Initiation, not information. Worship, not belief.

   

I think therefore I am ? I believe Christ is God, therefore I am a Christian ?

Well, as St James says, even the demons believe. Indeed, they have a perfect theology.

"What if, instead of starting from the assumption that human beings are thinking things, we started from the conviction that human beings are first and foremost lovers?”

From James K.A. Smith's book "You Are What You Love"

"The key is to know that love is a habit, not merely a choice. ... Learning to love God is like learning to play Bach: it requires daily immersion in habits and practices that train the 'muscles' of my heart to desire, and thus do, what it ought."

Gracey Olmstead adds in her review.

Georges Florovsky writes, 

“From the very beginning Christianity was not primarily a doctrine, but exactly a community. There was not only a Message to be proclaimed and delivered, and Good News to be declared. There was precisely a New Community, distinct and peculiar, in the process of growth and formation, to which members were called and recruited."

Florovsky's assessment highlights the priority of the ecclesial body over its own message and doctrine. The goal of early Christian preaching was not to establish and defend doctrine, but to inaugurate and develop a community of disciples.

As Francis Young points out, "religion" was not about doctrines or dogma's, but ritual. You shared a meal with your god, there was a communion, a give and take, perhaps even an exchange of life - bios, biological life, from flesh and blood, exchanged for the life of God, to ZOE, spiritual life.

His life for mine.

It is about initiation, not information.

Orthodoxy, as McGuckin writes, is not a “system of doctrines. . . . Orthodoxy is the living mystery of Christ’s pres­ ence in the world: a resurrectional power of life. It cannot be understood, except by being fully lived out.” He continues: “Our God is the One Who Is. When the disciple is in ontological harmony with this God, the disci­ ple also comes into life.”

Religion is a habitus, a disposition of the soul to be in the world a certain way.

The grammar of God is spoken in communal performance of song, praise, and thanksgiving.

James KA Smith says,

“Discipleship, becoming Christ-like, empowered by the Spirit to image God to the world is not magic. Nor is it merely intellectual. It’s a matter of re-forming our loves, re-narrativing our identities, re-habituating our virtue. And that is centered in the practices of the people of God gathered by the Spirit around Christ’s Word and the table.

Love takes practice. Worship is our gymnasium. . . .”

In liturgy, we are immersed in a narrative that shapes and forms the way we inhabit our lives.

James KA Smith ends with this :

That's why the Triune God doesn't just send us an "objective" Word; he sends his Son who, upon his ascension, imparts the Spirit who gives birth to a community of practice to enable us to read his world.

He doesn't just send us a message;he enfolds us into his body. And that body is the community of practice in which we learn to mean the world—the context in which we learn what the world is for.

Our seeing the world as a gift to be used is relative to our immersion in the Story in which that makes sense. The church is the language-game in which we learn to read the world aright.

The church is that"conventional"community in which the Spirit trains us to know the real world.

Metropolitan Jonah Paffhausen tells us :

“There is a temptation to reduce Orthodoxy, especially among young male converts, to a rational system of doctrines and dogmas, canons and rituals....

 
All these things, doctrines, dogmas, canons and so forth, are there in order to support one primary purpose: the transformation of our souls in theosis, in short, salvation. 

Just because you have the right doctrine, pure dogmas and strict observance of the canons does not mean that you are deified. In fact, the great spiritual fathers all say that knowledge puffs up, inflates our ego, and inflames our passions. These things will not save you. They are the context for the spiritual struggle but are not its content....

The Fathers tell us, over and over, that until we have achieved a substantial degree of purification from the passions, we must not touch theology. In the early Church, the three year period of catechesis was primarily devoted to moral teaching from the Old Testament. You have to live Orthodox to understand the Faith.”

Is God enough ? Adam needed Eve.

                                   

The Orthodox Nun and therapist Katherine Weston in her book Loneliness or Fruitful Longing remarks that though Adam walked with God, it was not enough. He needed Eve. He needed community.

With God, but without others, without a life progressing toward some value, we remain crippled.

The Fathers tell us, look towards self, and it’s hell, towards others, and we find paradise. But it’s difficult to practice self-forgetting when we are alone.

As Prof.Kenneth Seeskin in his essay on Adam and Eve says, HERE,

"Human perfection cannot be achieved only through intellectual and spiritual development, but requires companionship and physical intimacy."

Personhood requires love, which requires relationship, doesn't it ?

What about all those imprisoned ? Victor Frankl, the Jewish psychologist, or Father Arseny, the Orthodox priest imprisoned in Soviet Russia ? Did not God suffice for them ?

That is different.

First, they were afforded the opportunity to set value upon their lives - they helped others, in a kind of community. Their lives had meaning.

But, more than this, they had no choice. I have been to prison. There is freedom there.

A man today thinks, if only he could figure out a way, try harder, he could get the girl, or promotion, or life change that would create a life of meaning.

And sometimes that’s right. In prison, however, that burden is taken away.

You would think the number would be zero, but many remark at how many of the Dalit’s, the “untouchables”, in India are seen smiling, despite living with their family in desolate shacks, pulling a rickshaw for 12 hrs a day. But this is the wisdom of the caste system, they have accomplished all that they might within the possibilities laid down from society.

A fine mechanic might have his conscience, or wife or father, always whispering to him - you could do better, own your own shop perhaps...You can fix your life !

Those at the bottom in America are not the backbone of society, they are the losers. The message is - they ought to, and still can, do and be better.

The Aristotelian model of suffering & well-being identifies a set of baseline conditions and virtues for human happiness, with suffering being due to deviations from these conditions. Modern psychology and psychiatry are tacitly built on this model, with one popular version being Seligman’s PERMA Model: P – Positive Emotion; E – Engagement; R – Relationships; M – Meaning; A – Accomplishments. 

Jordan Peterson, despite his various short-comings, in an able psychologist, he says,

“We experience much of our positive emotion in relation to goals. We are not happy, technically speaking, unless we see ourselves progressing—and the very idea of progression implies value. Worse yet is the fact that the meaning of life without positive value is not simply neutral. Because we are vulnerable and mortal, pain and anxiety are an integral part of human existence.

We must have something to set against the suffering that is intrinsic to Being. We must have the meaning inherent in a profound system of value or the horror of existence rapidly becomes paramount. Then, nihilism beckons, with its hopelessness and despair.”

He’s right.

First, there is brain chemistry. For the depressed it is crucial they be put on some kind of anti-depressant.

AFTER that, what causes depression ?

Johann Hari, in his best-selling book Lost Connections, identifies 7 kinds social causes, disconnection from:

Meaningful Work

Other People

Meaningful Values

Childhood Trauma

Status and Respect

Natural World

Hopeful and Secure Future (faith)

He writes HERE,

“Everyone knows human beings have natural physical needs,” he added. “Well, there’s equally good evidence that we have innate psychological needs. We need to feel we belong to a group; we need to feel we have a stable future; we need to feel that we are valued; we need to feel we have meaning and purpose in our lives.”

Yes, a psychologist will first ask - do you have a significant other ? A job ? A friend ? A reason to live - something you can make progress at ?

You need at least 3 out of Hari's 7 as foundations, 4 or more and you can get better. Less than 3 and you're heading for suicide, even with a firm belief in God.

Unfortunately, our Churches often teach a kind of passivity, waiting on God, and giving of oneself when one has nothing to give. You must acquire love before it's given, as a result, much moral damage is done. 

For my own experience, and a free PDF of the book that most helped me, go HERE 

               

For most psychologists, there are the six basic human needs :

Love and connection
Significance
Variety
Certainty
Growth
Contribution

Laurence Heller’s groundbreaking NARM modality lists five core needs and their associated core capacities :

1) Connection

Capacity to be in touch with our body and our emotions Capacity to be in connection with others

2) Attunement

Capacity to attune to our needs and emotions

3) Trust

Capacity to recognize, reach out for, and take in physical and emotional nourishment

4) Autonomy

Capacity to set appropriate boundaries

Capacity to say no and set limits

Capacity to speak our minds without guilt or fear

5) Love-Sexuality

Capacity to live with an open heart

Capacity to integrate a loving relationship with a vital sexuality

Secular Reason in the Public Sphere - a Ruse of Power

 

  

As Stanley Fish puts it HERE : There are no such thing as “secular reasons.”

He writes, "the professor of law Steven Smith does in his new book, “The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse,” that there are no secular reasons, at least not reasons of the kind that could justify a decision to take one course of action rather than another.

Secular reason can’t do its own self-assigned job — of describing the world in ways that allow us to move forward in our projects — without importing, but not acknowledging, the very perspectives it pushes away in disdain.

Insofar as modern liberal discourse rests on a distinction between reasons that emerge in the course of disinterested observation — secular reasons — and reasons that flow from a prior metaphysical commitment, it hasn’t got a leg to stand on."

Of course, liberalism simply smuggles in its metaphysics under vague abstractions like "equality" and "freedom" that it pretends are just concrete objective facts floating out there without need of context or metaphysical presuppositions.

Liberalism only allows for secular reason to "count" in the public sphere, claiming it to be neutral and accessible to all.

But there is no such thing as an unbiased, neutral, objective standpoint. What people call 'reason' is based on a set of prior commitments. It is based on a belief system.

And what counts as knowledge is not neutrally determined, but constituted within networks of power— social, political, and economic.

SO, if the fundamentalist secularist get to bring in their fundamental beliefs and commitments and pretend that they are rational and objective, then why can’t religious ?

What is outside liberalism is then viewed not as reason, but irrationality, most especially the irrationality of faith. 

In claiming the realm of reason, liberalism also claims the realm of public space, which is precisely the space that is ruled by the rules of reason, which liberalism has laid down.

That's the trick, a liberal asks for a justification, but when given a religious reasoning, will simply dismiss it as not "real" reasons.

Only liberal-approved reasoning, with its own faith commitments, is allowed in the Public sphere.

“The ambition of the liberal political philosopher,” writes Paul Kahn (Putting Liberalism in its Place, 120), is to find that set of arguments that is so compelling that every individual, not corrupted by the illogic of interest, would necessarily affirm those reasons as his own.” Because it assumes the mantle of reason, it has “its own imperial ambitions” and can conceive of “no legitimate opposition because it has preempted the entire domain of public values by making an exhaustive claim to reason.”

Why go to church ? Because you become what you worship.

                                 

You become what you love, not what you think.

Practice, not belief, is primary - our doings precede our thinkings.

A religion is essentially bound up with the communal form of its practices : the material practices shape the subjectivity of adherents, making it possible to experience and construe the world in certain ways.

After all, Christ did not come to bring us doctrines, but His body, the Church, which enfolds us into its economy of life, shapes how we receive, and think of, the world , scripture, and God.

By participating in the rhythms of religious ritual we order our modes of perception to receive the world as sacrament.

Georges Florovsky wrote

“From the very beginning Christianity was not primarily a doctrine, but exactly a community. There was not only a Message to be proclaimed and delivered, and Good News to be declared. There was precisely a New Community, distinct and peculiar, in the process of growth and formation, to which members were called and recruited."

Florovsky's assessment highlights the priority of the ecclesial body over its own message and doctrine. The goal of early Christian preaching was not to establish and defend doctrine, but to inaugurate and develop a community of disciples.

As Francis Young points out, "religion" was not about doctrines or dogma's, but ritual. You shared a meal with your god, there was a communion, a give and take, perhaps even an exchange of life.

It was about initiation, not information.

Religion is a habitus, a disposition of the soul to be in the world a certain way.

Living liturgically is not optional. 

Our present cultural liturgies shape our perception to occlude the presence of wonder and the Divine.

The things of God are not obvious or clear to a darkened heart.

Faith is a means of perception that requires a change in the agent of perception. 

By participating in the rhythms of religious ritual we order our modes of perception to receive the world as sacrament.

RR Reno remarks, 

One of our great temptations in the modern era has been to evade responsibility for the proper formation of our prejudices. We seek fact-based truths, a mode of knowing that we imagine is secure against our vices…

As Newman put it, we hope that knowledge does not require preparation of our hearts. 

Thus the quintessential modern presupposition: “Truth is to be approached without homage.”

In this personal engagement with truth, a man’s moral character is as decisive as his native intelligence.”

You must take responsibility for the types of beliefs you wish to hold.

Knowledge requires preparation of the heart, which is just as decisive as intelligence.

The type of person you are, how you live, will determine the kinds of things you will know.

In general, people know what they want to know, hence educating desire is imperative.

Asad, in his Genealogies of Religion writes :

"The formation/transformation of moral dispositions ... required a particular program of disciplinary practices. 

The rites that were prescribed by that program did not simply evoke or release universal emotions, they aimed to construct and reorganize distinctive emotions 

– desire (cupiditas/carita ), humility (humilitas), remorse (contritio) –on which the central Christian virtue of obedience to God depended. 

This point must be stressed, because the emotions mentioned here are not universal human feelings, not ‘powerful drives and emotions associated with human physiology 

They are historically specific emotions that are structured internally and related to each other in historically determined ways.

And they are the product not of mere readings of symbols but of processes of power."

James KA Smith on the difference between the cold abstraction of ideology and proper religious *living :

“The sacramental imagination begins from the assumption that our discipleship depends not only—not even primarily—on the conveyance of ideas into our minds, but on our immersion in embodied practices and rituals that form us into the kind of people God calls us to be. 

…worship stages a recovery of the aesthetic aspects of the Christian tradition as a crucial means for redirecting our imagination in community—a means for reordering our love.

We were created for stories, not propositions; for drama, not bullet points. 

…worship resists such reductionism by reclaiming the holistic, full-orbed materiality of liturgical worship that activates all the senses: hearing (not just “messages” but the poetry of the preached Word), sight (with a renewed appreciation for the visual arts, iconicity, and the architectural space of worship), touch (in communal engagement, but also touching the bread that is Christ’s body), taste (the body and blood), and even smell (of wine in the cup of the new covenant but also the fragrance of worship in candles and incense).

…..in the rhythms and cadences of full-orbed Christian worship, we learn something about the gospel that we couldn’t learn in any other way—and might not even be able to put into words. 

Carried in the practices of Christian worship is an understanding of God that we “know” on a register deeper than the intellect, an understanding of the gospel on the level of the imagination that changes how we comport ourselves in the world, even if we can never quite articulate it in beliefs or doctrines or a Christian worldview.”

Yes, we are moved more than we are convinced.

Different traditions know God differently : the limits religious of dialogue

I’m often at a loss when speaking to Muslims on theology, it’s not that I disagree, it’s that I simply cannot understand how they are thinking about a thing.

This is because the way one lives, the community in which one is uncultured in, has a specific grammar to how they think about God, with its own way of interpreting scripture, shaped by its particular practices. The “rules” of how we think about a thing are very different.

There's a reason why all practicing Calvinists ( or Catholics or atheists) will each interpret scripture in the same particular way. If you wish to know how a Calvinist understand what faith in God is, you must live like one.

Stanley Hauerwas remarks :

“Of course, for this faith to make sense, it must be connected with the practices that make it intelligible: prayer, the sacraments, and the virtues.

Dr. D’Costa suggests that, 

“prayer is the necessary condition to secure the objectivity of theology, because theology cannot be done with intellectual rigor outside the context of a love affair with God and God’s community. 

The formal object of theology is God, and, like other disciplines that require practices and virtues constitutive for knowing the object of their investigation, theology requires prayer.”

Thus, logical proofs are of little use if their truth is not CONNECTED to our lives, one must love one’s way into knowing God, within some particular historical community.

Religion, for the ancients at least, was as a certain virtue, a certain habitus of the mind, a certain willingness to be open to the divine, to what it shows itself in nature.

Liturgy and lifestyle shape this mental orientation.

After all, Christ did not come to bring us doctrines, but His body, the Church, which enfolds us into its economy of life, shapes how we receive, and think of, the world , scripture, and God.

The rhythms of the liturgy attune us to the music of the spheres, it trains us to listen.

Doctrines are, in a sense, derivative from practice.

Religion is not a set of propositions that one believes but rather a (communal) way of life. 

Religion is a matter more of initiation than of information, a matter of know-how before it ever becomes a matter of know-that.

In most religions, you're sharing a meal with God, in sacrifice, forming a relationship to Him, even becoming one with Him, a mingling of His life with ours, an embodied dialogue takes place within a framework of specific rules.

In short, a religion is essentially bound up with the communal form of its practices : the material practices precede and shape the subjectivity of adherents, making it possible to experience and construe the world in certain ways.

One learns how to feel, act, and think in conformity with a religious tradition that is, in its inner structure, far richer and more subtle than can be explicitly "articulated."

"Religion" helps us "feel" the world in a certain way, orient ourselves toward it.

A religion works like a language in this respect: "It comprises a vocabulary of discursive and nondiscursive symbols together with a distinctive logic or grammar in terms of which this vocabulary can he meaningfully deployed" - Lindbeck

Our doings precede our thinkings. Practice is primary.

It's  is not primarily a set of propositions to be believed, but is rather the medium in which one moves, a set of skills that one employs in living one’s life.

Thus while a religion’s truth claims are often of the utmost importance, it is, nevertheless, the conceptual vocabulary and the syntax or inner logic which determine how we think about a thing.

Ritual worship forms the grammar of our thought.

Doctrine make explicit the norms that were already embedded in the community’s practiceIn other words, doctrines make explicit the know-how that was already implicit in our practice. To confess that Jesus is “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God”is to articulate what was already implicit in our prayers, a worshipful way of life nourished by the Scriptures.

Reminds me of Larry Hurtado's insight, the first Christian's sang God, it's only when we try and speak of Him, utilizing not our hearts and desire, but our intellect, that the trouble begins.

But it’s always been like that - narrative coherence has always ultimately governed tradition and its development.

For example, that Arian controversies showed that each dissident party could quote sources of theology quite evenly, and thus as a singular issue either one could have been vindicated. But it was the narrative compatibility (faith that was already practiced, sung, and understood for centuries) with dogmatic theses that resolved the matter in favour of the Nicene party.

The evaluation of whether to affirm the Nicene homoousios or the semi-Arian homoiousios is not a matter that can be settled by "formal" logic. 

That "first order" of prayer and proclamation is on the plane of know-how; doctrines as formulated in the Nicene Creed are the fruit of the community of Christian practice "making explicit" the norms that were previously unsaid. Doctrines say what, up to that point, we previously did, in a sense.

Theology and doctrine make explicit the commitments implicit in—and entailed by—our proclamation, praise, and prayer.

Rituals do not express belief, they shape how we know. It is impossible to understand religion without FIRST being formed in worship, HERE Peter Leithart remarks :

"....we do not find Israelites in the Hebrew Bible described as thinkers who then act. Rather, the prophets’ expect Israel to practicea nexus of ethically-induced rituals aimed at intellectual formation.

Israel’s rituals—are meant to form knowers and not merely express what is already believed or known..

False worship blinds Israel so that she can no longer discern YHWH’s actions from her false gods’ actions we will come to understand our world through our ethical behavior and our rituals. Whether they are prescribed by our culture or the prophets. 

The question centers on whether we will know foolishly or wisely, and whether or not we will bring a life trued to God’s instruction to the rituals of the church.”

So, whether I’m speaking to Muslims, or modern systematic theologians, I can’t find their way of thinking intelligible since it’s outside my tradition, the grammar of my thought is different.

John Behr asks,

“what happens when one takes these supposed core theological elements (Trinity and Incar nation) out of the context in which they were composed—the particular practice of reading Scripture and the celebration of liturgy within which they had meaning, both leading to a praxis of piety, practices of identity formation shaping the believer in the image of Christ, to be his body—and places them in another context…?”

We receive revelation from God and yet one needs to "learn" to receive it as such, we need “training" through the community of practice that is the body of Christ” and our reception of this as revelation is dependent upon our inculcation in the community of social practice that is the church.

I've written about this more HERE 

Only the erotic gaze can disclose the reality of God

 

I'm all for skepticism, in fact, one reason I finally opened up to Christianity was because after examining my own assumed beliefs I found how flimsy they were.

Most skeptics are scarcely skeptical of their own beliefs, truly, it's as if they never even questioned them. 

This is because we usually believe what we desire to believe, and what we desire is dependent upon how we live. If you wish to desire to believe or know a thing, you must live a certain way.

Indeed, the liturgy is to form us into the types of people who desire to know God, and then are capable of receiving His spirit.

Rituals do not express belief, they shape how we know. It is impossible to understand religion without FIRST being formed in worship, HERE Peter Leithart remarks :


"....we do not find Israelites in the Hebrew Bible described as thinkers who then act. Rather, the prophets’ expect Israel to practicea nexus of ethically-induced rituals aimed at intellectual formation.

Israel’s rituals—are meant to form knowers and not merely express what is already believed or known..

False worship blinds Israel so that she can no longer discern YHWH’s actions from her false gods’ actions we will come to understand our world through our ethical behavior and our rituals. Whether they are prescribed by our culture or the prophets.

The question centers on whether we will know foolishly or wisely, and whether or not we will bring a life trued to God’s instruction to the rituals of the church.”

One truly only knows what one loves, this is true even of mathematical propositions. 

This is why truth always must begin with beauty, to evoke desire, one must want to know a truth, and for this one must perceive it somehow as beautiful, or else one's consciousness will never intend toward the horizon of that truth to begin with.

As Plotinus discovered, love is necessary first, before beauty can be seen, for love is that essential "mood" that intends the world as beauty and can so receive it.

Only once the senses are “rendered rational” by ascetic education is the "ontologically erotic" gaze, which loves and desires being, able to receive creation as gift within the vision of love.

This is true, and also why knowledge of God must, *begin with desire, and beauty, neither of which is contained within dialectical reason, it requires a subjective *intention on the knowers part.

Hence the most fully “adequate” discourse of truth is worship, prayer, and rejoicing.

I’ve written how reality itself must be trusted to be known HERE

Esther Lightcap Meek in his “A Little Manual for Knowing” explains how we can adopt a posture that will bring us into contact with God:

“We love in order to know. Love, not bare information amassing, should characterize the way we relate to the world.

The goal is no longer comprehensive, mystery-eliminating, reality-denuding information. The goal is communion—the communion of knower and known. Communion is the fulfillment of love. The goal is ongoing friendship. Friendship requires our ongoing pledge.”

We pledge to give ourselves to the yet-to-be-known, and to consent to its being. We pledge to take the risk to follow something that may prove not to be there, something that may prove to be way different from what we imagine. ”

We pledge also to open ourselves to the transformation and to the new reality that the yet-to-be-known will bring us. We must be willing to have it change us, without specifying or holding at arm’s length the change we will undergo. ”

The goal of knowing is not complete information; it is communion.”

She says elsewhere,

“…philosophical arguments aren’t the natural foundation of religious belief, so ‘God exists’ gains its meaning not from philosophical arguments but from how people experience human life.

….people don’t normally acquire religious beliefs by argument or testing evidence. Instead, they come to an understanding of the world that is expressed in values and a way of living. When someone converts to a religion, what changes isn’t so much intellectual beliefs, but their will, what they value, how they choose to live”

Some things can only be known in this way, from within a commitment to them, a commitment which may be called ‘faith.’

                                   

When first I entered the Faith, I did not believe in the physical resurrection of Christ. God does not require that, he condescends to us.

To have a relationship with God, as with anyone, one needs to offer small tokens of trust.

"God is not exterior evidence, but the secret call within us.”

- Olivier Clement

Walk with God and you'll come to know Him, the person of Christ is embedded within the rhythms of the liturgical calendar.

The resurrection may have happened 2,000 yrs ago. I think it did. It would explain a lot, like how entire civilizations bloomed alive over the breaking of bread to some dead backwater peasant.

But, it's happening today. You can actually do this. Marry the rhythms of your deadened life onto the life-giving movement of God’s, tuning your soul to the music of paradise.

You can practice the resurrection, perform theology, live with God.

Discursive knowledge, in every realm, will never be certain, but, cleanse the nous, and direct perception of Gods beauty can be apprehended.

Of course, you have to educate your senses to receive God, generally, people know what they desire to know, desire intends consciousness

Yes, as if yearning itself was not a religious experience, and although we cannot grasp God, our desire exceeds what's possible for conceptual knowledge, erotically beckoning us to leap into the Divine unknown…

Participative knowing requires personal transformation, and living the virtues can disclose more of reality.

The virtue of humility is central to this unbounded receptivity so as to be filled with more.

Reminds me of Larry Hurtado's insight, the first Christian's sang God, it's only when we try and speak of Him, utilizing not our hearts and desire, but our intellect, that the trouble begins.

Met Hilarion Alfeyev once said, 

"The theological authority of liturgical texts is, in my opinion, higher than that of the works of the Fathers of the Church,

"...The lex credendi grows out of the lex orandi, and dogmas are considered divinely revealed because they are born in the life of prayer and revealed to the Church through its divine services.”

And Francis Martin says,

"For the religious, knowledge depends not only upon rationality and clarity but also upon ethical living, participation in prayer and liturgy, practices of fidelity, and openness to the Spirit. This is chiefly because in knowing God, we seek to know a person and persons must reveal themselves through cultivated relationships."

David Bentley Hart puts the problem well :

"In reality, subjective certitude cannot be secured, not because the world is nothing but the aleatory play of opaque signifiers, but because subjective certitude is an irreparably defective model of knowledge; it cannot correspond to or “adequate” a world that is gratuity rather than ground, poetry rather than necessity, rhetoric rather than dialectic.

*********************************************************
For Christian thought, then, delight is the premise of any sound epistemology: it is delight that constitutes creation, and so only delight can comprehend it, see it aright, understand its grammar. Only in loving creation’s beauty – only in seeing that creation truly is beauty – does one apprehend what creation is.

*********************************************************
Thus, for Christian thought, to know the world truly is achieved not through a positivistic reconstruction of its “sufficient reason”, but through an openness before glory, a willingness to orient one’s will toward the light of being, and to receive the world as gift, in response to which the most fully “adequate” discourse of truth is worship, prayer, and rejoicing. "

Paul Tyson has written on how, for the ancients, philosophy wasn’t about thinking, which can bring no truth :

“….right action and right feeling in an actual lived life are clearly a more significant measure of philosophical validity to Plato than smart thinking.

Merely intellectually “believing” in the transcendent existence of the form of “The Table” does not make you either a philosopher or a Platonist.

Plato refuses to put his philosophy in clear propositions before us for the very specific reason that he mistrusts written statements as being “dead” propositional substitutes for the communal and individual spiritual practices of the truly philosophical life.

Other than as an active, affective, aesthetic, and embodied existential stance…such spiritual formation cannot be imposed by mere argumentative force and cannot be “obtained” with a mere proof.

Thus receptive prayer, quiet attention, and right worship are keys to truth and success in the active pursuit of meaningful knowledge.”

So Faith is a means of perception that requires a change in the agent of perception.

By participating in the rhythms of religious ritual we order our modes of perception to receive the world as sacrament.

These things are not anti-reason, they complete reason itself.

Who Is Israel ?

The early Church fathers did not see themselves as a “New Israel”, but as Israel itself.

In fact, not all ethnic Jews at the time of Christ were considered part of Israel either.

The great Jewish Rabbinic scholar Daniel Boyarin argues that within Judaism itself, there was a distinction as to who and what constituted Israel :

“the Mishna strongly supports this analysis, even suggesting the conclusion that "Sadducees" were not considered "Israel," although in this instance on grounds of ritual difference, not doctrine…

….for rabbinic discourse there are Jews who are outside of "Israel," and that these Jews are called variously minim and Sadducees…..there are historical and genealogical Israelites who are not "Israel."

….the Rabbis are in these texts appropriating the name "Israel" for those who hold their creed and follow the ways that they identify as the "ways of Israel," and the "Sadducees" are heretics who are beyond the pale and outside the name Israel.”

As Boyarin further explains,

"Jewish sectarianism as a form of decentralized pluralism by default had been replaced by the binary of Jewish orthodox and Jewish heretics: the latter comprising those who are Jews and say the wrong things and may therefore no longer be called “Israel”.'

Read his paper HERE.

Shaye Cohen states that, “this rabbinic ideology is reflected in Justin’s discussion of the Jewish sects: there are Jews, i.e., the “orthodox” and there are sects, among them the Pharisees, who scarcely deserve the name Jew”.

Cohen notes that, “All of the persistent sectarians” of “‘Pharisees,’ ‘Sadducees,’ and ‘Christians’ ... were cursed in the birkhat haminim”.

Recall Paul’s instruction to the church of Rome that, “they are not all Israel, which are of Israel” (Rom 9.6)

Indeed, in the earliest moments of the Gospel nar- rative, John the Baptist makes the Abrahamic claim to those gathered at the Jordan River that, “God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham” (Mt. 3.9).

Peter Richardson in Israel in the Apostolic Church suggests that John’s cleansing of sins in the Jordan was a “proselyte baptism which has for its presupposition that all Jews have forfeited their right to be Israelites, have become as Gentiles, and there- fore have to be readmitted”. 

In his letter to the Magnesians, St Ignatius writes, “For if even unto this day we live after the manner of Judaism, we avow that we have not received grace: for the divine prophets lived after Christ Jesus”. (Ign. Magn. 8:2).

In the same epistle, the bishop of Antioch puts it another way: “For Christianity did not believe in Judaism, but Judaism in Christianity, wherein every tongue believed and was gathered together unto God” (Ign. Magn. 10:3).

For Ignatius, it was the contemporaneous expression of Judaism that was out of step with the Israelite faith of the prophets, not Christians who represented the fulfillment and realization of their prophecies.

Indeed, contrast to modern Rabbinic Jewish notions, one never needed to be ethnically Jewish, HERE Stephen de Young writes,

“Importantly, when this people left Egypt, it included an ethnically mixed group of Egyptians and other Semitic migrants (Ex 12:38). This group is not mentioned again in the Torah as a distinct class because these families are integrated into the nation and people of Israel and become some of its founding members.

Of all of the generation which came out of Egypt, only two men, Joshua and Caleb, entered into and took possession of the promised land (Numbers 13:26-14:24).

All the rest, including Moses himself, died in the wilderness as a result of Caleb is, however, the son of Jephunneh, and Jephunneh is repeatedly identified as being a Kenizzite (Num 32:12; Josh 14:6, 14).

The Kenizzites were a Canaanite people who already lived in Canaan at the time that Abraham had arrived there (Gen 15:19).

Caleb and his family were among the many Semitic migrants to Egypt during this period, and yet through his faithfulness to Yahweh and his participation in the events from Passover to Pentecost, he became a part of the tribe of Judah, even one of its chief men, and an inheritor of the promises to Abraham (Josh 14:13-14; 21:43-45).

These Gentiles are not naturalized citizens or converts to the religion of Judaism, rather they, like Caleb, are part of one of the tribes of Israel, children of Abraham, and inheritors of all of those promises.

The phrases “the church replaces Israel” or “the church is a new Israel” are therefore nonsensical once the terms in which the scriptures speak is understood. The church is Israel. Specifically, the church is the assembly of Israel, God’s people, to offer worship, praise, and sacrifice to their God. It is not that God’s people are no longer an ethnic or national entity, it is rather that God’s people and inheritance were never an ethnic entity, and only ever so briefly a national one.

This is the fulfillment of the prophecy of Hosea, after Yahweh had declared Israel to be ‘not my people’ that Israel would be restored when a people which did not yet exist would be called his people while at the same time those who had been rejected were declared to be his people once again (Hos 1:10; 2:23; Rom 9:25-26).

God created a people for himself and called it Israel. This group was not a nation or an ethnicity. It was a group formed by participation in the Passover and the giving of the covenant (Pentecost). God knew that most of this group would be unfaithful, but he bore with them for a time and then scattered the unfaithful among the nations. Then when he regathered and reconstitutes Israel, he did it from the nations into which those tribes had been dispersed.

So Israel and God’s people are synonymous terms. This means that the assembly (church) today is identical to the assembly of Israel in the Old Testament. We are all, in the church, Israelites, though we are not all Judeans (Jews). But Judah/Judea was never all of Israel. It was the part from which the king (I.e. Messiah) came.”

                                                         

Many Christians think Paul expects a restoration of Jews in the distant future, and some have seen the modern state of Israel as a fulfillment of Romans 9–11.

This is wrong.

As Peter Leithart, a protestant scholar, says : “The prophets of the Hebrew Bible testified that a time would come when judgment would come upon Israel after their return from exile. At this point, much of Israel would be cut off, but a remnant would be purified and preserved by the fire of judgment.

This remnant would become the basis for a new Israel, into which the nations would stream.

It is St. Paul’s understanding in the uncontroversially Pauline Epistle to the Romans that this had taken place in the coming of Christ (Rom. 11:1–24), an understanding also found in St. John’s Gospel. The Church is a new people of God, a renewed Israel, made up of the faithful remnant of Israel of the Old Covenant into which Gentiles who have come to Christ have been grafted. Those returning from the nations replace the tribes scattered to the nations so that in the end all Israel will be saved."

It’s odd to see modern evangelicals disagree with Paul and the Bible :

"There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ. And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring, *heirs according to the promise*.”

Romans 9:6, 7 confirm this: "Not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel, and not all are children of Abraham just because they are descendants."

In John 8:39 the Jews defend themselves against Jesus' criticisms by saying, "'Abraham is our father.' Jesus said to them, 'If you were Abraham's children, you would do what Abraham did.'"

Jesus shows us that they are not Abraham's children, even though they are Jews.

Finally, we must ask how the modern state of Israel is related to Abraham or the Israelite religion. Is Israel a nation given by God, and for God ? No, Israel is one of the least religious nations on earth. Only 30% of Israelis say they are religious, THIS survey finds

If it’s all about genetics, then the Palestinians are just as likely to be related to the ancient Israelites as modern Jews, and in some cases, more so, as has been acknowledged by Jewish historians, including two of the founders of the modern state of Israel, David Ben-Gurion and Itzhak Ben-Zvi. “Jews and Arabs are all really children of Abraham," says Harry Ostrer, M.D., Director of the Human Genetics Program at New York University School of Medicine HERE, and he’s right.