stray from other parts of Scripture. But not Nicea. That is because Nicea - and a whole procession of creeds, canons and councils to follow, that have to follow to try to clean up the mess made - are lenses through which we read scripture. We do not read the lenses.

We look at the Bible, we look through the creeds. Since the Bible reveals who God is, I am arguing that the lenses are seriously worth checking out if we are serious about knowing the guy[s] we are looking at. My grandmother at the end of her life lost nearly all of her sight. However, as it turns out, a certain tint of yellow lens helped her see contrasts better. She needed a lens, it was not like she could see without it. But the lens makes everything yellowish, and that is key information also. She knew that she couldn't argue that the tree really is yellow because she knew about her lens, its usefulness and its limits.

The creeds hold unbelievable and unidentified influence over us Christians today. Rant over - for now!

Time-locked language Part 3

Update on posts Time-locked language Parts 1 and 2: 

We should note that Zizioulas (Holmes, QFT, p13) strongly emphasises the Father's causing principle within the trinity. Holmes says Zizioulas qualifies this causation as something "free and personal, not something mechanical and fixed." The question and challenge raised for this article on time-locked language, is now to find something that is "free and personal" that can be caused in a non-time-dependant way. Can you think of anything?

I think I finally see a way through here in looking back at the Greek word, αἰτία, an old theological principle to which Zizioulas wants to remain loyal. In Strong's Greek NT 156 we have indeed something less mechanical. Here we speak of "guilt", responsibility, accusation, fault, grounds, reason. I cannot deny that this opens a quite different discussion in terms of NT authors' perspective around the notion of causation, however, it really must not be forgotten that this word is not used for this purpose prior to the patristic period, that is hundreds of years AFTER the scriptures were written (it would seem particularly around the debates surrounding the Filioque clause, St Maximus the Confessor, and the 15th Century Council of Florence). Where the Scriptures speak of the interpersonal relationships between God the Father, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit vocabulary other than αἰτία is used. The word "send" jumps out very strongly in my mind.

Time-locked language (Part 2)

Source.

Generate.

Spirate.

Proceed.

Cause.

...................Beget. 

?

b. From doctrinal to Scriptural usage: a leap of faith

The Holy Scriptures agree about the time-rootedness of these words. Even in the closest we get to anything like a present tense, which I think might be Psalm 7:2 and its quotation (and validation?!) in Hebrews 1:5, we are still utterly time-bound. Today, yes, but: "I have begotten you". If that information is to be comprehended by a language-speaking educated human, then they are no longer at a conception stage or age, they are at an adoptive age. I am not saying that Jesus was adopted as Son of God here, in either a human way or even an ungraspable divine way, although some think this was one of the earliest christologies that may have existed (and by no means a bad thing either, check out Ehrman on the superiority in the Roman mind at least, of being adopted over a natural child). Whatever our later doctrinal take or attempt at expanding the past-tense of begotten - I just love the KJV's begat, I don't know why! - Scripturally we find ourselves more at home temporally and conceptually.

But if I am to nurture the concept of a big God, I need to get more comfortable with his surpassing my human limitations, right? Much is said and now written about "mystery" arguments of doctrine. What I retain is that to believe something you have to understand it and find it reasonable at least to some degree in order to believe in its truthfulness. Of course some of these "mysteries" are directly in the authoritative texts themselves (I am sure not all of those would seem mysterious to the original beneficiaries of the writings). But the greatest mysteries are not located there, they are unashamedly standing at the heart of the Nicean 4th Century Trinitarian declarations (i.e. not Tertullian, or other Logos theologians), the 5th Century's hypostatic union of Christ and perhaps finally in the two-willed Christ dyothelite (culminating as Holmes wholeheartedly reaffirms, in agreement of it not being the son of God praying in Gethsemane, for there is but one divine will).

So why does the doctrinal language attempt this language-leap? Why not just come up with their own jargon?
Well they do come up with a lot of jargon actually, as some of the previous paragraph should show. But not all. The leap in tense of beget, which is a scriptural word, is to do with this development of son of god to God the Son, son of God the Father (Nicea), while hanging on to the authority of scripture's key idea of begetting - although I might one day have more experience to debate the successfulness of that "hanging on" (not yet). Begetting usually means causing, and is at least close in meaning. But it is very difficult to hold out that both Jesus is eternal and that in the past at some point he was caused, was begotten, etc., even if that is what the Bible says (another less-known one, although this is more anecdotal really, is that Jesus is always said to have loved us, i.e. love through action at the cross). The way around this of course is to choose a "more suitable" tense that connects us better - although in good and right recognition of God's ineffability, not perfectly - to the deeper connections within the "Godhead" that unlock us slightly from time. Assumption: the Scriptures are perfect, holy, infallible but a bit too time-locked.

A trinitarian conclusion: perhaps we can humanly make progress to comprehending a triune God's timeless begetting, being begotten, sending and proceeding, when we think in terms of non-specific effect. So in this line of thinking, we might just possibly be able to conceive of the effect of fathership and sonship... (and spiritship!) to be mutually, permanently and effectively caused. "Sustained" still seems closer to me, though.

Time-locked language (Part 1)

Source.

Generate.

Spirate.

Proceed.

Cause.

...................Beget. 

?

In today's post, I am going to somewhat vaguely, air something of a theological frustration of mine. This frustration is more felt against theologians than God, and more aimed at ancient theologians than recent ones, which should be a big clue to me to go and do some more homework. The frustration is based on:

a. the way causing works in most (if not all) instances in human languages - I argue it is semantically time-locked, or if not completely time-locked, limited to general non-specific effects, and effects which are inherently about change.
b. the way in which the tenses shift from scripture to doctrine (i.e. Jesus was begotten by the Father in scripture, and the Father begets [eternally generates] the Son, in doctrinal parlance).

Because a. took me longer to write than I initially thought, I will post b. separately.

A Time-locked causation

When we try, sometimes I get the impression of "try desperately", to make the doctrinal ideas fit Scripture and the Scripture the doctrinal ideas (Church fathers), or indeed to make the Scriptures agree with one another within the model of the doctrine (Holmes), we forget, or we forgot, something that is very basic indeed. The above words (cause, generate, beget, etc.) cannot be used, or only very rarely used, in describing the eternal or permanent. In my two languages of English and French, these words are inseparable from the notions of time and movement. Of course, that may not be the case in Greek, I need to check, but needless to say, I anticipate issues there also for the simple reason that we have chosen these words as apt and suited for translation purposes. This is why my questions to a fictive, English-speaking, 4th-century pro-Nicene theologian might be: "what does it mean to cause something that has always existed?" "What is there left in the word 'cause' once you remove time from its very essence?" 

And finally: "Please, would you stop misreading (Holmes' word, not mine) Isaiah 53:8?!"

As Christians, we do not believe that any human language is divine, in the sense, for example, that Muslims believe the Arabic language comes directly from Allah. Greek is just Greek, and so on, developed necessarily by humans to express and comprehend their needs and lives. When rain falls and the sun shines and the seeds are sown, and the gods smile, the crops grow. They were not, and now they are. Causation. There is little in causing-vocabulary that lends itself to describing an eternal or permanent action.

This said, I would first like to take a moment to try very hard and disprove my own objection to be sure. Look at two natural examples with me that may seem to create "mind space" for this kind of perpetual causation, examples that would be valid for people back then as they area now: first the moon, then the sun.

1. The moon's gravitational effect

We cannot be sure what people presumed about the phenomena of tides, but for the sake of this article let us assume that some kind of causal connection was made between the location of the moon the tide. Does the moon perpetually cause tides? Yes I think for the sake of this counter-argument, we could say it does. But let us be clear here, we are not saying that one huge lump of water is produced or removed over and over, all we can say is that this phenomenon is perpetually caused by the position of the moon. A permanent effect. So the moon's gravity on our oceans helps us provide a little leg-room on the perpetual side, while still absolutely being locked into movement.

2. Heat from the sun

Let's keep it astral. So does the sun's steady warmth (leaving aside seasons, weather fluctuations, day and night and everything else) provide us with more linguistic head space? Unlike the moon's gravitational effects on the ocean's movements, the heat we sense does not change, and yet this warmth is caused continuously, without it, we would freeze to death in an instant.
Here we certainly can discount 1st or 4th century notions of vibrating molecules, and their movement, besides that would just be getting a bit too theoretical! Well, what is warmth? Warmth is a sensation I feel after I have been feeling cold. So while there is change and time-lockedness there, we could move on to simply say the warmth of the sun is essential to life. The warmth of the sun (in combination with other factors), causes life. Continuously.

So having identified some room for this notion of perpetual causation from natural phenomena, we should note the following key points: 1) permanent causation examples seem fewer and are theoretical, i.e. no two actual tides are identical even in the same location, 2) the only permanent cause examples seem to be phenomenal change-inducing effects, i.e. the warmth of the sun helps cause the crops to grow. There is no specific thing or creature or person that is perpetually begotten or caused in our human languages.

So, as mentioned in the intro, I argue that causing is semantically time-locked, and where not completely time-locked, limited to general non-specific effects, and effects which represent change.

Update: Note that Zizioulas (Holmes, QFT, p13) strongly emphasises the Father's causing of the Trinity. Holmes qualifies this causation as something "free and personal, not something mechanical and fixed." The question and challenge raised for this article on time-locked language, is now to find something that is "free and personal" that can be caused in a non-time-dependant way. Can you think of anything?

I think I finally see a way through here in looking back at the Greek word, αἰτία, an old theological principle to which Zizioulas wants to remain loyal. In Strong's Greek NT 156 we have indeed something less mechanical. Here we speak of "guilt", responsibility, accusation, fault, grounds, reason. I cannot deny that this opens a quite different discussion in terms of NT authors' perspective around causation, however, it really must not be forgotten that this word is not used prior to the patristic period, that is hundreds of years AFTER the scriptures were written (it would seem particularly around the debates surrounding the Filioque clause, St Maximus the Confessor, and the 15th Century Council of Florence).