Epistemology and non-being participation

Some of this will be my own reflections on CvT’s A Christian Theory of Knowledge and the rest will be towards a construction of anti-scale of being philosophy.  I am not reviewing the whole book because it’s unnecessary.   Why do a review of any CvT work after Bahnsen’s magnum opus?  Further, the last 150 pages of CTK could have been left off and the book would have been better.

While CvT’s critique of Romanism was good, he didn’t integrate his earlier (and fine) critique of Plotinus, Augustine, and being/non-being into his larger critique of Romanism, which likely could have buried Romanism.  Instead, he got sidetracked on showing how Karl Barth is secretly in line with the nouvelle theologie of post-Vatican II theology.  That simply doesn’t wash.   For all of Barth’s problems, he rejected the analogia entis and the substance metaphysics upon which Rome is built.

CvT gives a fairly good summary and critique of the early church fathers.  There is some difficulty in this, since no one, even anchoretic traditions, are entirely clear on who constitutes (and when!) the ECFs.  Even admitting Tertullian is a heretic, I don’t think you will find many exceptions in the ancient world to the epistemology CvT is summarizing.   The later Palamite epistemology is simply a refinement (and perhaps bungling) of some neo-Platonic themes, so to the degree that CvT accurately summarizes and critiques the being theologies of Augustine, Plotinus, and Eurigena, the criticism applies to Palamas (and Palamas and Augustine are closer than one might suspect).

CvT writes that the early church could not find a Christian view of freedom to coalesce with a Christian view of necessity, with the result the fathers opted for a nonbiblical view of free will.

Non-Christian Continuity and Discontinuity

A non-Christian view of continuity sees an identification of God and man, as seen below:

The higher on the scale, the more real and “true” the thing is.  Van Til notes that Tertullian sees sin as “the opposite of good.”  This sounds correct until we realize that means sin is “lower” on the scale of good.   Sin has “slenderness of being.”

On the principle of continuity it is hard to see how Tertullian (and Justin)’s view of God is different from the Stoics’.  But when he argues against Marcion, he says the Christian God is “Other” than man (107).

Later Platonisms

Moving to the fathers (Origen and Clement) we see the scale of being hardened in place.   CvT quotes Plotinus to the effect, “thought is motion” and this is inferior to ecstasy.   (Rowan Williams has a helpful summary on this point).

Here our chart is modified. God is now seen as hyper-ousia, above ousia.  How does one then get from the highest point on the scale of being to “above being?”   Mysticism, ecstasy.   Van Til can then make the critique that many of these fathers employed both rationalism (scale of being, continuity principle) and irrationalism (ecstasy, mysticism).  In fact, rationalism and irrationalism on this gloss are dialectically correlative.

If man is on the scale of being and participates in good, then consistently we must say he also participates in non-being.

Is Finitude Evil?

This is the key point: on metaphysical accounts (and yes, I used the word “metaphysical”) man is defective because he is finite (he participates lower on the scale of being, even to participating in non-being.   Biblical religion, by contrast, sees man’s problem as ethical:  he is in rebellion to God.   CvT then gives a helpful discussion on “total depravity.”  We are not saying that man’s noetic capacity is ruined.   It is in rebellion.

A Metaphysical Fall from Oneness

Augustine is very clear (City of God section on the Platonists) that One = Truth = Being.   The further away from the One we get, the more irrational we get.   The problem is that historical facts are in the realm of the many (further, since history is contingent).  This is similar to Plato’s problem of learning by experience.  Van Til writes,

When Plato took his line and divided it sharply between eternal being of which there was genuine knowledge or science, and non-being of which there was no knowledge, he was faced with the question of how learning by experience is possible (129).

Back to Augustine:  Eternal Truth and History are dialectical opposites.  If Christ is the Eternal Word (and true) then how could he be historical? If historical, then not eternal, and thus not true, and thus unknown.  This is where one’s onto-epistemology leads.  As Van Til says, “The first option leads to truth without content.”

Van Til has a nice phrase to summarize all of this:  slenderness of being.  (And that is where these traditions find man’s free will).

Other notes:

Rejecting the Augstino-Platonic view of Time:  sheer timeless (moving image of eternity) would swallow up all distinctions.

Problems:

I almost understand what CvT means when he says pure rationality and pure irrationality demand one another (144).  I wish he would have clarified it.

I understand his criticisms of Barth and some of them are valid.  I don’t think he fully showed how Barth’s actualist ontology is at odds with Rome’s analogia entis.

Mary(ied) Relations with Joseph

I’m reading some old biblical typology discussions on whether Mary and Joseph ever consummated their relationship after Jesus’s birth.   I used to always think this was a no-brainer  When I read all the church fathers it seemed to seep into me that maybe they didn’t.  I’ve rejected that view, too.  I am going to look at the evidence.

1.  The text clearly says that Joseph did not know Mary until after she purified herself from childbirth.  I know of all the Anchorite hoops jumped through on this verse, but the most natural meaning of the text is that they eventually consummated their relationship.

2.   Mary was a good Jewish girl.  Hebrew girls wanted to give away their virginity to their husbands.

3.   Deliberate refusal of sex for “spiritual” reasons in marriage is simply docetism.

4.  Marriage is a reflection of Christ and his church.  What would an unconsummated marriage teach about Christ and the church?

 

I never could shake this argument

All Protestants intuitively know this.  However, as some begin to move into Patristics they pretend it isn’t there.   I first came across it in Jim Jordan’s brief commentary on Revelation (which I don’t endorse).  Jordan writes,

Anyone who reads the Bible, climaxing in the New Testament, and then turns to the “apostolic fathers” of the second century, is amazed at how little these men seem to have known. The Epistle of Barnabas, for instance, comments on the laws in Leviticus, but completely misinterprets them, following not Paul but the Jewish Letter of Aristeas. It is clear that there is some significant break in continuity between the apostles and these men.

No argument here.  It’s the next sentence that loses all his readers,

What accounts for this? I can only suggest that the harvest of the first-fruit saints in the years before ad 70, which seems to be spoken of in Revelation 14, created this historical discontinuity. (I’d say the first-fruits Church was the Pentecostal harvest of the third month; we look toward the Tabernacles harvest of the seventh month; note Leviticus 23:22, which comes right after the description of the Pentecostal feast, and may well shed significant light on the problem we have here mentioned.)

That might be true, but you just can’t drop bombs like this out of nowhere and expect people to follow along.  But I digress.  Back to Aristeas.   There are a number of comments that OB didn’t approve on the LXX.  His next point is spot-on.

We ought to be careful, too, in assuming we have a comprehensive picture of the early church. We have a few writings of a few men, many of whom were not pastors and teachers but educated first generation converts from paganism, lay scholars who were engaged in debate.

Anchorites love to appeal to St Ignatios and the fact that he was a disciple of John.  What of it?  What gives you the right to take a mere selection (fewer than 20 pages) of one man’s writing and apply them to the whole church?  This is the crudest of logical fallacies

Am I deconstructing the Fathers?

Do Protestants merely pick and choose the Fathers.  It is often suggested that our use of the Church Fathers is merely an exercise in deconstruction.   Maybe it is, but several issues need to be resolved first:

1. What is meant by the term “deconstruction.”  Are we using it in the Plotinian-dialectical sense, the Hegelian sense, or the Derridean sense?  They are not the same.
2. Give an example.
3. Even if the contention is true, please explain in a non-circular fashion why this is bad.
4. What about genuinely legitimate problems, like the Fathers’ commitment to substance-metaphysics?

Empire and anti-chiliasm

“The Constantinian Imperial churches condemned early Christian millennarianism because they saw themselves in the Christian imperium as “the holy rule” of Christ’s Thousand Year empire.  So every future hope for a different, alternative kingdom of Christ was feared and condemned as a heresy” (Moltmann, xv).

I am not making the claim that a Christendom-model is necessarily bad.   I just find it interesting that condemnations of chiliasm by the church happened around the same time that the Imperium became officially Christian.  I need to reread Oliver O’Donovan’s Desire of the Nations and see if he specifically interacts with this point.

An olive branch to my Orthodox friends

I know I seem critical of Eastern Orthodoxy and I make no bones about that.   I do believe with regard to the believer’s confidence it casts doubt on the finished work of Christ and the down-payment of the Spirit (Listen to this interview by Fr Thomas Hopko.   One gets the impression that Christ might not be enough to save the believer.

Kevin Allen: Father, there are evangelicals who are listening out there, and they are saying, “You know what? These Orthodox, they have no idea whether they are saved or not, even if they have lived a righteous life, and they have spent all their time on their face prostrating, and tears, and everything else.” What you are saying is, you never know.

Fr. Thomas: Yes, I would say that is absolutely true, and the evangelical is completely and totally wrong. But I would say the evangelical is right if their answer to the question, “Are you saved?” is “Yes, absolutely, as far as God and the blood of Christ,” but to say that I can be saved, simply by saying that I accept Jesus as my savior, is blasphemous.

To put it mildly, that’s problematic.  But back to my main point.  It was because of the Orthodox guys that I read through the entirety of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (Second Series).   I cross-referenced what they said with what Seraphim Rose said, noting both agreements and disagreements (anybody want to laugh at Rose on creation after reading Basil’s Hexameron?).  Perhaps more influentially, it was the outlaw priest Fr Matthew Raphael Johnson who really got me reading the fathers.   I am saddened that The Orthodox Nationalist is no longer broadcasting.  Those were some outstanding podcasts and his articles are well worth your time.  And for the record, I largely accept his apologetics proper

Did the Church Fathers teach theonomy?

These kind of questions give Eastern Orthodox apologists all the ammo they need against Calvinists.   The problem with the post-Bahnsenian theonomists is that they will scour church history for examples of “theonomy.”  Rushdoony really wasn’t as bad on this point as people will think (more later).  In order to prove church history is on their side, Young Turk theonomists will read church history sources and look for guys teaching theonomy.  The question then becomes, “What does theonomy mean?”  Does it mean some form of God-oriented social order which takes account of the law of God?  If so, then most everybody in church history is a theonomist.  It’s hard to see why Bahnsen even got in trouble.  Heck, RTS-Jackson even believes that (kind of).

That’s cheating, though.  Joseph Farrell has pointed out that everyone, even the pagans, believed in theo-krasia.  But theonomists will quickly rebut, “We see church fathers employing the judicial laws as still valid.”   Technically, that’s true.   They did employ some judicial laws.  My question is “Did they adopt the Bahnsenian hermeneutics that the judicial law in exhaustive detail is binding”?  The answer is clearly no.  Eastern fathers have a theoretical antinomian streak (2nd Commandment, anyone?  footnote1).  True, we do see some fathers like Gregory the Great arguing for the Sabbath, but that’s unremarkable on anyone’s gloss.

The problem is that Church Fathers were more interested in Christology, Trinity, and monasticism than they were in the social functions of the law of God.  To read otherwise is to commit the worst of anachronistic fallacies.

Footnote 1:  There actually might be more of a parallel.   Theonomists for the most part reject the practical applications of the 2nd Commandment, too!

Prima facie problems with Orthodox claims

 

Note several things:  I am challenging Orthodox claims, not the lives of saints and monks, nor the theology passed down in the Councils.  Further, I still remain sympathetic to much in Orthodoxy.  However, when I was communicating these Orthodox claims to other Protestatnts, I was met with the following responses.  Dealing with these responses successfully will better help Orthodox Apologists in the Western world.  I am doing you a favor.  Please allow me to be very clear:  I really like you guys.  Some Orthodox thinkers like Fr Seraphim Rose and Fr Raphael Johnson have been so influential I really can’t put it into words.  I am doing this so that your own presentation of the faith will be so much sharper.  This is not a combative debate.

And when I use the term “convertskii,” I am doing it in good fun.  An orthodox convert friend of mine coined that term.

1.  By the nature of the case, oral tradition is resistant to verification.  One needs a written document to verify that the tradition exists.

2.  Even if we deny the principle of sola Scriptura, yet when explicit appeal is made to Scripture to ground a given dogma, then such an appeal must be exegetically sustainable.

3.  In what sense is the church “objective,” but the Bible is not?  Chrysostom thought it was objective.

4.  Given that no Magisterial promulgation is necessarily perspicuous, any answer anyone gives to the question of “what is the criterion by which perspicuity can be identified?” must have been discovered by some other means. And since knowledge and application of this criterion will be a precondition for even understanding what Magisterial proclamations in fact mean, it turns out that the sort of private judgment about which RCs lament follows from Protestantism really follows from RC. (I realize this more touches on Roman Catholic claims).

5.  to invoke the presence of the Holy Spirit in the church begs the question of how we identify the true church. In which church is the Holy Spirit to be found? What are one’s  criteria? Why those criteria?  I suspect that the very positing of the criteria begs even further questions.  Of course, this is true of any tradition.

6.  Appeal is often made to Vincent of Lerins canon. Yet in that same work, building that very argument, Vincent says that the church has always taught the Federal Headship of Adam’s sin (Commonitories, chapter 24).  The reply is, “The Fathers aren’t right on everything.”  Fair enough, by what criteria, then, is Vincent right on the canon and wrong on imputation of Adam’s sin?

6a.  In other words, we are hearing an appeal to the Fathers to help prove tradition.  But to justify the Fathers elsewhere, we appeal to other aspects of tradition.  How is this not circular reasoning?

6b.  Energetic Procession once made the criticism that sola scriptura was faulty because it relied on an appeal to what Scripture said elsewhere to interpret what it says here.   Admittedly, this is circular reasoning.  How is doing it with the Fathers and tradition any better?

7.  By what criteria do we affirm that your miracle stories are true and mine are not?  (And for the record, I affirm the stories to be true).

8.  You laugh at the grammatical-literal method of interpretation of the Bible, yet you employ this same interpretation when you read the fathers.  Why?  Can I employ Chrysostom’s method?

9.  It’s easy to make fun of the so-called 20,000 Protestant denominations, yet is the Orthodox church truly “one?”   Do the “True Orthodox” count as part of the Orthodox world?  Are they in communion with SCOBA, for example?  What about the catacombers?  Yes, ROCOR did reunite with MP, but the fact that ROCOR existed for so long seems to be an argument against the “seamless unity.”

9a.  These True Orthodox guys deny communion with you, saying you “lack grace in the sacraments.”  Here the Protestant inquirer faces an insurmountable difficulty:  both sides claim to be Orthodox.  One side was even formed out of resistance to Masonic and government apostasy (which seems to line up with what St Cyril of Jerusalem said on the end times–the True Orthodox shall fight Satan in his very person; therefore the prima facie claim to the real Orthodox guy goes to the True Orthodox).  Yet both sides make mutually exclusive claims.  Who gets to adjudicate?  Appealing to one side over another begs all sorts of questions.

10.  Which Orthodox churches have condemned Freemasonry and which are in bed with it?  This is important because 33rd degree Freemasons swear an oath to Lucifer.

10a.  If Athanasios is correct and that communing with someone is sharing in that person’s life and doctrine, what are the implications of sharing in the life and doctrine of one who has sworn an intimate oath with Lucifer?

11.   Can I appeal to Gregory the Great of Old Rome on the extent of certain canonical books?  Jnorm responded to me saying that Gregory was responding to Western needs, or something like that.  Fair enough.  My question remains:  I am a Westerner who resonates with Gregory’s liturgy.  Can I quote Gregory on this?  Is his understanding of the scope and limit normative for me, a Western Christian?

12.  I understand that many balk at the Calvinist’s understanding of God’s sovereignty.  I don’t like it either. Ultimately, though, all sides have to deal with the claim:  Is the future certain for God or not?  If it is, how is this not God’s causal determining of the future?  If not, open theism.

13.  Cyril of Alexandria solved many problems.  Did he create more?

14.  Are earlier fathers like the Cappadocians and St Maximus using the term energia/logoi in the same sense as Palamas?  Bradshaw affirms it of Nyssa but denies it of Maximus.  Radde-Galwitz denies it of both.  If they aren’t, does this not represent some form of development?

14a.  As Drake points out, how is God simplicity itself and beyond simplicity?

15.  Did Athanasius affirm the extra-Calvinisticum?

16.  Why does Monachos block my threads inquiring about ecumenism and Freemasonry (okay, you don’t have to answer that question).

17.  Much is made of the person-nature distinction, and the claim that Western models confuse person and nature with regard to Federalism.  Yet the Corporate Person is unavoidably biblical (see also Achan’s sin in Judges; Isaiah 53).

18.  The East rightly critiques Rome’s claims to unity based upon Rome’s faulty doctrine of God, Absolute Divine Simplicity.  This view reduces all reality to “The One.”  Applied to ecclesiology, Rome reduces unity to a visible, singular unity.  Yet often when Orthodox talk about the unity of the Church, they use this exact same argument.

19.  The Orthodox make the claim that God is hyperousia, beyond being.  All of God is beyond being, essence, energies and persons.  I know this is from Plato (Republic, 549 b, I think).  Is it really wise to base your divine ontology off of Plato?  ROCOR condemned Fr Sergii Bulgakov for doing precisely that.  I know that some sharp Orthodox philosophers will deny that their view is Platonic since they deny that God has an opposite.  Maybe so, but Andrew Radde-Galwitz, to whom these very same guys appeal, says that for Gregory of Nyssa every good has an opposite (pp. 206ff.), and these goods are correlative with the divine essence.

20.  I know this next one isn’t true of all, but it is something I have been seeing a lot of:  there seems to be an incipient Manicheanism concerning the use of reason.  When I make logical arguments over at Orthodox Bridge, I am told that there is more to Orthodoxy than just books.  Fair enough.  But why the aversion to propositional reasoning?  Maybe this is also why many Orthodox don’t like Perry’s blog.

Athanasius and the extra-calvinisticum

The guys at CalvinistInternational have done a decent job with the sources.

The Extra-Calvinisticum is the doctrine that Lutherans charged followers of Calvin for holding.  For the record, I still side with the Lutherans on this, but that’s not the point.   The point is that the extra-Calvinisticum is tied in with the Nestorian charge that people often throw at Calvinists.   The problem–of which I was aware when I was attacking Calvinist Christology–is that many Greek fathers held to the extra-Calvinisticum, if the anachronistic use of the term can be excused.  The quote by Athanasius is fairly common knowledge.   The rest is from the guys at CalvinInter.  Let’s keep in mind what the extra-calvinisticum is claiming.  It is claiming that there is a bit of the Logos’  divine nature not contained inside the incarnate Person.

The Word was not hedged in by being present elsewhere as well.  When He moved His body He did not cease also to direct the universe by His Mind and might.  No.  The marvellous truth is, that being the Word, so far from being Himself contained by anything, He actually contained all things Himself.

On the Incarnation 17

Now it is impossible for any creature to comprehend the Divine Essence, as was shown in the FP, Q12, AA1,4,7, seeing that the infinite is not comprehended by the finite. And hence it must be said that the soul of Christ nowise comprehends the Divine Essence.

John of Damascus, qtd in Thomas Aquinas, Third Part, Q10, A1.

To put this into perspective, let’s keep in mind the doctrine of en-hypostatization.   Natures are contained within an hypostasis.

Find it in the fathers!….um, no

The one common refrain at OrthodoxBridge is that Protestants can’t find any of their distinctives in the early Fathers of the church.   This charge bothers some people.  However, like a judo artist, I will redirect the blow.  This will not prove that Protestantism is correct, but it will show that if the charge is correct, not only is Protestantism false, but so is Orthodoxy.

In volume 5 of his series on the History of Christian Doctrine, Jaroslav Pelikan openly challenges the adequacy of the Vincentian canon (it’s in the second to last chapter).  At best it can only read, “What is [usually] believed by [many] people in [most] places.”  Evidentially, especially in the earlier days of the church, it’s almost impossible to prove that the people in India believed in the same thing as the people in North Africa.   And if the evidence is missing, how can you make the case?

Even worse, as Lars Thunberg points out, St Cyril affirmed “one will and energy” of Christ (Pseudo-Dionysius said the same thing).   The whole point behind St maximus’s theology is the very opposite of this.  Yet, if one were to “go to the earlier fathers,” would one necessarily come away with dyotheletism?   Even worse, St Maximus himself hints that the greatest of all theologians, St Gregory Nazianzus, used language that was disturbingly similar to monotheletism.

The problem is this with Orthodox internet apologists:

P1:  Our practice today is part of the ancient tradition of the church.
P2:  We thus appeal to this church father to prove this.
—————————————————————–
Therefore, the early church taught this and this is the tradition.

What’s the problem with this argument?  The problem is that there is an epistemic gap between P2 and the conclusion.  How do we know that this father is the tradition, or that tradition is thus and so (and most of the time, I don’t even grant P2.   A lot of times these fathers aren’t event talking about 9/10ths of the practices that are now considered “tradition”)?

Even granting P2, at best the syllogism’s conclusion only reads:  one Father of the church taught this.