More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
For Aristotle, theologia, “discourse about God,” was the “first philosophy” because it was concerned with the highest mode of being, but Aristotle’s God was utterly impersonal and bore no resemblance to either Yahweh or the Olympians. It had no appeal for ordinary folk.
“Thought thinks on itself because it shares the nature of the object of thought,” he explained, for … thought and object of thought are the same: The act of contemplation [theoria] is what is most pleasant and best. If, then, God is always in that good state in which we sometimes are, this compels our wonder; and if in a better this compels it yet more. And God is in a better state. And life also belongs to God; for the actuality of thought is life, and God is that actuality; and God’s self-dependent actuality is life most good and eternal. We say therefore that God is living being, eternal,
...more
regarded philosophy as a transformative way of life rather than a purely theoretical system.
Theology is not systematic.
When they contemplated the vastness of empty space with its swirling particles, Epicureans felt they had achieved a godlike perspective.
The rationalism of ancient Greece was not opposed to religion; indeed, it was itself a faith tradition that evolved its own distinctive version of the principles that guided most of the religious systems.
Yohanan and his pupils Eliezer and Joshua, began the heroic task of transforming Judaism from a temple faith to a religion of the book. The Torah would replace the Holy of Holies, and the study of scripture would substitute for animal sacrifice.
“What is hateful to yourself, do not to your fellow man. That is the whole of the Torah and the remainder is but commentary. Go learn it.”
so murder was not just a crime against humanity but a sacrilege: “Scripture instructs us that whatsoever sheds human blood is regarded as if he had diminished the divine image.”7 God had created only one man at the beginning of time to teach us that the destruction of a single life was equivalent to annihilating the entire world; conversely, to save a life redeemed the whole of humanity.8 To humiliate anybody, even a slave or a goy, was a sacrilegious defacing of God’s image9 and a malicious libel denied God’s existence.10 Any interpretation of scripture that bred hatred or disdain for others
...more
As Ezra had indicated so long ago, scripture was not a closed book and revelation was not a distant historical event.
They too now stressed the centrality of compassion and were developing a more interior spirituality.
Christian doctrine would always be a miqra that would make sense only when translated into a ritual, meditative, or ethical program.
Jesus was not asking people to “believe” in his divinity, because he was making no such claim.
When the New Testament was translated from Greek into Latin by Saint Jerome (c. 342–420), pistis became fides (“loyalty”). Fides had no verbal form, so for pisteuo Jerome used the Latin verb credo, a word that derived from cor do, “I give my heart.” He did not think of using opinor (“I hold an opinion”).
During the late seventeenth century, however, as our concept of knowledge became more theoretical, the word “belief” started to be used to describe an intellectual assent to a hypothetical—and often dubious— proposition.
The rabbis knew that miracles proved nothing. One day, during the early years at Yavneh, Rabbi Eliezer was engaged in a fierce argument about a legal ruling (halakah) arising from the Torah. When his colleagues refused to accept his opinion, he asked God to prove his point with a series of miracles. A carob tree moved four hundred cubits of its own accord, water in a nearby canal flowed backward, and the walls of the house of studies caved in, as if on the point of collapse. But the rabbis remained unconvinced and seemed somewhat disapproving of this divine extravaganza. In desperation, Rabbi
...more
Like a human person, scripture consisted of a body, a psyche, and a spirit that transcended mortal nature; these corresponded to the three senses in which scripture could be understood. The mystes had to master the “body” of the sacred text (its literal sense) before he could progress to anything higher. Then he was ready for the moral sense, an interpretation that represented the “psyche,” the natural powers of mind and heart: it provided us with ethical guidance but was largely a matter of common sense. The mystes that pressed on to the end of his initiation was introduced to the spiritual,
...more
Kierkegaard’s “Stages of Faith”
Scripture was not just a text but an “activity;” you did not merely read it— you had to do it.
Faith was purely a matter of commitment and practical living.
Theological speculation that results in the formulation of abstruse doctrines is dismissed as zannah, self-indulgent guesswork about matters that nobody can prove one way or the other but that makes people quarrelsome and stupidly sectarian.85
In one remarkable passage, God insists that Muslims must accept indiscriminately the revelations of every single one of God’s messengers: Abraham, Isaac, Ishmael, Jacob, Moses, Jesus, and all the other prophets.96
Eventually, when the war with Mecca was turning in his favor, Muhammad adopted a policy of nonviolence.102
In the early fourth century, however, Christianity had begun to move in a slightly different direction and developed a preoccupation with doctrinal correctness that would become its Achilles’ heel.
Some Christians had already started to promote the new doctrine, entirely unknown in antiquity, of creation ex nihilo.
believed that the philosophical idea of an eternal cosmos was idolatrous, because it presented nature as a second coeternal god.
Did it not imply that God
was responsible for evil?
The immense and all-powerful God could not possibly have been in the man Jesus: for Arius that would be like cramming a whale into a can of shrimp or a mountain into a box.
Because of imperial pressure, all the delegates except Arius and two of his colleagues signed the statement, but once they had returned to their dioceses, they continued to teach as they had always done—for the most part midway between Arius and Athanasius.
in the West: God became man in order to expiate the sin of Adam.
The Orthodox view of Jesus was defined by Maximus the Confessor (c. 580–662), who believed that the Word would have become flesh even if Adam had not sinned.
Paradoxical as it might sound, the purpose of revelation was to tell us that we knew nothing about God.
silence is the only medium in which it is possible to apprehend the divine.
told his Corinthian converts that these transports had to remain within due bounds and that by far the most important of the spiritual gifts was charity.
In all the major traditions, the iron rule of religious experience is that it be integrated successfully with daily life. A disorderly spirituality that makes the practitioner dreamy, eccentric, or uncontrolled is a very bad sign indeed.
A contemplative must not think of undertaking this journey into the depths of the psyche without a spiritual director or guru.
“The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.” Joseph Campbell
good director can lead disciples past dangerous swings of mood to the disciplined equanimity of hesychia, which was rooted in a level of the self that lies deeper than the emotions.
Once religious experience is equated with fervid enthusiasm, this can indicate that people are losing touch with the psychological rhythms of the interior life.
Welsey - the Reasonable Enthusiast
world. But while nature could lead us to the Logos, through whom the world was made, it could not bring us to God itself.
Basil insisted that we could never know God’s ousia;
But we could form an idea about the divine “energies” that have, as it were, translated the ineffable God into a human idiom: the incarnate Word and the immanent divine presence within us that scripture calls the Holy Spirit.
When we spoke of Father, Son, and Spirit being One God, we were not saying “One plus one plus one equals three” but “Unknown infinity plus unknown infinity plus unknown infinity equals unknown infinity.”
The Trinity was a “mystery” not because it was an incomprehensible conundrum that had to be taken “on faith.” It was a musterion because it was an “initiation” that inducted Christians into a wholly different way of thinking about the divine.
Trinity was an activity rather than an abstract metaphysical doctrine.
Augustine was appalled by the instability of the material world, which seemed to tremble on the brink of nothingness. At first he fought shy of Christianity. He found the idea of the incarnation offensive and was disappointed by the literary quality of the Bible.
study of the natural world could not give us information about God:
“What, then, do I love in loving my God?”
If we looked within, we would discover a triad in our minds in the faculties of memory (memoria), understanding (intellectus), and will or love (voluntas) that gave us an insight into the triune life of God.
As in God, the three different faculties—memory, understanding, and love—constitute “one life, one mind, and one essence” within ourselves.60
Augustine was no die-hard biblical literalist. He took science very seriously, and his “principle of accommodation” would dominate biblical interpretation in the West until well into the early modern period. God had, as it were, adapted revelation to the cultural
norms of the people who had first received it.62 One of the psalms, for example, clearly reflects the ancient view, long outmoded by Augustine’s time, that there was a body of water above the earth that caused rainfall.
