This is from Dallas Willard’s The Great Omission. I don’t really recommend the book, but one chapter was pure gold.
It requires the will to be logical (182).
Committed to logic as a “fundamental value” (183).
Jesus uses enthymemes.
And if anyone says, “Logic kills spiritual experience,” or “that is a Western thing,” all I can respond is you are not being faithful to the example of Jesus. Take it up with him.
Theme: Spirituality and soteriology are tied together. Further tying these two are three sub-themes: doctrine of the imago dei, rejection of original sin, and deification (114).
Meyendorff begins with this interesting concession: “There is no patrum consensus for a complete exegesis of Genesis 1:26-27) (114). Another point where Orthodox Bridge is wrong.
“Image implies a participation in the divine nature” (114). Commenting on Cyril, Meyendorff says “It appears from this passage that the proper dignity of human nature, as conceived by God and realized by Adam, consists of going beyond itself and receiving illuminating grace” (115). This is the Eastern version of the Latin donum superadditum.
On freedom: “The original existence of man presupposed a free participation in God through the intermediary of the superior elements of the human composite, essentially the intellect” (116; cf. McCormack essay and comments on Damascene).
Sin, for Cyril, is conceived as an illness (117).
A Thought: If salvation is simply participation, does this mean that salvation is in some sense an arising upward of the inner man? How does this square with the extra nos that comes by preaching? Further, how does it escape Feuerbach’s critique?
Prayer: principal means of liberating the mind. “This liberation implies for Evagrius a dematerialization…a prelude to the immaterial gnosis” (121).
Meyendorff is aware that desert spirituality, which seem a communion in the Archetype, borders on semi-Pelagianism. He assures us this is not the case, for this is a real communion between image and archetype (125). Perhaps, but if this paradigm is seen to be nonbiblical and neo-Platonic, then it is in trouble.
Rather than shying away from this neo-Platonic language, Meyendorff embraces it: “All things exist by participation in the Only Existing One, but man has a particular way in which he participates in God, different from that of other beings. He communicates with him freely, for he carries in himself the image of the Creator. Deification is precisely this free and conscious participation in the divine life” (128-129).
I stand by all my earlier criticisms of Reconstructionism. Still, when I study the doctrine of sanctification and the image of God (particularly the Shorter Catechism’s language!) I cannot help but see “dominion” as an inescapable concept.
Reconstructionism’s problem was that they “grasped” too early. Many were trying to take over a compromised system and …I don’t know what they planned to do. Even when Gary North said (correctly) that the takeover will be by regeneration, not revolution, that begged the question, “Well, why bother with all this law-teaching on taking over the government at all?”
To make matters worse, if the Constitution is a compromise with Freemasonry, which I agree with Gary North and think it is, then why bother with the “Christianity and the Constitution” narrative?
The shame, though, is that dominion got so associated with Reconstructionism that no one will speak of it today. But if you reject a metaphysical approach to salvation and sanctification, and opt rather (and rightly) for a covenantal approach, you are left with something like dominion.
But don’t be alarmed. This doesn’t mean we have to go recon. It just means we need to be honest about the bible’s language.
Paul writes, “When we were children we were slaves to the elemental spirits (stoichea) of the universe: (Galatians 4:3). O’Donovan comments, “These elemental spirits are actually identified with the law given by the hand of angels on Mt. Sinai, and yet at the same time they are the beings which by nature are not gods, to which even the formerly Gentile pagans were in bondage (4:8-9)! How can Paul so daringly associate the revealed morality of the Old Testament faith with the superstitious idolatry of paganism? Because the order of creation, whether in a pure or impure form, can encounter us only as a threat” (RMO, 22).
We see from this that the stoichea can be at least two different things: reverting back to the ceremonial law code and living under the pagan world order, ordered by times and seasons. Per the latter, in Galatians Paul appears to link living under the old order, including the elemental spirits, with observing the boundary markers of the old order (days and seasons)
10 Ye observe days, and months, and times, and years. 11 I am afraid of you, lest I have bestowed upon you labour in vain.
Paul writes elsewhere in Col. 2
16 Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. 17 These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. 18 Let no one disqualify you, insisting on asceticism and worship of angels, going on in detail about visions,[d] puffed up without reason by his sensuous mind, 19 and not holding fast to the Head, from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God.
20 If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the world, why, as if you were still alive in the world, do you submit to regulations
I think we should all agree, that whatever conclusions one draws about the continuation of prophecy (or other gifts) today, whether in Old Testament or New, there was not necessarily a correlate between personal holiness and the ability to prophecy. I even think cessationists can use this argument against Roman Catholics.
In the Old Testament and in today’s history we see a number of people who were either temporarily immoral or reprobate accurately prophesying. I have in mind Balaam, Saul and others. Some were even good men who prophecied correctly but disobeyed God later and paid for it (the prophet who was killed by the lion; and even more troubling, the prophet who lied to him!).
I am currently reading Jack Deere’s Surprised by the Voice of God. Much of it is silly and dated, though there are a few important chapters. One troubling chapter is on Paul Cain. Cain, to whom I will not link, accurately prophecied numerous times beyond dispute (which forever buries the hard Princetonian case). As many know, Cain later fell into the most wicked of sins. Does that negate his previous accurate prophecies? I can’t imagine why, especially if we consider how many OT prophets either disobeyed God, were reprobate, or something like that–yet despite that they accurately prophecied.
This distinction can help cessationists because many will be confronted with miraculous claims by Orthodox and Romanist apologists. The older response was that these claims were simply fraudulent or demonic. While many in fact are, after a while such a denial begins to produce cognitive dissonance, which can be dangerous for some (and is one of the reasons that leads to the Convertskii).
If the legal purifications and washings, which were of God’s own appointing, did not make those who used them more holy; and the priests, who were holy garments and had holy oil poured on them, were not more holy without the annointing of the Spirit; then surely those superstitious innovations in religion, which God never appointed, cannot contribute more holiness in men.
Thomas Watson, A Body of Divinity (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth Trust, 1983), 243.
The Lecture Hall of Tyrannus 