R265: CHRISTIAN PARADIGMS

but it's a human trait that very few readers will be able to step out of their cognitive boxes to understand the paradigms of people unlike themselves. Most people haven't trained their minds or had their minds trained in the sort of flexibility that understands why X follows from their own premise A but not from someone else's premise B--or why Y follows from someone else's premise D but not from their own premise C. It is a fact that a person can be brilliant in one's own special field but totally unable to think straight in another field-- because of being unable to re-arrange one's mental furniture enough to grasp another point of view, a problem that increases with age for most people, but decreases with age for a few. But of course this is less mentally bankrupt than the relativist idea that when we say different things because of different paradigms, we are saying the same things.

The truth of what one asserts is contingent on
--the acceptability of the premises or axioms that one's assertions are based on;
--the correctness of the way the assertions are derived from the axioms they are based on.

East-West paradigm differences are (for historical reasons) largely ONTIC (Esstern) vs. NOMIC (Western; the sense of this term in science is not meant here). Ontic has to do with reality, especially materiality (Incarnation, Mysteries [sacraments], bodily Resurrection) and temporality─evolution in creation, revelation [tradition], and in salvation's three phases. This is the Eastern Patristic worldview, where Christians are worshipers and sacrifice─including the Crucifixion─is worship in its purest form, i.e. returning to the God the best part of creation in acknowledgement of His ownership of all that is. Resurrection with Divinization (théōsis) is Salvation from the state of hamartia (deprivation of Grace and Divinization) caused by the sin (hamártēma) of the first humans.

The extreme form of the Western outlook was in no small part due to the Renaissance and the (Neo-)Platonism of the humanist Reformers. Luther, however, was not a humanist; the matter and form and his original para-digm were constituted of the two modernisms of the time, respectively the pietistic devotio moderna and the via moderna philosophy of Ockham the Nominalist. Luther redefined fides "faith" in volitional-juridical terms as fiducia ("loyalty, trust"). For Luther, Justification was non-ontic; it is by a volitional fiat of the divine will.

An example of paradigm differences is the that between the jussum quia jussum ("commanded because right" of the traditionalists and the justum quia jussum ("right because commanded") of the Nominalist Protestants (and some Latins of the Renaissance). The latter point of view of course had little connection with the basic concept of ENERGY in St. Paul's writings (26 uses, plus nouns derived from causative verbs and words for "synergizing") and in the writings of the Greek Church Fathers.

Since the West has not distinguished God's changeless and imparticipable Essence from His Nature (constituted of His uncreated Energies), predesti-nation has been a constant problem─and of course 2 Peter 1:4 cannot be interpreted literally. Moreover, without the concept of energy (twice mentioned in Philippians 2:13), a conflict between works and (non-energetic Grace) is unavoidable.

Not only do Western literalists reject the literal sense of the mistranslated Bible (see the two passages just cited), and even the correct translations of John 3:5, 6:53-54, they refer to mistranslation of THE Greek Bible as "the" Bible─a basic error of "Biblicism." The New Testament was written in Greek and the Greek Old Testament (translated by 72 bilingual rabbis over 200 years before Christ's Birth)

If the Father's view that the Incarnation of God the Son is the first Mystery (sacrament) and that the Resurrection is the ultimate Mystery is acknowl-edged, these two events are soterial, . . . not incidental to the Crucifixion, as in some magisterial Roman Catholic and Protestant soteriologies. If they are incidental, so is the Mother of God's rôle in Salvation; if they are soterially essential, so is she . . . for those able to connect the dots!

The East says that the cosmos has been created by the divine Reason (LOGOS in JOhn 1:1,3) and Wisdom (I Corinthians 1:24) and is therefore logikos "intelligible," amenable to scientific study and analysis. The West says that the cosmos has been created by a divine WORD; it is presumably therefore wordy. When time and evolution are rejected from the (Patristic and Orthodox) view of creation, tradition (merely virtual according to the recent Vatican Catechism), and salvation (it has three phases in Orthodox theology), you get some forms of Western Christianity.

St. John of Damaskos and St. Gregory of Nyssa adopted Aristotle's view of three kinds of life or psyche─you may possibly entertain a different view of the human embryo and fœtus and a different view of murder (vs. killing) from the view that fails to distinguish these. (But see HERE.) In reverse order, the change from human to animate to vegetative life at the end of some people's lives raises the same questions; e.g. is it murder or mercy to remove the feeding tubes of a person in a vegetative state for a decade? Different paradigms favor different answers. It is worthy of study.

Once these semantic differences are understood, things should be clearer for seekers, critics, would-be ecumenists (who fail to grasp how fundamentally irresoluble the paradigm axioms are), etc.

CLICK HERE for the distinction between natural law and positive law
and between right and lawfulness (legality)

	EASTERN ORTHODOX	THE LATINS	PROTESTANTS
“matter”	Hebrew sacramentalism	Hebrew sacramentalism	Hellenistic Gnosticism^a
interpreted in terms of
cognitive “form”	Paul’s Hellenistic energy ontology	Semitic juridicalism	Semitic juridicalism
^aHellenistic Gnosticism derived from Indo-Iranian religion. (Plato mentioned Zoroaster at least once.) Gnostics treated the material creation or economy as created by a lesser (or evil) “god.” Their Gnostic “matter” forced Greek philosophers’ to view the cosmos as devolving from better to worse, not from simpler to more complex as taught by the Eastern father, Great St. Vasil.

The three established Christian paradigms discussed on this website
are dealt with on webpage R192 as well as the following:

See R255 and R285 on apologetics // R264 and R288 on interfaith discussions / R266 on soteriology // For paradigms in non-classical apologetics, see R284. See also R300 on "Assimilation." See R308 on teaching New Testament Greek in Orthodox parish schools.

I have just come across the following chapter title (Ch. 3 of The Pearl by Michael Whelton [Regina Orthodox Press, 1999[), which very aptly says, "The landscape is different." That author cites Timothy Ware (now Bishop Kallistos) from the 1973 edition of his The Orthodox Church: "In Orthodoxy, . . . it is not merely the answers that are different--the questions themselves are not the same as in the West." In contemporary lingo, one would say that one has to get out one's cognitive box and into another. The result is that "when we say the same things, we are not saying the same things," because the axioms of our thought worlds conflict--and those axioms impose their senses on what we say and fence out unacceptable meanings. Whelton speaks of Augustine as constituting THE GREAT DIVIDE; the eminent Protopresvyter John Romanides views the Carolingian era as being the great divide; and the present editor has long maintained that the great divide was created by the West's getting the form of its paradigm from Islamic Córdova when Latin translations of "the Muslim Aristotle" brought the Dark Ages to an end (see R28 and some of the pages listed above).

1. The all-holy Trinity is differently conceived in East and West. Among several basic differences is the way the divine Unity is conceived: The Orthodox Tradition holds that the unity of the Trinity is based on the Father as the Source of all being—though the Son or Reason and Wisdom of God has created every created thing, as the Apostles John and Paul taught, and constantly re-creates (Heb. 1:3) it all to keep it from falling back into nothingness. The West finds the divine Unity in the one Essence and maintains that the all-holy Spirit proceeds from two Causes; it is a substantialist view that is at odds with the Eastern personalist view and undermines the Unity of the Persons in the Trinity.

2. For the Orthodox, infants do not inherit Adam’s guilt or sin; Rom. 5:12 twice mentions ‘amartía (a state of separation from the Assimilation to the Divine), not ‘amártēma “a sin.” The idea of “merits” that can be transferred from one person to another are alien to Orthodoxy. The Orthodox do not teach a substitutive (or imputative) rôle for what Jesus Christ accomplished on the Life-giving Cross. With the New Testament, they teach that there is an ontic unity of worshipers with Christ when they participate in His uncreated Life or Energies (Grace), so that all that He has done in His earthly life is really shared by His members. This is Divinization (théōsis), a union of energies, not a pagan Deification (apothéōsis) or union of essences.

3. The soul is not immortal by nature; it is immortal through Grace. The Resurrection of the soul takes place at Baptism. (In the case of the Old Testament Saints, it took place during Christ’s sojourn in Hades.) The necessary Resurrection of the flesh will take place on the last day, though the all-pure Theotókos had a special resurrection when her body was carried off by Angels three days after her death.

4. Jesus is YHWH, as He Himself affirmed in John 8:58, and as St. Elizabeth asserted in Luke 1:43; cf. also Justin Martyr’s Trypho and St. John Chrysóstom’s Discourses 15 and 74. Jesus’s pre-Incarnational appearances took place in the Garden of Eden; at the giving of the Ten Commandments; in the fiery furnace; etc. [One has learned that some Evangelicals agree with this Orthodox teaching.] The Creator is the LÓGOS or Reason of God for St. John the Theologian, Evangelist, and Prophet; St. Paul called the Creator the WISDOM or SOPHÍA of God (wisdom is practical reason). Because it has been created by the LÓGOS, the cosmos is logikós (“intelligible”)—the basis of science. If, counterfactually, the Creator had been a Word, a cosmos described as logikós would need to be “wordy,” and Rom. 12:1-2 would be recommending “wordy Worship.” St. Maximos the Confessor accepted the old teaching that created things are formed with lógoi, rational traces that mirror the Energies of the LÓGOS.

5. God did not do something so counternatural as to impose death on the humanity that He had created (Yezekiel 33:11 [cf. 18:23], 18:32; 33:11; Wisdom 1:13-14, 2:23-24; and I Tim. 2:4): He rather let satan impose death to forestall anyone’s sinning perpetually.

6. The basis of reality in Orthodoxy is energy (as it was conceived in the centuries preceding and following Christ’s lifetime on earth). Since the cosmos is energetic, it evolves, as Great St. Vasil taught (in ‘Exaemeron), from simpler to more complex. He taught (Letter 188.15 to Amphilókios) that life began in the waters.

7. Revelation takes place through real time, not in a virtual development that assumes it was all there at the beginning and is only apprehended over time. Though the few dogmas do not change, the doctrines or teachings that energize dogmas with meaning build on one another over time in a self-consistent and genuinely revelatory rôle.

^{--------------------------------------------------} *Though most Protestants do not accept development in doctrine, the Latins accept virtual development: The Orthodox take what St. Gregory the Theologian of Nazianzos said in his sermon 31.27 to refer to new revelations; the Latins interpret this in their framework as referring to theologians’ new insights. This is virtual development, not the real development of the Orthodox!

RELIGION: GODWARD	ETHICS: HUMAN BEHAVIOR
WORSHIP	SALVATION
ONTIC SACRIFICE: Offering back to the Creator the most perfect part of creation in acknowledging the Creator's ownership of all that is	JURIDICAL OBEDIENCE INSTRUCTION, SERMONS PRAYERS for human needs
ONTIC HOLINESS: THE SACRED *deprivation of this is inheritable** A NEW CREATING (KTίSIS)	JURIDICAL RIGHTEOUSNESS volitional sin** is not inheritable A NEW CREATURE (KTίSMA)
LOVE of GOD	LOVE of FELLOW HUMANS
**State of alienation from Grace, the uncreated Energies of God's Life: Greek hamartía.*	*Greek hamártēma.* [This table © 2007 by Orchid Land publications.]

The RCs stand in-between: Matter (like the Orthodox); Form (like the Reformers). A more comprehensive presentation of the attested paradigms is:

In the following table, note that the Latins agree with the Orthodox on the matter of their paradigm but with the Protestants (the other form of Western Christianity) on the form of their paradigm. The form came the so-called "Muslim Aristotle" (cf. HERE and elsewhere).

EASTERN ORTHODOX

WESTERN

LATIN

REFORMATION

MATTER: Mysteric*

MATTER: Non-mysteric**; will-based

FORM: Energy ontology

FORM: juridical***

Seeing

Hearing

*The term mysteric refers to Mysteries (sacrament[al]s); i.e. it refers to an incarnational or matter+spirit view of religious reality, one in which matter is integral and essential to the Christian religion and is soterial, a reality in which time (tradition) is revelatory. Body is a vessel of soul. Essence and energy (nature, as in 1 Pet. 1:4) are distinct; reality is understood in the Hellenistic Greek of the Apostolic Age (and in the East, till now) the way Aristotle conceptualized it in his Physics and Metaphysics: The picture is one in which reality consists of a relation between dynámeis (plural of dýnamis--a capacity or potential) and the energies that make each dýnamis real and actual. Enérgeia was rendered in Latin as actus or operatio and viewed as a static actuality; the corresponding verb, usually misrendered with the deponent verb operari, was occasionally better calqued as perficere "accomplish, effect." It should not be forgotten that Greek often pairs a feminine form ending in -sis or a masculine form ending in -ismós or -asmós representing an energizing with its result expressed as the same root plus the neuter ending -ma. (Both forms in ending in -sis and in -ma have recessive accent.)

An example is found in the following family of words, paralleled in Greek by a large number of others; this particular group represents ideas as common to all religions and philosophies of the first century as were the idea that the LOGOS "Reason" (cf. St. John the Theologian's Prologue) and SOPHIA "Wisdom" of God (cf. St. Paul) created the cosmos. The words come from Gen. 1:26 in the LXX:

--eikón "image, likeness, similitude" [for the Eastern Fathers and Mothers: lógos "reason" and proaíresis "freechoice"--often spoken of as the 'omoíōma or "likeness" of God.
--'omoíōsis or Assimilation to God (note the energization suffix -sis!)

For Orthodox terminology click R297
and the link to R124 on that page

The word 'omoiótēs also existed for "similitude." Note, incidentally, that English likeness calques Latin imago, which translated Greek eikón.

Other energizings were masculines ending in -asmós and -ismós. There are a few isolated words, including enérgeia itself, of different formations that could referred to ener-gizings.

**Matter and time (evolution, tradition) play no integral or essential role in religion or soteriology.

***Non-energetic and essentially static; the Fall is juridical (penal), and soteriology is a set of juridical concepts--satisfaction, atonement, justification, redemption, legal adoption, virtual unity with the (ontologically) imparticipable uncreated Essence of God. Aquinas said that this unity is intentional [conceptual] with the ideas of God; the Reformers held it to be will-based--covenantal. Note that some Protestants who still practise Baptism and Communion call them "ordinances"--as juridical and non-sacramental a term as one could opt for. (The Reformers accepted Augustine's idea of a "sacrament" as a "visihle word"!)

GRACE is (EO) uncreated Energy, God's Life; (L) neither uncreated nor energetic (it is non-operativa), a habit or perduring quality a believer's soul; and (R) virtual righteousness imputed to people who remain sinners--almost by definition. (There are no "saints" in this individualistic and egalitarian thought world; there are only justified believers.) Eastern Christianity rejected the pagan-Greek philosophical view of the soul's immortality by nature; the soul is immortal by Grace and God's will.

The FALL is (East) the loss of the Assimilation to God--ontological separation from God; (West) God's punishment of humanity with Death and the perpetual inheritance of Adam's sin.

SALVATION (which reverses the Fall) is (EO) the flesh's resurrection and the recovery of the lost Assimilation to God in a new birth as a new creation in Christ, i.e. as a member of Christ sharing His uncreated Life--which Assimilation culminates in the worshiper's ontological partaking through the Vision of the uncreated Light (the purest form of energy) of God's uncreated Nature forever; (L) virtual (intentional or conceptual) unity with God's Essence; and (R) imputed (virtual) righteousness and virtual (imputed, covenantal) unity with God's Essence. (The resurrection of the flesh is usually absent from formal Western soteriology.)

CLICK HERE for symbols of different thought worlds

It makes no sense for a participant in a discussion to say, "If you are not X, you are Y-- the only other choice in THAT PERSON's thought world. They are often not the choices offered in another's thought world.

One has noticed the need for people to balance individualism with collectivism. Christians on the religious left (antitraditionalists) who go along with the political position that passes for the political right balance the differences in the opposite way from Christians on the conservative right (the Orthodox) who go along with the position that passes for the political left.

For readers who have trouble with some basic terms, note the following parallel correspondences:

reason/intellect	will
being*	commands/laws
ONTOLOGY	JURIDICALISM

The onotological framework or the volitonal framework may be energetic and developmental or static. (See also R285.)

-------------

*For those locked into a Western Christian juridical paradigm, being can be metaphorical, virtual (imputed), etc.; this liberty does not exist for those in an Eastern ontological paradigm.

     The only reason to be Orthodox or Latin or Protestant is accepting the paradigm, thought world, or cognitive framework of Christianity embrace by a given variety. Because the axioms of a paradigm determine what the details mean--the words of Scripture (John 6:53-54, Phlp. 2:13 (in the Greek original), John 1:1,3, Gen. 1:26 and generally every important verse that we differ over) as well as words like Trinity, Grace, etc.
    Was the Fall ontological or juridical? That will determine the nature of it's reversal in Salvation as being ontological . . . or juridical--satisfaction, atonement, redemption, justification, legal adoption, virtual unity with God's ontolgoically imparticipable Essence.
     The Orthodox scheme is much simpler (and I dare say more convincing); it lacks the foregoing apparatus:

The Fall was, or involved, separation from the Assimilation to God (Gen. 1:25 in the LXX)―viz. the uncreated Energies of Grace, God's Life--that energize(d) the capacities of reason and freechoice belonging to the icon (image) of God (capacities necessary to distiguish human nature, the icon [image] of God from that of animals) to act in ways pleasing to God (cf. Philp. 2:13 again--in Greek). God let satan impose death on those separated from uncreated Life to prevent sinning's being perpetuated. The soul is not immortal by nature but by Grace and divine will. No newborn can inherit anyone's sin, let alone by "physical generation"; a newborn can be born in ontological separation from immortality and the Assimilation (an energy formation in the morphology of Greek grammar) of Gen. 1:26.

     The Fall was juridical and penal. The soul is (as in pagan Greek philosophy) immortal bay nature. God punished humans for death and allows (or imputes, if one is a Protestant) newborns somehow to physically inherit the moral guilt of Adam. (A double-barreled conundrum.) Salvation juridically reverses this in Christ's Immolation and penal Sacrifice (Oblation of Himself). Ontology plays no role; the Incarnation. Transfiguration, and above all, the Resurrection are incidental, as the main Western theologians prior to this millennium insisted. Further, the resurrection of a worshiper's (excuse, I mean "believer's") body doesn't fit this scheme, though it was the theme of the Apostolic Gospel. Union is with God's ontological imparticipable Essence (not His uncreated Energies) and hence is only virtual (intentional-conception with Aquinas and covenantal-volitional with the Reformers).
     The Protestant framework adds the "spiritual" premise that created matter (Mysteries or sacrament[al]s) and time (evolutionary creation and developmental revelation) have no soterial role; they are not even real for many. Calvinist's follow Augustine in calling a sacrament a visible word. They even call the Creator a "Word"; but then, the Latins fall into that same error, despite what St. John the Theologian, Evangelist, and Apostle and what St. Paul the Apostle wrote.
     Grace cannot be something (other than God's good will to impute virtual righteousness to ontological sinners. The Latin paradigm requires their theologians to reject the idea that Grace is uncreated and/or energy, so it is a habit (perduring form) of the created soul.

You buy a paradigm and you buy the interpretations that follow from its premises; the details or empty of meaning without given views of reality and religion. A paradigm, like any premise or definition, is irrefutable. You can argue about its clash with reality, the impossibility that it could've existed before Augustine and then only in the West, or that it did not exist before the West got its paradigms from Córdova (the Islamic Aristotle), . . . and such considerations will influence your will to embrace or reject said paradigm. The three incompatible and disparate concepts of Grace automatically follows from your premises.

That is why cross-paradigm (interfaith) converse is not deeply meaningful except at the paradigm level--in theology, as in any discipline.

WHY DID GOD ORDAIN A JURIDICAL FORM FOR THE OLD TESTAMENT RELIGION IF THE ULTIMATE GOAL WAS TO CONSTITUTE A BETTER MATCH WITH THE O.T. RESPECT FOR THE ROLE OF CREATED MATTER AND TIME IN RELIGION?

     Consider which matches O. T. matter--a role for created matter and time (tradition) in religion--juridicality (commandments) or onotology (energy)? Law implies wholly predictable humans, just as the stuff of the universe that is subject to the laws of physics. Government and obedience would be more important than Mysteries. (Consider how the denominations are named for their forms of government--episcopalian, presbyterian, congregatio-nalist--when not for a leader--Wesleyans, Campbellites, etc.).   Reading Gal. 3:23-4:7, we see that the obedience of a child is akin to slavery in a mature adult. If ontology matches materiality and time better than law does, especially if ontological is energetic, not frozen and static, morality will be guided in terms of what promotes nature--not a set of arbitrary commands (like "Don't eat the fruit of this tree" and "Don't touch the Ark, even if it is falling off the cart!").
     A free mature adult needs, according to St. Paul, a New Testament in continuity with the Old. The concept of energy and energizing Mysteries [sacraments], vessels and channels of Grace just as Christ's human body and soul channeled His Divinity to humanity. Also needed was the energization of time to develop deeper insights into the faith once revealed to the Saints revealing of divine religion, i.e. developing doctrines to give deeper mean-ings to and energize our deeper understanding of the changeless dogmas. This energetic world contrasts with the static world of Mediæval and Renaissance papal Christianity and such develop- ments as have flowed out of the Reformation--which certainly did re-form Christianity by switching the form and matter of traditional Orthodoxy.*
     When Biblical religion was a child, an "heir" to the Kingdom, it needed the discipline of law; but when the Reason and Wisdom of God came to earth as one of us, a more mature phase of development came into being. Reason could guide commands that could otherwise be arbitrary. Greek thinking about ontology—the concept of energy—could play a crucial role to preserve O.T. sacramentalism in a more mature manner. The concept of energy made a fitting marriage to Mysteries and time.**
     The Wisdom literature of the O.T., mostly written in Greek, had (not for no reason) adumbrated the LOGOS or Reason of God in the centuries immediately preceding the Incarnation, Which was a Mystery (Sacrament; see Mk. 4:11, Rom. 11:25, 16:25, 1 Cor. 2:7, Eph. 1:9, 3:3-4, esp. 3:9 [cf. 6:20], esp. Col. 1:26-27 and 2:2, 4:3, 1 Tim. 3:9, and cf. Apoc. 10:7). The Incarnation was timed to occur when Jesus was born, i.e. as a Hebrew in a Greek-influenced milieu. If you compare St. Vasil the Great's energetic view of creation with the static paradigms of the West, you will see juridical form in the West (esp. Anselm's soteriology, common to the Latin Scholastics and the Protestant Scholastics) and, in Protestantism, more will than elsewhere--even though the human will was held to be unfree at first. Will was the center. Ockhams God was Will, and Luther accepted this in his virtual righteous-ness, as did Calvin in His virtual presence of Christ in the Lord's Supper. An evolving creation was excluded, and "word" replaced energy.
     Paradoxically, despite their static world views, both Latins and Protestants have evolved so drastically as to beggar the holy tradition of Eastern Christianity!
-------------------------------------
     *Where the matter and form of Orthodoxy are Hebrew and Hellenistic thinking in Orthodoxy, the matter nd form of Refor-mation thinking are Hellenistic Gnostic anti-sacramentalism and Hebrew will-based juridicalism, repsectively, despite all of its condemnations of THE Law. No one was more legalistic or anti- sacramental than the Calvinistic-congregtionalist Puritans, who banned candles, allowed only academic vestments, and banned temporality--for instance, one got punished for feasting on Christ's Birthday. The only sacraments of extremist Protestants seem to be wedding rings, the American flag, and the national anthem.
   **You see dark and light energy ["water"] in the account of the creation in the opening verses of Genesis, namely, in the evening and dawn of the first day―three eons before the sun was created. Science would say that "the lights came on again after the Big Bang" ('ormé), though the cosmos remains 95 per cent dark matter.

1. What attracts us and gets us there vs. what we should believe when we stay.

1. We should use every proper means to get people to visit us. But IMHO we should not teach them a list of beliefs to be learned by rote. We should try to get them to understand what they believe ACCORDING TO THEIR ABILITY. Without that, a belief becomes a slogan and (deprived of reasoning) a superstition.

2. Everyone has a thought world. It is not usually conscious and requires no elevated IQ. It is not a matter of intelligence, but of will--what one assumes to be the case. Although it determines what concepts mean, it is not intellectual--it's volitional.

3. The idea that a paradigm is complicated is incorrect. Take the axiom that material things and time have no religious role. That's about as simple as you can get, but think of all that it leads to--the rejection of Mysteries, tradition. The contrary axiom that the Reason of God made an intelligible universe and the axiom that creation plays a necessary role in religion have far reaching consquences--the body plays a role in worship (e.g. prostration)--resurrection of the worshiper's flesh--the rejection of Gnosticism--etc. The axiom that each individual is competent to judge what Scripture means is simple. So let's not confuse a simple assumption with the complex array of doctrines that can be deducted or otherwise moulded by it. That's a caution I would like to emphasize.

4. The Orthodox are "worshipers"; Western Christians are "believers." But: Belief is like the foundation of a skyscraper--it's not what the building is for. But without a solid foundation, the higher parts and functions of the building are shaky.

In your note, I came across the idea (a Gnostic error) that our nature is "sinful." Sin is an act of the will (i.e. deontic, which has to do with morality, i.e. with volition and juridicality), not something ontic like nature. Greek (in St. Paul’s day) distinguished ontic essence from ontic nature, which is what is referred to in 2 Pet. 1:4, . . . seeing that the divine Essence is imparticipable. [If (counterfactually) either were sinful, then it would be nature, not essence, because willing is an energy.]

God created Humanity’s Essence "according to the Icon of God"; and Humanity’s Nature,

Dear in Christ X:
     You say that it would be good if one defined "conservative."
     1. If one premises that conservative and traditionalist do NOT (contrary to the dictionary) mean the same thing, then your position holds true. In theology, “liberal” usually means “Salvation by works”; thus Liberal applies to no major religious group except a few modernist (antitraditionalist) Protestants. In academe, "liberal" means open-minded, dogmatic perhaps but not doctrinaire.
     2. If one premises that the cosmos is not energetic (that creation does not evolve the way the Old Testament and St. Paul assumed and the Greek Fathers taught—in short, if one doesn’t admit that the Old Testament represents a long tradition and a traditionalist view of evolving insights into revelation—then one could hold tradition to be the opposite of what a lexicographer would hold.
     3. Contrary to John 16:13, you stipulate that the collective Church consists of [never-inspired] "men" since the Gospel writers. (This follows from the static, once-for-all view of revelation) You ignore that the Bible was not canonized till the end of the fourth century, and then by the Orthodox Church. If those "men" were not inspired, how can what she or they compiled—including a given Gospel or Epistle; rejecting some other one that was current—be inspired? This is so contradictory.
     There is no such thing as a "Bible truth" independent of any paradigm. What is true in one paradigm may be false in another.   When we say the same things, we are not saying the same things. Your views disagree with the Fathers’ interpretations, though they were native-speakers of the language of the Bible and were culturally over a 1000-1500 years nearer to St. Paul than you or me . . . and stood in an tradition not broken by 700 years of Dark Ages in the West. In my view, they were more inspired than you or me. Your "Bible truth" is not what people not in your frame of reference might easily imagine as being true.
     I think you have said one thing that is objective false . . . though "true," of course, if you so define it that way. You say:

I have observed that the "liberal Christians" find their way into liberal
politics, as men can easily formulate "comfort zones" there.

I have heard it observed (I don’t know how many times) that people compensate by being liberal or conservative in religion and the other in politics. You are a standing example (except by virtue of your semantically empty definition of “conservative”). If the dictionary is right that conservative means conserving past thinking (tradition), then you are on the left wing (people who reject tradition) of Christianity but on the right wing of politics.
You define the teachings of past ages as "men's" teachings, as though they thereby have ex hypothesei not been inspired by the all-holy Spirit. Aren’t you ignoring John 16:13, whether you don’t believe it or for some other reason--perhaps because you think Jesus wasn’t speaking to “men” or to the Church as it was then constituted? If you choose a definition of conservative and even of liberal that most people would not recognize (or only recognize as turning the semantic tables on English usage), then you can go on defining anything as true or false. You could define the inspired tradition with its constant miracles (many in our own day) as “evil” and, in your own terms, you would be infallibly right. But what would be the profit?

I think that, when talking with people across paradigms, one has to be sure that one is making sense in the others' thought world, however hard it may be when one's interlocutors cannot step outside of their cognitive boxes. It is true that they might be able to jump out for a moment to understand what you mean, but I would think you'd want to try to enter theirs (momentarily) in the same way, if only to see where they are coming from.. I think Christianity thrives on openness and truth. I don’t think that looking at how different views arose is “vain philosophy.” I am not afraid to expose Orthodox views (including the seven teachings listed near the beginning) to any charge of inconsistency. The same cannot be said of the Western views of contrary import.
Now you can reply that I’m defining this and that as such and so. But established academic usage should at least in this case be preferred to a subjective and idiosyncratic usage, shouldn’t it? One can define one's way on paper (or cyberspace) n and out of anything. The search for truth demands something quite different, viz. escaping one’s subjective definitions and becoming objective. Anyone can prove anything if defining or name-calling reverses established usage . . . or if one imagines that one can alter reality by calling it something else. I leave others to their own resorts, but I believe in avoiding such tricks or subterfuges.

—The pagan Greeks (Platonists, Gnostics, etc.) rejected time and evolution as well as the spiritual value of material things or acts. The Hebrews took the opposite course.

—St. Paul and St. Peter and St. John (and the Orthodox) premised that the cosmos is always evolving from simpler to more complex because reality is energetic; and that the revelation of the changeless truth of a dogma grows or expands (as in the Old Testament)—not virtually (see the Latin view below) over time. You can see how one’s premises affect what one concludes to be true: —The Latin view is of virtual development: Everything was there at the outset, and we only gradually come to see it.
—Protestants: Matter and time do not convey spiritual Grace and truth. The Orthodox believed in 100 AD, as also in 2000 AD, that the few dogmas are empty until energized (over time) as doctrines (teachings) build on past teachings (and are hence consistent with them).

The outcome of your Hellenistic (non-Hebraic) and in fact pagan Gnostic assumptions about the rôle of matter and time in religion lead you to view Mysteries (sacrament[al]s) and tradition as of little worth. Presumably, you hold (as do Latin and Protestant theologians) that the Incarnation and Resurrection (of Christ and of worshipers’ bodies) are soterially incidental to Christ’s teaching and dying on the Life-giving Cross. The Orthodox conservative or traditionalist—at least it’s conservative in being 2000 years old and unaffected by the Augustinian and Islamic will-based form of the two main Western Christian thought worlds—view of the energetic cosmos (which St. Paul often assumed in his uses of energy terms) holds that even matter can have be a vehicle of uncreated Energy. Thus, an icon (just like the napkins from Peter’s body and even his shadow in the first chapters of Acts) can—under given conditions—be healing. Your radical view would, I presume, say the opposite, but I don’t want to put words in your mouth.

It’s a simple principle of human thinking: One’s premises (together, they constitute a paradigm) fence in what can be true and fence out what cannot be admitted as true. From day one, the Orthodox have been Semitic about matter and time and Hellenistic about energy—St. Paul’s great revelation. But the mirror-image of this is: Gnostic views of creation and time, along with Semitic (laws and rules), substitution, and those other complicated Mediaeval ideas about the Crucifixion and Salvation . . . and, I assume, about (virtual) righteousness' being imputed to believers and virtual guilt's being imputed to every newborn . . . nd let's not forget the virtual Presence of Jesus in the bread and wine and your retranslating John 6:53-54 and 16:13. I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but your views of the religious rôles of matter and time are Hellenistic, agreeing with the Platonic philosophers of Greece, the middle Platonist Philo the Jew (whose life overlapped that of Jesus, who influenced St. John to call the Creator LOGOS, though this was an idea common to all religions of the time), and the reigning neo-Platonists (Plotinists) of the first centuries of our era.

The ancient (traditionalist; conservative) view explains the time and place of Jesus’s Birth as being the only time in history when the Pauline Orthodox view could have come into being. Your position may or may not do the same in a mirror-image sort of way. By mirror-imaging, I mean that, perhaps you could say (if it were not unattested) that it was the only time when a juridical form of religion could have been married with Gnostic matter. Actually, the time for this was during the Age of Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham, Biel, Luther, and Calvin, not the Apostolic Age:

     Thomism modified it in an intellectual direction; e.g. we are virtual
     “partakers of the divine Nature” intellectually, i.e. with God’s ideas; the
     Scotist-Ockhamist (and Luther’s) via moderna emphasized the volitional
     basis of theology—which, carried to the Calvinist extreme, made will
     and law superior to reason and being—and in fact replaced natural law
     with taboos that can be compared with the story of Uzzah.

The point is that conservative = preserving tradition; radical = overthrowing tradition. Of course, as Alice in Wonderland said, “I can make words mean whatever I want”; a more modern expressions is: “Our axioms/paradigms make our words mean what they mean” or “When we [or St. Paul] and a Western Christian say the same things, we are not saying the same things”—at least outside of Wonderland.
PLEASE NOTE that I am not using Wonderland as a put-down, but as a vivid way of referring to virtual reality—virtual righteousness, Christ’s virtual Presence in the bread and wine, etc., etc. No one can say that your view or my view is false (or true) except in terms of the premises that we respectively set out from.

Where I go into history at the end of these comments (see below) concerning the source of each set of axioms came—is falsifable if one can prove that a given Mediæval or Renaissance paradigm was held in the Apostolic Age; it is a truth-vulnerable matter: Someone can prove (with convincing evidence) that I’m wrong or that I’m right on the point in question.. Otherwise, the rest of what I say claims to exhibit a studied impartiality or neutrality, though I make no effort to hide my own position.

Names for points of view are not intended tendentiously as value-judgments or sloganizers (terms of opprobrium), as you seem (?) to be using and liberal (though using the former for the--traditionalist position you espouse is a real innovation; and the is used in religious discussions, in my past experience, for those espousing “salvation by works,” which not Christian body that I know of explicitly affirms, though some Liberal body may do so without my knowing of it). But all of what I said is objective; it can become hogwash if will replaces, or stands above, reason or if words are used tendentiously (as slogans or put-downs rather than as meaningful descriptions). Not only does theletism (volitionalism) make “intentionality” meaningless (as in the story of Uzzah); it certainly supports what Alice in effect said: I can, should I wish, define “conservative” to mean anti-traditionalist and “liberal” to mean traditionalist. The latter definition would shock a Liberal (who would say that the definer is living in Wonderland).
If conversely, one makes reason the basis of right will, then we have to agree that our axioms (which, I repeat, are assumptions that cannot be proven to be false or true) determine the sense of what we say. Since axioms cannot be shown to be true or false, they can only be shown to be what St. Paul or St. John—or Thomas Aquinas—or Luther or Calvin—espouses—more often than not, unconsciously, esp. among people that reject that kind of thinking as vain philosophy. Since, however, St. Paul can be read to mean what the axioms of any party pre-determine, the job of accessing them is beyond the means of people not used to exact thinking. since you are used to exact thinking, you obviously can do it if you shift from the subjective mode to the objective. The only thing one can reasonably rely on is history and unbroken tradition. For example, one asks, Can it be shown that anyone in the ancient world held the ”matter” of Hellenistic Gnostic is married to the form of will-based juridicalism? I think not. (By Semitic, I mean ancient Hebrew religion plus twelfth-century Islam). The paradigm you hold, if I interpret your words to mean what they say, is very philosphical; Lut

From the Hebrews	From the Hellenes
Orthodox: matter	Orthodox energy (form)
Protestants: form	Gnostic matter

ANCIENT	MEDIÆVAL
Hebrew Matter: Respect for matter* & time Form: Juridical**	Latin Christian Matter: Respect for matter & time Form: Juridical
Gnostic Matter: Rejection of matter & time Form: Energy (emotional)	Reformers’ Christian Matter: Rejection of matter & time Form: Juridical
Eastern Christian Matter: Respect for matter & time Form: Energy (ontological)	Notes: *Mystericism (sacramentalism). **Tradition-based.

PROTESTANTS