You’re going to out me as a closet Orthodox devotee yet, aren’t you?!
I suspect I would admire much of their take-aways from some of the early church fathers - regarding which ones they heed more than their western counterparts did - Origen being one of those if I’m not mistaken?
Lately I’ve been running into things that make me ponder my life, and I keep finding myself thinking that I feel mature enough now to be a college student. Then I wonder if my perspective is even sound!
The only place I think I’ve gained wisdom is that in planning for idiots – always important when building trails – there’s no point in being angry when someone comes along and out-idiots all planning.
I forget when I decided I was more brought up in “churchianity” than Christianity, but I do remember it was a big part of what made me walk out of Methodist confirmation classes which seemed to be far more about John and Charles Wesley than about Christ.
My first college biology professor (a Lutheran) held that thinking “science and philosophy” weren’t part of the sacred made for a life sadly devoid of real understanding. He noted that one of the lessons of the Mosaic Law, which covered so many ordinary human things, was that everything we engage in is sacred – including biology classes, especially cell biology. 
The others in the informal intelligent design club I mingled with in my university days would respond that if this is so then there’s no point trying to learn anything at all because if/since the universe points to a Designer/Creator and that Designer/Creator is at all interested in us then there should be evidence of His/Her/Its efforts at communication that is just as objective as any scientific knowledge.
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That reading has always bothered me because I’ve never seen myself in either group – I see myself as lamenting all the times I should have seen Him but didn’t, along with the times where I darned well ought to have recognized that I was seeing Him but did nothing.
A cousin once offered that he wanted to find another place to live if that actually happened. I wasn’t part of the conversation before that but I heard it, stuck in a bookmark and slapped the book I was reading shut to get attention, and asked if he knew that there were neighborhoods in the U.S. where there was no majority, where everyone was a minority and none had more than a quarter of the population. He didn’t, but asked, “So what?” and I proceeded to relate the conclusions of a study of a half dozen such neighborhoods, primarily in California and New York: far less crime, higher levels of education at all ages, far lower levels of gang activity, less drug use, and more. I suggested that anyone who could live in such a mixed neighborhood but chose not to was a bit short in good sense.
For several years after I moved back to the parental home to help take care of my dad I was constantly bothered by something and could identify it; it seemed something was off but I had no clue what it might be. Then one day while shopping a couple of busloads of college kids came pouring into the store and in just moments I found myself whistling as I shopped. That was when it hit me: at university there was enough diversity that whites were barely a majority, and those busloads of college students were just the same, if whites were a majority among them at all; it made me realize that I’d felt like I was living in a stunted ecosystem or some such thing!
A couple of years later when I was out front of a store that serves as a local hang-out for kids, talking with a guy I was trying to help straighten his life out, he noticed a group of young adults coming along the sidewalk towards us and made a rude and negative comment about them “living here now”. I looked up and saw a mix of some blacks, a couple of Koreans, an Indian (or possibly Pakistani), a Vietnamese, a couple of Mexicans, and a pair of North American natives. I don’t at all remember what he said, but I asked, “Really? They all live here?” and he confirmed that with some disgust. I watched them walking towards us, talking happily together, and said, “Awesome!” He just stared at me and refused to talk any more that day.
[Since then he’s come around somewhat, shifting from white supremacist to “white pride”, admitting that other people are still people but that he’s still proud of what he is.]
That reminds me of the time I was privileged to get to hear the great radio preacher Dr. Oswald Hoffman preach in person, and the Gospel reading for the day was the parable of the lost sheep. An elder read it at the appropriate point in the liturgy, but then instead of the very common statement that the Gospel lesson was the text for the sermon, Dr. Hoffman read the whole thing again, then closed his Bible and looked out over the congregation – and just kept looking, catching any eye here and there, until people were actually starting to squirm. He then leaned forward over the edge of the pulpit and said, like he was sharing a secret, “There ARE no ‘ninety and nine’.”
I’d always known of course that we’re all supposed to recognize that we’re the lost sheep, but it never really hit me until that day when Dr. Hoffman in making that declaration managed to make it like a punch to the gut.
Sadly (but true to form) he managed to offend some people with that statement.
I once went through a year with more money than I, having grown up definitely in the poor category, knew what to do with. I didn’t recognize how much that stressed me until that year was over – I think my stress level was higher than when I wasn’t quite sure where my next meal was coming from. During COVID when various benefits were raised I finally found myself in the “sweet spot”: just enough more money than I really needed that I could be generous to people along the way. Now those are ended, and prices on everything are going up, and now I’m back to stressing over having enough – not unhappy from the lack of it, but frustrated at the results of that lack.
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My sister got awards in high school for excellence in German. She loved it because they didn’t put up with any nonsense about having to keep two words that obviously belonged together in a sentence as separate words the way English so pedantically does.
Ancient Greek has more than that and I love it! I never quite got to the point where I could use it for something as common as keeping a journal, but I have repeatedly lamented that English is not more like ancient or even Koine Greek because English can be so vague and imprecise, for example in a sentence the word “he” might appear three or four times and if it is referring to more than one person the sentence can get confusing – whereas in ancient Greek there would be no confusion at all.
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I wonder if and how that interacts with the ancient penchant for teaching by contradiction.
This isn’t actually what I wanted to respond to, but after an hour of searching without success this is the closest thing to it: someone posted something about minds recognizing mind in themselves but not being able to recognize them in others, and that gave me a very unsettling moment until I made a connection–
Last year I read a science fiction book where humanity was up against an alien race which had that very feature: they recognized mind in themselves and in their own kind, but lacked the capacity to recognize mind anywhere else. The author’s exploration of how those aliens related to the rest of the universe was devastatingly chilling, enough so that I had to keep putting the book down to do something peaceful like trimming the roses. One pointed bit in the book was some humans, recognizing the issue, had the wisdom to ask just how different we really were; after all we’d lived with “lesser” species that have mind for generation – so did these aliens at least regard us the way we regard dogs and dolphins? or did they see us more like we see ants, able to cooperate and even do problem-solving, but “obviously” not ‘people’?
Outside the book that question led to wondering about Creation and humanity: if homo sapiens and others down through the millennia before some spiritual awakening, the introduction by God of spiritual life into genus homo, were able to think, were they more like those aliens, able even to form societies but not really see that the “other” might also be “people”?
That strikes me as a sort of weak echo of a point made by Fr. John Behr when talking about Jesus, that He showed us what it is to be God in the way that He died as a man.
I’ve always thought of Jesus on the Cross as Man while recognizing that He was of course also God, but Behr flips this on its head, saying that on the Cross Jesus was foremost God, showing us what it means to be God by dying as a man – and thus “drawing all men to Himself” that we, too, might show others what it is to be God in the way that through us He lives as human beings.
And to show us what it means to be God: to give past the point of mere pain/agony.
I’ll start with the science and come back to the aliens.
The ability to think doesn’t require language or a spiritual awakening. What I was originally talking about was empathy, or the ability to project yourself into another’s mind and “imagine” what they’re thinking. That ability can be called “intention reading” (Tomasello) or Theory of Mind (many others). Both toddlers and great apes possess “first order” Theory of Mind. Chimps can infer what others (of many species) want or intend by their actions, gaze and vocalizations. Adult males spend most of their free time trying to fool each other, and they work together to surround and kill monkeys by predicting where they might flee and setting a trap, and even chimps have a form of culture. Pretty dang smart. They didn’t have an abstract concept of “people,” but they recognized conspecifics and understood that other species of apes, monkeys, and other mammals (at the least) had a mind that operated similar to their own.
Edit: Dang, I forgot the aliens! If an alien culture, no matter how technologically advanced, lacked a basic ability such as empathy, I’d say they’re the “lesser” beings. That would pretty much equate to a society of psychopaths and narcissists, which would self-destruct in short order.
Unfortunately this forum encourages long responses filled with unrelated parts. Not everyone can read and post every day, so in order to respond to things it becomes necessary to include responses to two, three, four, even five posts in just one. That’s especially true when someone discovers a thread with hundreds of posts, and is why most of my posts in here have been so long. I’ve been skimming and skipping a lot of material trying to catch up here and I’m still only two-thirds of the way through. That’s the result of the three consecutive posts rule, which as far as I can see is designed to discourage participation – and that is true also of the seven-day rule; some weeks I can’t check in often enough and it’s not uncommon for me to find that a thread I’m interested in has died because of the seven-day rule.
Multiple responses in single posts can be confusing, so I’ve started using this little divider to indicate a border between disparate bits–
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Pieper? The only Pieper I know in terms of theology is Franz Pieper who wrote a rather lengthy Dogmatics that is supposed to be Lutheran but has definite outside influences.
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That fits well the modern recognition that we don’t actually “live in the moment”, we live in a mental construct that is actually running a bit behind temporally. So the “present” doesn’t actually exist for us and thus can’t be a phenomenon of time but of eternity.
I remember wading through Kierkegaard – which we used to deliberately mispronounce as “kirche·gard” – and thinking I’d never read anything quite so obtuse, but it was worth the effort because every now and then a real gem would pop up.
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Just noticed I’m two-thirds of the way through this thread, and heading for the final stretch.
The odd thing about this board is that if no one else makes any posts I won’t be able to get any closer to the finish, but if others do make posts that moves the finish line further away.
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Fr. John Behr speaks to this concept a couple of times as a response to the question, “Do you believe in God?” He notes that assuming that there is a possible yes-or-no answer indicates that either the one asking the question or the one of whom it is asked, or more likely both, is not thinking clearly. So his response, which he recommends to his audience, is to ask, “Which God?” [I think he has a full lecture with that title], and then says that before making any response, that one included, they should be clear as to which God they believe in, something that many, many Christians aren’t.
Every now and then I’ve been asked why I don’t believe in Zeus or Thor or Frey or some other name. The questioner is clearly making two assumptions: one, that one deity is as good as any other, and two, that the point of belief is to make the believer happy, two assumptions that, taken together, turn faith into a kind of smörgåsbord where all things are equal and the point is enjoyment.
My answer is generally that I don’t even regard such entities as gods in the first place because they belong to a collection of mildly to majorly malignant misfits that live in a sort of unending cheap soap-opera juvenile drama and only in theory do any display attributes that would make them respected if they were humans – and why should I pay any attention to permanently adolescent delinquents who have no discernible virtues?
Besides which, says I, there is a vast, vast difference between those ‘gods’ and a very small set of others: Zeus and Thor and Frey appear to be little different from humans in an even more important way – they are as subject to the workings of the universe as we are (sure, they may have more potent powers of persuasion or amazing abilities for annihilation, but so what? Humans in modern times can mostly match them). That makes them contingent beings just as I am; a bit up there on the scale of personal attributes, but still contingent beings.
Which means they aren’t even in the same category as any deity who has no peers, soap opera types or otherwise, and who does not rely on anyone or anything else for his/her/its existence. So, says I, the gods my questioner mentioned are just a few of hundreds or more who all fit in the same basket, whereas the God the question is regarding as the same as these sits in a basket all alone due to the claims of being the Creator of everything else but Himself, which means that if the others even exist then they were made to be His servants – and they plainly aren’t doing a very good job at that because they never bother to point to their Maker and mine!
So the “one less god” gambit as far as I can see is just shallow and juvenile and tells me that the one making that claim hasn’t done the homework that ought to go into such a ploy
I had an Australian theology professor who proposed “font of being”.
And then, of course, divided the class in two and set us to debate the positive and negative aspects of each.
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That’s a powerful concept that even people who think they understand it fail to truly apply. If the Kingdom of God is the “family of God”, then the saints who have gone before are as much alive and part of the church as are we who “feebly struggle” – and the reverse is true as well, that we are as much saints here in the trenches as they who “in glory shine”. By treating the two, as is all too common, as different and disconnected, we reduce both they and ourselves to something below what we are.
Indeed this unity of the Kingdom is why the ancient church invoked the prayers of the departed saints: they are as much our fellows as those who sit around us Sunday mornings, and since we are to both ask others to pray for us and pray for each other, they are not excluded just because they’ve moved onward.
A hymn comes to mind…
[I notice the video has one less verse than the text below; I bolded the numbers of the ones they sing. Also the organ intro is a shortened version of what I’m used to.]
1 For all the saints who from their labors rest,
who Thee by faith before the world confessed;
Thy name, O Jesus, be forever blest.
Alleluia, Alleluia!
2 Thou wast their Rock, their Fortress and their Might;
Thou, Lord, their Captain in the well-fought fight;
Thou, in the darkness drear, their one true Light.
Alleluia, Alleluia!
3 Lord, may Thy warriors faithful, true, and bold
fight as Thy saints who nobly fought of old
and win with them the victor’s crown of gold.
Alleluia, Alleluia!
4 O blest communion, fellowship divine!
We feebly struggle, they in glory shine;
yet all are one in Thee, for all are Thine.
Alleluia, Alleluia!
5 And when the strife is fierce, the warfare long,
steals on the ear the distant triumph song,
and hearts are brave again, and arms are strong.
Alleluia, Alleluia!
6 But then there breaks a yet more glorious day:
the saints triumphant rise in bright array;
the King of glory passes on His way.
Alleluia, Alleluia!
7 From earth’s wide bounds, from ocean’s farthest coast,
through gates of pearl streams in the countless host,
praising the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
Alleluia, Alleluia!
(I sang that in college choir so many times I wouldn’t want to even guess; I don’t think we ever did a concert without it.)
“Limitless genie powers” is a step backwards into the category error mentioned above: it assumes that the universe is not contingent. In a contingent universe, God doesn’t have “powers” because everything that is, every instant, is what it is because He generates it that way. What is uninsightfully termed “genie powers” is just God generating the universe a bit differently from the expected from one moment to the next.
Ah, that would be me v the young-Earth creationists! The God of Islam is a deceiver, but the YEC God is a flat-out liar.
I suspected it to be a typo of ‘Piper’ but found this:
There, you now have a new series of three posts you can begin, and you needn’t feel burdened to reply to this one, thus moving your goal nearer. 
Sir, you have a strong constitution, incredible powers of concentration and very good vision (or screen reader).
Congratulations!
Surrender.
Surrender.
There’s a big problem with this analogy: it is not a husband’s nature to ignore his wife and do as he pleases, but that is exactly our nature towards God!
To come to a wife, a man is an equal making a supplication. To come to God, a person is a rebel and the only option is surrender. That doesn’t apply just to “getting saved”, it applies to every moment of every day.
How does Christ live in me and I no longer live? Surrender.
How do I walk in the light as He is in the light? Surrender.
How do I lean on the everlasting arms? Surrender.
How do I pray without ceasing? Surrender.
How do I rejoice always? Surrender.
How do I repent? Surrender.
I would not characterize a child’s best relationship with its father, or Father, as being primarily being based on surrender, however. A restored relationship of a delinquent with his father may have to start with that though, surrendering to the law and its judgments, literally and figuratively.
By that measure I’d have to say I’ve never met anyone who was saved.
I used to be able to sing along with that one, note and timing perfect. Haven’t tried that in years.
One summer when I was head aquatics guy at a summer camp as well as a counselor one week there was a kid in my cabin named Dustin. On a whim I started calling him “(the) Wind”. That became our cabin’s official song for the week.
A certain movie later I discovered that when I hike the dunes and some sand blows over a crest I always think of Socrates.
I was musically deficient for years because I had no recorder/player and couldn’t afford a tape anyway. I was too ashamed to admit why I didn’t know the words to everything on the radio when I could reel off the right answers to everything in every science class.
My summertime anthems all had to do with working at the county fair all summer to get the grounds ready for the fair, then keep things going for the fair, and then shut everything down again after.
Mornings were all “King of the Road” due to the happenstance that the first day my first summer there almost the moment we started sweeping out the main building after all the vehicles and boats stored for the winter were gone that came on the radio:
Afternoons became our own twisted version of Rhinestone Cowboy, “Dime Store Cowboy”’ we mangled the song thoroughly with our own words; the high point of that song was one lunch hour when the eight of us on the crew happened to be working on the roofs of the three building around the central courtyard; the song came on the radio we had blasting from the courtyard stage and someone pulled out a Frisbee and we started tossing it from roof to roof, singing like idiots along with the radio.
A Christian study center where I attended university did a course one winter on the theology of Calvin and Hobbes. Of all the courses on offer, of course that was the one that wouldn’t fit my schedule!
I think the second part is unclear about the meaning of the word “belief” in the first part. But that vagueness is where the switch lies: used as is common, i.e. “Yeah, I agree with that”, then belief in God is quite often the conclusion of an argument, but used as Jesus and the New Testament use it one has to step beyond the argument into trust.
That was always an amazing thing in our informal intelligent design club, where a former atheist who due to studying science had reached the first use of “belief”, and after a journey of deciding that the Bible was the best candidate for being communication from the Designer, reached the next step of belief as trust. The truly amazing moments were when someone had reached that point without realizing it, when they suddenly recognized that they’d moved on from assent to trust quite some time earlier.
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Given the introductory comment “about factual reality”, I find that the juxtaposition of the two quotes is itself a commentary.
A blog I enjoy had a series on the theology of Calvin and Hobbes. Maybe it will help with your disappointment at missing the course:
It’s interesting that Abraham was wrong – for the moment, anyway – because God didn’t provide a lamb, He provided a ram. The Lamb came later.
I’ve often thought that Isaac needed the greater faith anyway: Abraham couldn’t have gotten him on that altar without his cooperation.
Such is Kierkegaard. When in philosophy class we complained that the translation we had for use was obscure and clumsy, our professor responded that the translation was not the problem, it was Kierkegaard himself, that Kierkegaard’s writing reflected his thought, which was in no way straightforward regardless of the language or translation.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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