That's ex opere operato.
Sounds like you're arguing for a kind of Federalism. I am not opposed to Federalist theology, I'm just not convinced that it extends to the ordinances of the New Covenant.
Yes
I don't view it as an exercise in individual theological debate. I mean, I'm not strictly opposed to that characterization because it happens to apply in this case, but it stems from internal Protestant debate, which we don't have. It's just not my individual position, it's the position of the Orthodox Church since the First Millennium.
I would encourage you to look into the basics of Orthodox dogma, as it's hard to summarize in a post, but its teachings cohere within a very beautiful phronema. I frequently notice that serious Protestants start to formulate teachings that almost seem to approach Orthodoxy, and instead of me agreeing or disagreeing (I'm not blessed by my priest to take a teaching position), I think you'll find that there are plenty of teachings that have been articulated by sensible Protestant theologians at one point or another, and much holy wisdom beyond that.
Undoubtedly, I think.
I've just been thinking lately about how heritage Americans are Ina similar situation in our time. Almost everyone in Latin America is Christian, as are large numbers of African and Asian immigrants. Even the immigrants who are not Christian could be converted. So, does it really matter that heritage America is well on the way to disappearing. That's what I wonder.
I think the Reformer closest to Orthodox soteriology would probably be John Wesley. I was a Wesleyan Protestant before I became Orthodox and subsequently avoided a lot of the hurdles and obstacles that Calvinist converts have to deal with.
That, and, which I have heard a lot about in Orthodox circles, Aulén's Christus Victor theology, which avoids Calvinist forensic reductionism in Soteriology. I haven't yet read that myself though.
Oh, and before anyone complains:
This isn't off-topic, as forensic reductionism (a term I used earlier in the Orthodox forum) is often argued using St. Augustine's writings as well.
What I mean is the idea that penal substitution is one-sidedly understood to be a payment for sin, at the cost of its significance as a cooperative, energetic regeneration of man's fallen state.
Plot twist: all the migrants who the Jews moved in turn out to be Christian Nationalists, who then will kick the Jews out.
Augustine observing the fall of Rome speaks a lot to our time. It is why he wrote the City of God, as he understood that the Church is too big of a concept to be fixed in the temporal alone.
I have spent the last several weeks reading almost nothing but Augustine, and today his basic approach finally clicked for me: He just wanted to understand what he already believed. He looked at the dogmas of the faith, the liturgical rites, and the tradition he'd received from his predecessors and - rather than simply believing with no investigation - wanted to construct an intellectual understanding that made his beliefs make sense. For example he looked at the rite of infant baptism, which contains pronouncements about the remission of sins along with an exorcism and exsufflation for the infant just like it does for adults (since these are the exact same service), and tried to make sense of what "sin" is being remitted along with how the infant came under the influence of the devil in the first place. He took the entirety of the faith as true and truly God-inspired, believing it with his whole heart, and wanted to understand it as well with his whole mind - to whatever small degree that's actually possible for our limited rationality. I think this is one of the things that made him such a rarity not just in the Christian world, but in the history of mankind as a whole.
I don't really have any dogs in the St Augustine debates that seem to rage among the Orthodox. But I enjoyed this video, it is well researched, and I learned a lot. I would love to see more videos in this style about St. Augustine or any other topics in Orthodoxy
He was correct, and this is not a good thing:
https://theparticularbaptist.net/20...phy-corrupted-the-ecclesiology-of-the-church/
Embedded within Neo-Platonism is this idea of emanationism. This is the idea that God emanates outward, and that the only way to get back to "the Source" is to ascend through the gradations and ranks to get back to it. In other words, it is a denial of the direct access that we have to God as in the New Testament.
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Could be wrong about this, but it does seem like the transcendental arguments for God's existence is inspired by Platonism/Neo-Platonism and Augustine's development of the school of thought that he used for Christian purposes. Jay Dyer and a lot of the Orthobros have been popularizing it online but I believe the form of the argument they use is actually from Calvinist thinkers though they wouldn't admit this publicly. Augustine's influence isn't just limited to Catholicism and Orthodoxy; he was used heavily by the Reformers as well and I don't think just the fact that a line of thought had been inspired by Platonism means it's inherently heretical. I think there can be a distinction drawn from the proper and improper use of this philosophy.
TAG is not Platonic. You're not going to find it in the writings of Plato or Plotinus. The equivalent for TAG in Platonism would be the ontological argument.
Lyer learned TAG from his short time at Bahnsen U. The Orthobros accuse Prots of stealing from them, when it's actually the other way around. The Calvinists who formulated TAG (Van Til and Greg Bahnsen) were consciously anti-Platonic. In fact, there's a debate between Bahnsen, who used the presuppositional method, and R.C Sproul, who used the classical (read: platonic influenced Christian) method, over this.
Augustine's influence on the Reformers had more to do with his soteriology than his ecclesiology. Augustine's soteriology is the least Neo-Platonic thing about him, especially compared to his ecclesiology. Whether or not it's heretical depends on if it lines up with the Bible or not.
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I know this poster is not here to reply, but I figure I'll go off his post to start a conversation. I see from earlier that Augustine is his patron Saint. It makes sense he would be interested in original sin as well.
I do understand Augustine's sentiment, but this is where I think things can go off the rails. ie, rationally trying to make everything fit into a box. Obviously I think it's fine to use our intellect, but, especially now, there's a fine thing line in that there can be a need for control that is driving inquiry. At this point in history, in our "science world", where now we are trying to build systems to encompass everything, this has grown to outsized proportions.
If he recognized the limitations of our rationality to grasp the ineffible, then yes, that indeed makes him unique. It's the general trend in the mindset of later people that extrapolated to an over-systematic approach.
Also, I guess this is where neo-platonism overlaps. My understanding is that one of its central tenants was that the source of reality transcends being and thought and is naturally unknowable. It seems that's partially true. But we Christians are aware of this wonderful thing where we can know Christ deeply, but at the same time recognize that the depth of God is unknowable, beyond, infinite, etc.
What are we talking about that is distinctive about Platonism? I contend that Plato's mindset was held, at least in part, by other ancient people as well. In particular I think people worked with the idea that the spiritual and material were much more connected than we normally do today. And by that I mean all things that are immaterial were basically acknowledged as spiritual. So, Plato was working from that. In particular when he's working through the forms. Essentially saying something like a chair has a more real counterpart, or form, behind it. Now-a-days we think the concept is just a general construct of our mind. Almost all ancient people did not think this way, however.
We talked about this in another thread. Doesn't emanation also deny God is sentient?
I would say that even if most people did hold a non-materialist view in the days of Plato, most of them also could not really articulate in an intellectually justifiable coherent way why they held this view so there's a need for a philosopher to systemize all these thoughts and put them down in writing for the sake of intellectual posterity. Also there was other competing forces such as the Sophists and the followers of Heraclitus that were promoting views that we would see as "modern" such as how there's no such thing as objective reality and that everything is constantly in flux and change so there definitely a need to challenge these other schools of thought.
I think good arguments to argue for whole the material isn't the totality of all existence and to defend the reality of higher realities that go beyond our fleshly senses are always going to be a benefit for the defense of the faith.
I think good arguments to argue for whole the material isn't the totality of all existence and to defend the reality of higher realities that go beyond our fleshly senses are always going to be a benefit for the defense of the faith.
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I don't mean to criticize, but this paradigm of "ancient people thought spiritually [Greek Dualism] and modern people think overly rationialistically" is itself reductionistic. Plato and the Greek philosophers did not even think about the world in the same way as the Greek mythologists that preceded them. In fact, the philosophers looked like atheists in comparison and Socrates was executed on a blasphemy charge. It would also be naive to lump in Greek philosophy with the Old Testament, which is how the Jews saw the world, under the category of "ancient people all thought this way." It is not as simple as an ancient/modern dialectic.
No one who was heavily influenced by Augustine believed that man can know everything, whether you're talking about Aquinas, Luther, or Calvin. "The human intellect could not exhaust a fly." “The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law."
Depends on who's scheme you're following.
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Your critique is fair. I am generalizing. I recognize there are wide variations within ancient thought. But I am still proposing that there is this general arc throughout history in larger conceptual ideas - mainly in acknowledging the spiritual (and within that the degree of its connectivity to the physical) up to the sheer materialism we live in today. I also think this materialism is connected to a development of a type of rationalism (I called it over rationalistic) that sees the world as mechanical or machine-like.
You know, there is a rabbit hole that you can go down on this one too. There was an entire philosophic debate/struggle on what happens to "the person", and perception of reality, when you decide you can write things down... rather than keep everything in your brain and be verbal. Essentially some thought it was very lazy and represented a downfall.
Edit: actually, I think it was Plato that said that, or at least he was relaying what a group of people thought about the effect of writing.
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