Tuesday 28 December 2010

This is Why We Call it Arian

In brief, God is inexpressible to the Son.
For he is in himself what he is, that is, indescribable,
So that the son does not comprehend any of these things or have the understanding to explain them.
For it is impossible for him to fathom the Father, who is by himself.
For the Son himself does not even know his own essence (ousia),
For being Son, his existence is most certainly at the will of the Father.
 Arius of Alexandria (context here)

The Son, as a human, couldn't possibly know his own ousia you see.

Monday 27 December 2010

I Know Just How He Felt

Earlier in the month, Rey wrote a pretty funny send up of the problems with Kenotic Arian anthropology. Read it here:

Was Jesus Upset About Santa?

I realize this is a little late, but I wanted all the KA stuff to point back to one place (ie MY blog) when The Don or The Don's minions stumble across it so that he (or the minions) can then contact me about his excellent forthcoming forward to the book. Mem even gave me a German subtitle: Lehrung der Tools. Or something like that. Hopefully The Don approves.

I bet Jesus was also was super excited about The Don writing a forward to his book so he knows just how I feel and will work to give me what he got! Right?

Monday 20 December 2010

Modern Guilt

One of our discussions reminded me of one of my many aborted blog posts sitting in the drafts of this blog. Since it's back in my mind, I decided to dust it off a little and post.

One of the things I find interesting about human nature is how adverse we are to anything that might be unpleasant, even that which is good. I think it says a lot about our incurvatus and how pathetically desperate we are to maintain it. So here we are, creating many theories and religions and devices to prove that unpleasantness isn't really real, much less necessary. Even we Christians have our Word-Faith heresies.

I was recently reminded of how we, in our narcissism, now tend to see guilt as a deadly enemy. Guilt is unpleasant evil, and one couldn't possibly feel guilt because they are guilty. Oh anything but that.   That kind of attitude just keeps one from being truly happy. Guilt is no consequence of your wrongdoing-it's the problem. And the solution then is to remove the sting of it, and re-label your sins, yourself.

But this dresses the wound only slightly and proclaims double fold peace when there is no peace at all. How can there be peace when we rip ourselves from our creator and then pretend we can "walk it off" as we bleed out all over the place? So we go through life suffering a vague and unsettling sort of "modern guilt"-like the song says, we don't know what we've done but we do feel ashamed.

This I think is captured well here;
The sad thing here is that this flight from guilt means not only a life of delusion, but a life of spiritual misery. If you are guilty, you are alienated from God, and you flee from Him. Then you are lonely at a fundamental level, because only God understands you deeply and can supply the deep fellowship that you yearn for. Cut off from God, your life is meaningless, because meaning flows from God. In addition, you lose capacity genuinely to befriend other people, because you can't admit your guilt to them. Instead of loving others, you are caught up with maintaining your own self-esteem—your own pride. You are swirling in a downward spiral toward death.

Vern Poythress (see the rest of this article here)

A spiral of death-orbiting around my navel.