On the Road Again

Dear Readers,

As you know the blog the past month or so has been rather slow. This has been for a number of reasons.

First I judged it to be best to skip out on blogging during Lent. It freed up some time to spend with my family and gave me a bit of perspective. Sometimes you need to get away from something to see it more clearly.

Second, I have a paper forthcoming for publication and another one under review which along with my teaching duties has consumed a fair amount of my time. 

Third, I have been embroiled in an academic fracas since another person that I thought was a friend of mine, and a professing Christian, (I suppose thankfully that they aren’t Orthodox) turned out to be plagiarizing my most important work. For academic and legal reasons I am not able to write about this openly. But a word to the wise, if you are in academia, I wouldn’t share any of your best (or original) ideas in seminar with anyone. In my opinion, unless it is in print, formally published and unless there is verbatium copying, you simply can’t win, no matter how overwhelming the evidence. It doesn’t matter what a given policy states in terms of class presentations, colloquia or whatever. If it isn’t in print, you’ve lost. As I have learned this is the unspoken “gnosis” among academics. Silly me, I thought integrity mattered. The will to power crops up in the oddest of places. (See Time Bandits)

Consequently, I won’t be airing some of the cutting edge stuff or things I am kicking around, here anymore or any of my papers even though I have a copyright listed at the header of the blog. It just isn’t sufficient protection against intellectual theft. So until material is accepted for publication, I need to be silent as a trappist church mouse.

So as soon as finals are over and the grading is done, (after the 15th) watch for some new posts on various topics. These will include a second part on metaethics, the inadequacy of Catholicism and Protestantism replies to the problem of evil, and the eternity of the world. I also plan to address some comments I left standing. And a number of you have made email inquiries that I haven’t been able to get back to, so please be patient.

Metaethics and Maximus

“[G.E.] Moore is as it were the frame of the picture. A great deal has happaned since he wrote, and when we read him again it is startling to see how many of his beliefs are philosophically unstable now. Moore believed that good was a supersensible reality, that it was a mysterious quality, unrepresentable and indefinable, that it was an object of knowledge and (implicitly) that to be able to see it was in some sense to have it.  He thought of the good upon analogy of the beautiful; and he was, in spite of himself, a ‘naturalist’ in that he took goodness to be a real constituent of the world.  We know how severely and in what respects Moore was corrected by his successors. Moore was quite right (it was said) to separate the question ‘What does “good” mean?’ from the question ‘What things are good?’ though he was wrong to answer the second question as well as the first. He was right to say that good was indefinable because of judgments of value depend upon the will and choice of the individual. Moore was wrong (his critics continue) to use the quasi-aesthetic imagery of vision in conceiving of the good.  Such a view, conceiving the good on the analogy of the beautiful, would seem to make possible a contemplative attitude on the part of the moral agent, whereas the point about this person is that he is essentially and inescapably an agent. The image whereby to understand morality, it is argued, is not the image of vision, but the image of movement. Goodness and beauty are not analogous but sharply constrasting ideas. Good must be thought of, not as part of the world, but as a moveable label affixed to the world; for only so can the agent be pictured as responsible and free. And indeed this truth Moore himself half aprpehended when he separated the denotation from the cnotation of ‘good.’ The concept of ‘good’ is not the name of an esoteric object, it is the tool of every rational man. Goodness is not an object of insight or knowledge, it is a function of the will. Thus runs the correction of Moore and let me say with anticipation that on almost every point I agree with Moore and not with his critics.”

Iris Murdoch,  The Sovereignty of the Good, Routledge 1970, 2001, pp. 3-4

God, History and Dialectic

An electronic version of Joseph Farrell’s extended work, God, History, and Dialectic is now available here for purchase. I’d recommend getting it while you are able.

How Many?

“This heresy [filioque], which has united to itself many innovations, as has been said, appeared about the middle of the seventh century, at first and secretly, and then under various disguises, over the Western Provinces of Europe, until by degrees, creeping along for four or five centuries, it obtained precedence over the ancient orthodoxy of those parts, through the heedlessness of Pastors and the countenance of Princes. Little by little it overspread not only the hitherto orthodox Churches of Spain, but also the German, and French, and Italian Churches, whose orthodoxy at one time was sounded throughout the world, with whom our divine Fathers such as the great Athanasius and heavenly Basil conferred, and whose sympathy and fellowship with us until the seventh Ecumenical Council, preserved unharmed the doctrine of the Catholic and Apostolic Church. But in process of time, by envy of the devil, the novelties respecting the sound and orthodox doctrine of the Holy Ghost, the blasphemy of whom shall not be forgiven unto men either in this world or the next, according to the saying of our Lord (Matt. xii. 32), and others that succeeded respecting the divine Mysteries, particularly that of the world-saving Baptism, and the Holy Communion, and the Priesthood, like prodigious births, overspread even Old Rome; and thus sprung, by assumption of special distinctions in the Church as a badge and title, the Papacy. Some of the Bishops of that City, styled Popes, for example Leo III and John VIII, did indeed, as has been said, denounce the innovation, and published the denunciation to the world, the former by those silver plates, the latter by his letter to the holy Photius at the eighth Ecumenical Council, and another to Sphendopulcrus, by the hands of Methodius, Bishop of Moravia. The greater part, however, of their successors, the Popes of Rome, enticed by the antisynodical privileges offered them for the oppression of the Churches of God, and finding in them much worldly advantage, and “much gain,” and conceiving a Monarchy in the Catholic Church and a monopoly of the gifts of the Holy Ghost, changed the ancient worship at will, separating themselves by novelties from the old received Christian Polity. Nor did they cease their endeavors, by lawless projects (as veritable history assures us), to entice the other four Patriarchates into their apostasy from Orthodoxy, and so subject the Catholic Church to the whims and ordinances of men.”

Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs, 1848, sec. 6.

Signed, Patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem.

Who Knew?

http://www.michaelhyatt.com/fromwhereisit/about.htm

Just go down to the bottom and read the last paragraph.

Resistance is Futile

http://www.ansamed.info/en/news/ME01.YAM12593.html

 http://www.expatica.com/de/articles/news/Erdogan-cheered-by-16_000-Turks-in-Cologne-.html

What is in a Name?

http://www.aina.org/news/20080211032311.htm

Are You Going to Get Burned?

“What had caused the debate and disagreement between the Greeks and Latins in the conferences [at Florrence] on Purgatory was not the question of the middle state after death, but if there is punishment by fire in the middle state. The Latins argued that there is such punishment.” Constantine Tsirpanlis, Mark Eugenicus and the Council of Florence, 78.

“Mark refutes entirely punishment by [a created] fire in the middle state as opposed to and unattested by the Holy Scriptures and the tradition of the Church. The Latin argument from Scripture is of no avail because neither does the Book of Maccabees nor St. Matthew mention fire, and St. Paul in speaking of fire means, as St. John Chrysostom clearly shows [PG 61, 75-82, 361], the eternal fire of hell, not the temporary punishment of fire in Purgatory.” 79.

The Nestorian Bible?

“[I'he] whole of Scripture is the product of the divine activities which enter it, not by superseding the activities of the human authors, but by working confluently with them, so that the Scriptures are the joint product of divine and human activities, both of which penetrate them at every point, working harmoniously together to the production of a writing which is not divine here and human there, but at once divine and human in every part, every word and every particular.”

B.B. Warfield, “The Divine and Human in the Bible,” The Presbyterian Journal, May 3, 1894.

“[T]he organic nature of Scripture…implies the idea that the Holy Spirit, in the inscripturation of the Word of God, did not spurn anything human to serve as an organ of the divine. The revelation of God is not abstractly supernatural but has entered into the human fabric, into persons and states of being, into forms and usages, into history and life. It does not fly high above us but descends into our situation: it has become flesh and blood, like us in all things except sin. Divine revelation is now an ineradicable constituent of this cosmos in which we live and, effecting renewal and restoration, continues its operation. The human has become an instrument of the divine, the natural has become a revelation of the supernatural; the visible has become a sign and seal of the invisible. In the process of inspiration, use has been made of all the gifts and forces resident in human nature.”

Herman Bavink, Reformed Dogmatics I, 442-443

Apostolic Hermeneutics

Peter Enns is an evangelical biblical scholar at Westminster Seminary. I am not usually disposed to post things from WTS, but this article will prove helpful to those wondering how the Orthodox Fathers exegete Scripture. While not, for obvious reasons, always consistent with Orthodoxy, he comes very close to it and has came to see the inadequacies of the grammatical-historical methodology that is so prized among Protestants.

http://peterennsonline.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/AposExegWTJ-fall%2003-final.pdf