The Failure of the One & Many Argument of Van Til

July 22, 2010 8 Comments

By: Jay

The so-called argument from the one and the many is a hallmark aspect of classical Van Tillian apologetics. Having studied this school for the last ten years, I am very acquainted with its methodology and published works. However, once one moves into patristics and Catholic and Orthodox theology, and then into other religious philosophies, the argument as constructed in writers like Van Til, Rushdoony and Bahnsen no longer works. This is not to say, however, that the argument has no relevance: on the contrary, in my estimation, it still retains its strength as a powerful signpost pointing to the Personal God of the Bible. However, I don’t think it proves the Trinity. 

There are two reasons the one and many argument doesn’t to prove the Trinity. For one, Van Til wasn’t the first to reason in this regard: many earlier Christian thinkers and church fathers had argued along similar lines, such as Origen, Irenaeus, Basil and the Cappadocian, Maximus the Confessor, and others even in other religions, as we see in the Coomaraswamy article on Vedic Exemplarism. What is interesting in Maximus though, is that from the created one and many we experience, it does not prove or point to a single divine ousia and three Persons, but rather a single rational Principle of God – the Logos, the second Person of the Trinity, in whom all the many logoi, or rational principles/meanings of things are united. So for Maximus, drawing on Origen, the many logoi are one in the one Logos of God. This argument arose historically in the context of Hellenic Christianity borrowing the Logos idea, and was transformed into an argument for the necessity of creation through the Logos. In other words, the one and many argument is an argument centered in divine exemplarism. Read more of this post

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The Satanic Nature of Nazism

July 17, 2010 4 Comments

Image of Savitri Devi that Pretty Much Says it All

By: Jay

A couple of years ago, when I first began to look at race studies and “national socialism,” someone (I don’t recall who) argued to me that national socialism was not Teutonic paganism. This is a bunch of bull. It clearly is, and I intend to demonstrate that. What the movement also has is interesting connections with is Hinduism and gnosticism and can also be considered as a forerunner to the modern green movement. Yes, Nazism as a forerunner to the modern green movement. How is this? The key players in demonstrating this claim are Savitri Devi, Heinrich Himmler and other notables of the so-called “traditionalist studies,” such as Julius Evola, Ananda Coomaraswamy as well as the infamous God-hater and fraudster, Madame Blavatsky.

Just as I critiqued the notion of “perennial philosophy” that specifically rejects the biblical God who is in covenantal relationship with man, so these theorists also posit at times a “perennial religion.” What is this? Once again, it is the age-old pantheistic lie that “Nature” is God. You will notice in these writers that, having rejected a personal God, like with Guenon, his move was more gnostic in nature, become a Sufi Muslim. With someone like Savitri Devi, a huge promoter of the Nazi movement and well-known writer of the traditionalist school, Devi makes clear what the agenda is – a green, neo-pagan, polytheistic-that-blends-into-pantheistic mythos that looks to Hinduism and the myth of Aryan “godhood.” Thus the convergence of Devi and Heinrich Himmler’s fables. Devi makes this abundantly clear in this article, which is indisputable proof. Read more of this post

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Taking the Law and Prophets Seriously: Judgments

June 10, 2010 7 Comments

The Prophet Samuel Hacks Up King Agag

By: Jay

I am sick and tired of the Law and the Prophets being a joke. This past year I’ve seen several Orthodox priests/prelates openly say they do not accept the “God” as presented in the Old Testament, as well as not a few Roman Catholics. Textual liberalism and rejecting “that kind of God” often go hand in hand, or are at least kissing cousins. One need only look at the history of Luther’s “reformation” and the explosion of textual liberalism that followed a few hundred years later in German higher criticism to see where these views lead.

Higher criticism and modern rejections of Moses may not have the same motivations, but they arrive at the same endpoint – the rejection of “that kind of God.” By that, what is meant is the God who condones exterminations of cities, is providential within all historical events, and punishes (even if remedially) descendants based on the actions of fathers and forebears. The simple question that arises is this – how do these people expect anyone to take them seriously as proponents of a religion which comes from the Law and the Prophets? Seriously? I am supposed to accept that you have the truth, and you tell me all these instances are “allegory” or at least not historical. Anyone with basic logic and an elementary knowledge of the Bible need only think for about 5 minutes about how implausible this is. Were I a serious Jew, I would not accept such ridiculous claims, and justly so. You prelates have told me that the very Book you accept is a-historical in crucial events, when all along it’s been viewed as historical – even amongst the various Christian groups, prior to higher criticism. In fact, in places where the New Testament views incidents in the Law and Prophets as historical, I have been told they are not – and that the New Testament writers are in error. What arrogance. 

I am always bitched at for “not being practical.” Well, ok, here we go – let’s be practical. Let me examine the stories I was told emulate in Sunday School as a young boy – arguably the most simplistic and practial stories imaginable, and let’s see if these religionists persuade me to be practical according to their conceptions. Read more of this post

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Maximus, Sartre, and the Dialectic of Time-existence

May 24, 2010 1 Comment

Jay

Sartre explained that the average man hides behind masks and sustains himself on a kind of false existence of wearing masks and role-playing. Nietzsche said much the same of the masses. It is hard to deny this to be the case. The ancient pre-socratic philosophers alternated within this same dialectic, too, with Heraclitus claiming all reality was constant flux and Parmenides rebutting that all reality was actually permanence. These are two sides of the same dialectic found in post-lapsarian time-existence.

What occurred to me was that these pre-Socratics were looking for an ultimate impersonal ontological grounding, while the modern existential philosophers were concerned with this issue anthropologically and socially. When one thinks of Sartre’s man who steps forward to dispell the viscous, as he calls it, and begins to be being-for-itself, one of his characters ends in suicide.  The ultimate act of chaos, change, and rejection of the permanent.  Someone like the rock star comes to mind.  (But isn’t this just a role as well? Yes, it is.)  On the other hand, you have the masses, dumbed down as obeisant sheep who follow blindly whatever Übermensch comes along.  In other words, same dialectic protracted through the history of philosophy. Read more of this post

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Problems in Thomistic Epistemology

May 13, 2010 17 Comments

By: Jay

Plato, Philo, Plotinus, Dionysius, Augustine, Basil, John of Damascus, Maximus the Confessor, Isaac the Syrian, John Scotus, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure and many others all profess a doctrine of divine exemplarism.  This is Plato’s forms or universals or logoi as located in the divine mind or essence (depending on whether it’s Eastern or Western). The problem will be, however, whether this can work as an epistemic foundation in Thomism.

It should go without saying that both Aristotle and Aquinas’ epistemology is basically an empirical method. A certain Thomist fussed to me about this, since “epistemology” and “empiricism” are anachronisms. As if we cannot use modern terms that accurately describe an ancient belief or system.  No one says we cannot say “Post-Apostolic theology” because that term wasn’t used in the Post-Apostolic era.  But it’s quite simple to show Aristotle and Thomas’ method is empirical. 

Aristotle says in De Anima 12:8:

“Since according to common agreement there is nothing outside and separate in existence from sensible spatial magnitudes, the objects of thought are in the sensible forms, viz. both the abstract objects and all the states and affections of sensible things. Hence (1) no one can learn or understand anything in the absence of sense, and (when the mind is actively aware of anything it is necessarily aware of it along with an image; for images are like sensuous contents except in that they contain no matter. “

Aquinas writes in De Veritate, Article III:

“19. Nothing is in the intellect that was not previously in sense. But in God there is no sensitive cognition, because this is material. Therefore, He does not know created things, since they were not previously in His sense. Read more of this post

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Introduction to Christology

May 10, 2010 3 Comments

My good friend Jonathan, who at the time was an Anglican seminarian, wrote a great introduction to Christology paper a few years ago. He has since moved into Orthodoxy, but the paper is useful for those who might come by this blog and not be familiar with the terms, early heresies and movements referenced. The file is a word doc. Download here.

As a caveat, I share some of his criticisms made of the Aristotelian language in regard to the Eucharist, but the Catholic view does not demand an Aristotelian framework. That philosophy provides an approximation of the mystery of the Real Presence.

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Josephus on the Temple Symbolism

May 5, 2010 Leave a comment

By: Jay

I had always thought, following James B. Jordan’s analysis as well (in Through New Eyes), that the three levels of the Temple signified a three-tiered, symbolical view of the world. In this view, the holy of holies corresponds to heaven, or God’s throne, and the holy place and courtyard to earth or the stellar sky and earth.  A friend of mine into biblical theology had always taken a different approach to the referents of the levels, and we had an interesting discussion as a result. However, I noticed that Josephus more or less backs up my view in Antiquities of the Jews, though elsewhere in Wars of the Jews in his younger days, he apparently gave a different interpretation.

Also interesting is that Josephus affirms the zodiacal symbolism of the breastplate (from Philo), and this is picked up in writers like Clement of Alexandria in The Stromata. Another argument I’d made several times that garnered quite a bit of opposition and criticism. I came across this in Mircea Eliade’s classic The Sacred & the Profane, and I think the symbolism is probably polyvalent. Gordon Wenham hints at this connection in his commentary on Numbers and here is Josephus affirming it: Read more of this post

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The Decree of Pope St. Gelasius – The Liturgical Joke of the Federal Vision

April 17, 2010 4 Comments

By: Jay Dyer

Protestants are generally clueless when it comes to the canon of Scripture. Even the best of them act as if the Bible dropped out of heaven into their academic circles, as God, of course, needs their rigorous scientific exegesis. But what’s the real problem with this? The problem is that the Protestants have taken the Bible out of its proper context – that of the Liturgy. And, for all you Federal Visionaries, the Church already has apostolic liturgies – we don’t need you inventing and fabricating your own. But at least the FV guys are moving in the right direction.

As I’ve stated many times in debates and discussions, the formation of the canon, whether new or old Testament, cannot be separated from the context that gave those books meaning – public liturgy. The only way we know the authorship of the texts is from Apostolic Tradition, as I’ve demonstrated many times, and the milieu of that Tradition was the public readings at the local liturgy. Scholars across various denominations have known this for years. This growth in the knowledge of God via liturgy and sacraments is called “mystagogy.” Eastern Orthodox theologian, Metropolitan Isaiah of Denver, explains:

“Strictly speaking, there never was a Bible in the Orthodox Church, at least not as we commonly think of the Bible as a single volume book we can hold in our hand. Since the beginning of the Church, from the start of our liturgical tradition, there has never been a single book in an Orthodox church we could point to as the Bible. Instead, the various books of the Bible are found scattered throughout several service books located either on the Holy Altar itself, or at the chanter’s stand. The Gospels (or their pericopes) are complied into a single volume — usually bound in precious metal and richly decorated — placed on the Holy Altar.” Read more of this post

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Response to a Calvinist on “Fallen Nature”

April 17, 2010 6 Comments

By: Jay Dyer

A Calvinist has asked: how can Christ assume a fallen nature and not be sinful?

 
In Calvinism, the tendency is to say that sin is actually in our nature, almost as a kind of substance, giving it ontological status.  The answer to this lies in the Catholic nature/grace distinction and our view that sin is negation and non-being. For us, sin is, and can only be an act of the will, as 1 John 3:4, 7, says–it’s transgression of the law–an act of the human will.  It’s not a state of being, as in Calvinism.  For the Calvinist, nature is inherently evil and passed on now, due to the fall. This is flat-out Manichaean.  It’s also why Calvinists end up hating creation and images–God cannot have anything to do with matter.
In fact, I often use the question posed to me years ago from one’s reading of Berkhof: when we worship Christ, do we worship His human nature, or just the divine? When you asked me that, I answered as any good Calvinist would–as a Nestorian. I said we only worship the divine nature, as Rushdoony said.  However, the meaning of in the Incarnation according to Ephesus, which most Calvinists profess to hold, teaches that we worship Christ with one adoration which includes his flesh (see the quote below).  This means we do, in some sense, worship something created–namely the deified humanity of Christ.  This the Calvinists cannot grasp.  Read more of this post

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Athanasius Shows the Reformed to be Arian, Pt 2

April 15, 2010 1 Comment

Dramatist Paul Washer

[So stop trying to get the hypostases to split and damn one another, Protestants! -Jay]
Four Discourses Against The Arians, Discourse III:

54. Therefore as, when the flesh advanced, He is said to have advanced, because the body was His own, so also what is said at the season of His death, that He was troubled, that He wept, must be taken in the same sense. For they, going up and down , as if thereby recommending their heresy anew, allege; Behold, ‘He wept,’ and said, ‘Now is My soul troubled,’ and He besought that the cup might pass away; how then, if He so spoke, is He God, and Word of the Father? Yea, it is written that He wept, O God’s enemies, and that He said, ‘I am troubled,’ and on the Cross He said, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani,’ that is, ‘My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?’ and He besought that the cup might pass away. Thus certainly it is written; but again I would ask you (for the same rejoinder must of necessity be made to each of your objections ), If the speaker is mere man, let him weep and fear death, as being man; but if He is the Word in flesh (for one must not be reluctant to repeat), whom had He to fear being God? Or wherefore should He fear death, who was Himself Life, and was rescuing others from death? Or how, whereas He said, ‘Fear not him that kills the body Luke 12:4,’ should He Himself fear? And how should He who said to Abraham, ‘Fear not, for I am with you,’ and encouraged Moses against Pharaoh, and said to the son of Nun, ‘Be strong, and of a good courage,’ Himself feel terror before Herod and Pilate? Further, He who succours others against fear (for ‘the Lord,’ says Scripture, ‘is on my side, I will not fear what man shall do unto me ‘), did He fear governors, mortal men? Did He who Himself had come against death, feel terror of death? Is it not both unseemly and irreligious to say that He was terrified at death or hades, whom the keepers of the gates of hades saw and shuddered? But if, as you would hold, the Word was in terror wherefore, when He spoke long before of the conspiracy of the Jews, did He not flee, nay said when actually sought, ‘I am He?’ for He could have avoided death, as He said, ‘I have power to lay down My life, and I have power to take it again;’ and ‘No one takes it from Me. ‘ Read more of this post

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