For the love of it

Cornflower

    Maybe not for Physics, but the idea of time for us people does contain a past and a future. These two states, the past and the future, comprise an understanding of the present which is different for each one of us. As the stories of the past coalesces into straighter and straighter lines, more of us share a similar past. This similar past becomes an origin, or a genesis which informs a present and provides the data for an interpretation of a future, which as the lines straighten we people also begin to share.

    For Christianity the shared past is usually described as a fall, the shared present is described as a search for salvation, the shared future, while it remains mysterious does seem to be a reunion with paradise for the obedient and redeemed and some sort of snake-pit for the disobedient and irredeemable.

    For Baxter and I the Christian understanding stops at the philosopher Epicurus, were rules for a good life are a salvation from unhappiness and begins to flounder when it reaches expressions like "Total Depravity" to describe the original state of the human condition.

   True, whether it be the sails of Viking Marauders hell bent on plunder and maidens, or that pervert Uncle Sprat back from whatever he does on the Mainland, the future can lurk in an often irredeemable, totally depraved manner. But when contemplating the future a mind does have a number of possible directions to take, not all of them horrible.

    Epicurus was born on the Athenian Island of Samos around the time Plato died (348 BC). He was a very wealthy man who had lost his fortune to a shipwreck. His followers, they paid no fee to hear him speak, saw their teacher as a guide who offered Salvation. He was less "getting a law degree and passing the bar exams" he was more an eye for "good conversation and positive attitude."

     His cure for Anxiety went this way: Don't be afraid of the Gods. Don't worry about Death. What is Good is easy to get. What is Terrible is easy to endure.

    The question for both Epicurus and Zeno, the founder of stoicism, both of them earth bound thinkers long settled into the polytheist story of a cadre of jealous Gods occasionally dabbling in human affairs who preferred to remain safely in their heaven while the souls of mortals were destined to a class bound underworld where nothing special happened, has to be : "Did Epicurus and Zeno, Plato for that matter, preach redemption and salvation."

     

A Genesis of Baptists and Motivation

Moon. 9.32 am US Eastern Standard Summer Time

     In my opinion Religion can be thought of as Motive Management in an Eternal Department overseen by a Taoist Celestial Master. The system has to be flexible enough to maintain a willing commitment without losing sight of a profit defined in terms of a genuinely and acceptably sensible future rather than a series of threats.

    Let's look at where the Baptists are, and here I'll risk the hay-baler and declare that the Baptists were an English speaking reaction to Calvinist Extremism that arrived in England via the Arminianist Interpretations of Jacobus Arminius, an understanding that was blossoming in the the early 1600's in the Netherlands. A Golden Age for the Dutch.

    "Sounds like an extremist minority opinion!"

    Calvinists have, or in the 1500's had, their five point plan, or TULIP, to guide them through the vicissitudes of such things as earthly election seasons. 

   T is for Total Depravity - Adam and Eve sinned, there is no hope in any of us people, so just remember that!

   U is for Unconditional Election - For Calvin, God chooses individuals for salvation based solely on His sovereign good pleasure. It has nothing to do with foreseen or preordained human faith, merits, or good works.

   L is for Limited Atonement - Christ died specifically for the elect, not for everyone.

   I is for Irresistible Grace - Because there is no hope in us people, God through the Holy Spirit works a miracle to put a person's soul back together before he or she is even able to become a believer. Once the Holy Spirit has done the work, there's no rejecting your soul, you might sell it, but you can't have it removed. Then, if you don't behave in a willing, able, sufficiently grateful, soul-worthy manner, you need to remember that having a soul isn't and never will be a free pass into heaven.

   P is for Perseverance of the Saints  -  God doesn't make mistakes. Those who God has truly saved, not the heavenly equivalent of a clerical error that sent the Holy Spirit to regenerate the wrong soul, they will be Believers to the end, they cannot lose their salvation. They have to chose salvation. They have to be motivated. They have to ignore the devil.

   "Parts of that sound a little bit mean."

   "Karl Marx would have agreed with you. He thought it mean and unsustainable."

  A Dutch Theologian called Jacobus Arminius wrote several critiques of John Calvin's thinking. Calvin was clearly a dangerous fanatic and time came for the Reformations most ardent reformers to have a synod, they chose a place named Dort to formally call a spade a spade, do away with paddling around, collect the nuts and bolts and sort stuff out.

   One of the upshots of the meeting at Dort was the realization that Calvin's Five Points, his entry level set of convictions for his supporters, once written down and signed for revealed what many thought a horrifying failure to grasp most of the New Testament.

   Fortunately The Synod at Dort also had a chance to have a strong look at Jacobus Arminius' critiques of Calvinist thought and they came up with a theological comprehension which modified and expanded upon Calvinism and produced  an understanding called Arminianism.

    The Arminiasts had their own five point program that addressed their disagreement with Calvinists on the three subjects of Human Free Will, Grace of God, and Salvation.

    Conditional Election: God predestines individuals to salvation based on His foreknowledge of who will freely choose to believe in Christ, rather than by an unconditional decree from on high.  In other words, God looks at you mewling a puking and because he already knows everything there is to know he is able to decide whether you'll believe that his only son Jesus Christ was born of a virgin and rose from the dead. This Calvinist thinking pattern had to be agreed upon because God knows everything. The however comes next in the idea of unlimited atonement.

   Unlimited Atonement. For those in doubt "atonement" is church speak for "making amends." For Jacobus Arminius the ultimate atonement was Christ’s death on the cross, God the Son making amends for some of his father's many flaws and for some of the less than polite things he did to us people in his rather needy efforts to get us to respect him. But, and this is very typical of the One God, while the saving benefit for humanity by Jesus' crucifixion was there for everyone, it was only ever given to those who "exercise faith." An ill-define term as any Baptist will endeavor to tell you

  Prevenient Grace: This is another important difference with Calvin's understanding of a chosen few. Prevenient is a way for the Pulpit to say that Grace comes first not after twelve dozen twirls around a catwalk. We people when we come into the world are already fallen, sinful and totally depraved, just awful. All the same, God's Prevenient Grace is given to all people so they can overcome their spiritual deadness and are awake enough to freely respond to the gospel, the Word, or the Message or the Good News. The operative words here are "Freely Respond."

     Resistible Grace: This too is a big difference for the followers of Arminianism, we people have genuine free will and in our purview we are able, of our own free will, to accept or reject God's offer of saving grace.

    Finally, the fifth point of clarification, is Conditional Salvation or Perseverance and Loss. True believers are called to persevere and remain in Christ. That much was and probably still is certain. But when something like this list of five Arminianist points was presented to the Dutch equivalent of the Parliament or House and Senate, there were disputes about whether a believer who willing chose to suddenly misbehave or was discovered behaving in a disgracefully ungodly manner could fall away, lose his earned salvation and have to rot in hell.

    The Dutch Arminiast disagreements with Calvinism set a bonfire under three English speaking males. They were John Smyth, Thomas Helwys and a man called John Murton, English religious reformers all of them. Unlike John Locke and other Calvinist Liberals hell bent on individual responsibility and limited entry into heaven, these three religious reformers had during their time on earth engaged more closely with the Beatitudes than for example with Genesis and the Lot conundrum (19), Deuteronomy (29), a goodly number of Psalms, Isiah (30 and 34), Ezekiel (38) ...... there are not shortage of Historical accounts of the old testament God in action.

    The point of it all for Baptists, when and if you were baptized you had to know what was happening and why it was happening, otherwise it had nothing to do with free will. If god in three persons were decent sort of chaps, if they meant us to have free will, they meant us to willing participate and to willingly participate you had have some clue what Grace was, and you had to agree that in a participating and responsible society of individuals salvation was a worthy pursuit. 

A Noble Lie and the Peace of God

Goldenrod Gone to Seed

    The Earth, according to Plato's Noble Lie, was our mother. When she created us she mixed different precious metals into our souls. Gold into the souls of rulers and guardians. Silver into the souls of auxiliaries and soldiers, auxiliaries were those who served society. Iron and Bronze went into the souls of the farmers, craftsmen and laborers.

    Look around chaps, there's a reason Plato wrote the lines of his Noble Lie for Socrates. Plato was never an idiot, he had his work as a tutor to the highly successful to look out for, so more likely Plato's own tongue was firmly in his cheek.

   Gold is a soft metal, pretty as a scanty princess, for men to fight over and possess. Silver's got a certain style, unless you're a Chinese Emperor silver is nothing to get worked up about, it polishes up nicely, makes a good candlestick for a lowly cat burglar. Bronze and iron are lumpen, they sit there looking useful until directed.

    In Plato's ideal republic, the Men of Gold weren't allowed to own anything. What society needed from them was a purification of their greed, their cunning, their ability to manipulate others, their skill at attracting personal wealth so that these talents might combine into a knowledge that passed all understanding called a Good Tyrant.

   And yes indeed, worth a quote from the King James Version from the missive written by Paul the Apostle and forwarded by Timothy, thanking the Church in Philippi for their financial support and a call for joy and even greater unity : "And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus."

   Following years and years of diaspora, by the time Pontius Pilate was the Roman Governor of Judea the majority of Jewish people lived outside of Judea. Philippi was a Roman Colony in Macedonia, on the Greek side of Rome, definitely in Europe. This colony had no Jewish Synagogue. For Paul the Apostle and his sidekick Timothy, in terms of world conquest, the Philippians were a bunch of non-Jewish outsiders, and the church in Philippi was a very big deal, it was almost up there with the Irish Saint Columba crossing the seas in a coracle, apparently, to convert the Picts.  

    It's "The Peace of God" that presents the promise "The Peace of a Good Tyrant."

October 27.

The Short Grass

      Contrary to Alfred propagandists and because Alfred's name was easy to pronounce and spell, he was not the first king of England, his grandson Æthelstan was.

    "Fancy that!"

    That expression brings to the mind, a call to imagination. "Fancy that!" goes back to them old days when "fantasy" had a whole bunch of foreign connotations from France and further back to the Latin and the Greek attached to it. It was a suspect and challenging area for the 14th Century Chaucerian minds of England for whom the matter of fact, the empathetic, the funny and the tolerant was so much easier than the practiced deceits of court-speak later generations adopted in an attempt to further King Alfred's 9th Century ambition to give his Saxons a little book learning and class, not something Early England was renowned for.

    For English speakers "Fancy That!" has rather gone out the window in this new age of gilded mantels and trim, obsession with toilets, along with the fartitude or gas-related endurance of Golf Courses. Of interest when the English had their Chaucer on the walk to Canterbury, the Scottish Court of James II was, when weather permitted, playing the almost entirely pointless game of golf and plotting with the French.

   This day in history also recalls the humorlessness of puritan convictions. Listed as follows : the absolute sovereignty of god, the total depravity of homo sapiens, the unconditional election of certain people who can do no wrong because they are chosen by god, and, the literal truth of holy scripture, the Bible.

    "Why today."

    On this day in 1682 William Penn founded Philadelphia.  He wanted to establish a "Holy Experiment." A free, tolerant society in North America based on Quaker principles of peace, equality, freedom of conscience, and representative government.