God the Father, God the Son, it could be said: God our Father, God our brother.
And the Holy Spirit? God our consolation? Our strength? Our support? Our help? Our impetus?
Thinking about this makes me feel that the way the Holy Spirit is usually talked about seems poor. Some churches talk too little, others focus on the least important.
The Holy Spirit IS Emmanuel.
Today is the feast of St John the Apostle, seen here with eagle and palm in the silver seal matrix of #ClareCollege (the half-figure is 8mm high), & in the sumptuous Breviary of Marie de St Pol, best friend of the #LadyOfClare. 🧵 1/3
Until this year, the only published photo was so fuzzy that there were debates as to whether there was a bird, and interpretation of the palm. Even with the RTI image, discussion continues. Falconer friends think this most resembles a #GoldenEagle, scaled to speak comfortably to St John, while… standing on his fist? as raptors usually do… or on his open palm? as a trusted messenger of God? 🧵 2/3 #StJohn#theology#interpretation#StoneCarving#illustration
Wrote a new blog post about some questions and musings about Gregory of Nyssa, Anthropocentrism, and Christocentrism. Trying to move beyond the "humanity is the telos of Creation" perspective, while still remaining connected to the teachings of the Fathers.
Also, I have moved my blog to a new platform. No platform perfectly matches what I want, but at least now my family and friends can easily subscribe to it.
I've been really enjoying these Hubert Dreyfus "Existentialism in Literature and Film" lectures. The ones on Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov are particularly illuminating.
Dogmatic religion is a bitch. It destroys the very core of people.
Humans are social creatures. So when our cherished others share with us that it is possible to know the love of a perfect being, to be enfolded in the bliss of union with it, if only we follow some rules, we naturally strive to seek this perfection. But the rules are the thing. When we submit to rules we want to know that they are justified. That they will be efficacious. But dogma, the insistence on unquestioning faith, does not give us such reassurance.
Any dogmatic set of rules is functionally unattainable in the long term because of the power of doubt. Dogmatism is not a natural part of what it is to be human. We thirst for understanding. And, while there is a great truth in not being a slave to the why of things, in sometimes accepting things as they are even though we cannot yet understand them, we will never cease completely to ask why.
Whenever there are rules they are broken. Always. If there is a rule, someone is breaking it. But with dogmatic religion it is always the rules held in the highest regard that are broken. Not just broken, smashed. The most proscribed precepts serving only to indicate the nature of the depravity of the oppressors. Our tender bliss seeking hearts recoil from this hypocrisy. And we instantly see the deception that these others have perpetrated upon us. And we hate them for it.
And if we are hurt enough, we defensively reject the entire possibility of the blissful union ever existing at all. We want our money back, because the thing they sold us does not exist. Or so we think. We think this because the hypocrites who taught us are hooked on the idea that there is only one way to characterize the perfect thing, and it is their characterization. All the other ones are evil. The god of Abraham boldly declares that all other gods are evil and untrue, false and deceiving, or even, the big lie, simply nonexistent. Like a spoiled toddler, his every utterance an insistent cry of There Can Be Only One.
This is often the first clue to us that the god of love they say they are recommending might not be quite as loving as they make him out to be. Even though we reject them once we see their hypocrisy rear its so, so ugly head, we have been so traumatically conditioned by the purveyors of the One True God™ that we can’t easily escape from the bounds of monotheism. Once we have found that particular god lacking we fall back on that conditioning and we believe that there must be no gods at all.
But the blissful union with the perfect thing is still there! If we continue to be prisoners of the conditioning foisted upon us by the damaged peddlers of the one single truth lie we shall be forever beholden to their conceptualizations. Forever locked in a trap of their design. Forever believing that it is their way or nothing.
The @QuakerRelThot sessions over the weekend were rich international discussions, exploring the current state of the movement George Fox created and the many different ways it has developed around the world.
I spoke in the second panel, about Quaker theological discussion and how it might inform antiracist work. Both panels were recorded and are on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@quakertheologicaldiscussio8853
I'm deeply grateful to announce that I wrote an article that was just published today in Christ and Pop Culture magazine. If you are interested, you are welcome to read it here.
Prosperity Gospel and Nationalism are two Christian heresies that have been rising continuously through my life, and really started rising in the 1960's. They both amount to the same theological fallacy: God wants his people to have social authority over others.
That message is about as far from Jesus as you can get.
I think one reason people fall for "soft" #polytheism is the mistaken belief that myths are the origin of our knowledge about the Gods.
Myths of course are largely symbolic. So if you believe the Gods' existence is confined within them, you will be led to believe the Gods must just be "metaphors," too.
Sallust on Myths and the Modes of Interpretation
In his essay
On the Gods and the Cosmos
3
(ch. III), Sallust affirms that myths are themselves divine and that they resemble the Gods themselves, who operate on many levels. The world itself, he says, could be con-sidered a myth, inasmuch as there are in the world, on the one hand, corporeal things and phenomena that are evident to the senses, and on the other, souls and intellects that are invisible and whose presence must be inferred or interpreted from the things we see. Myths embody a corresponding duality, in that they have a literal sense as well as multiple layers of meaning that are not present immediately on the surface. Sallust discerns five types of myths, or ways of interpreting myths (ch. IV):
Theological 2. Physical 3. Psychical 4. Material 5. Mixed
Pray without words!
I have written nine short readings, in Norwegian, on how to use your body to pray. Delivered from print today!
The context is #Lutheran, where words have had a too important role throughout Protestant history. I want to reclaim body language as prayer language, but not only in the traditional kneeling and folding hands way. #theology#prayer@theology