WHY ENGLISH-LANGUAGE WEBSITES GET IT WRONG AND

PROVIDE MISLEADING INFORMATION

Copyright by Orchid Land Publications

20080727

     The short answer is that they mangle in English differences that in Greek are essential to understanding Patristic and other writings.   Why they do this is evident if you consider the paradigms that impose meanings on given terms:

 

For an Eastern Christian, receiving Christ's Life in His Body and Blood
is not only proper  worship when it is offered as a perfect Offering:
partaking of our Savioar's Life makes worshipers His members

The connection between what got lost from Gen. 1:26 ("Assimilation" to the uncreated Eenergies of the divine Nature---not of course human essence) gets restored in
becoming partakers of the divine Nature (2 Pet. 1:4);  the state or condition
humanity found itself in has been the result of sin (hamártēma) was hamartía--
a condition of estrangement or alienation from Grace (the uncreated Energies
of divine Life) that Jesus came to take away;, as John 1:29 says (although
this condition is often mistranslated as "sin," an activity of the will, not a state)

Partaking of the divine Nature is Divinization; it is not the heresy
of Deification---an unthinkable partaking of the divine Essence

See R375

The confusion of what is ontic (real) and what is deontic (willed)
in the West leads to a paradigm-caused confusion of

hamartía (an ontic state)
with
hamártēma (a volitional act)

as well as

the confusion of ESSENCE and (energetic) NATURE

and

a confusion of Deification with Divinization.

not to mention the counter-Biblical teaching of inherited "sin"! 
These and other confusions are rampant in the

literature and in online postings.

 

HOW MISTRANSLATIONS HARM ORTHODOX THINKING AND WHY

Anonimoto [20080717]

     A reader of the Greek Bible and Fathers can hardly fail to be aware that most trans­lations distort the sense of the texts.  Consider translations by persons who know the different imports of the Greek endings -sis and –ma (comparable with those creating the difference between English disenfranchize and disenfranchisement or that between fertilization and fertil­ity) that misrender the word for “assimilation” (Greek ‘omoíosis, in Gen. 1:26) as “like­ness” (Latin similitudo).  Why do they accept accept such a pointless pleonasm?  Assuming that this practice is not due to ignorance, what motivates such per­sistent mis­transla­tions?  I the New Testament writings attributed to him, the Apostle Paul used energy terms—they were as fashionable in his time as some of the slogans of Western theology in the Twentieth Century—26 times.  Paul would naturally have accepted what Aristotle has said about the energy in his Physics and especially in his Meta­physics:  It is what makes a dýnamis or “potential” real and actual.

    A step towards getting translations right would be to recognize that in Hellenic thinking (but not often in Western thinking) an essence (divine or human) is distinguished from its corresponding nature—which consists of the energies through which the divine Essence or the (unforfetiable) essence shared by all humans relates to other beings.  If human essence can­not be lost by a human being, the uncreated Energies of God’s Life, the Grace that assimi­lates a worshiper to the divine Nature, can be lost.  The Greek understanding consti-

Note that Latin saving [sanctifying] Grace, which incorporates a worshiper into GOD, is by definition “neither uncreated nor energetic”; Protestant Grace is simply God’s WILLing to impute to a believer virtues that in reality are not present there.

tutes the link between Gen. 1:26 and 2 Pet. 1:4 absent in the West:  The latter verse refers to the restoration of what got lost—the Assimilation in Gen. 1:26—through the first humans’ sinning.  The Greek word for the condi­tion or state that has resuslted from the loss is hamar­tía.  (How can an Orthodox Christian understand hamartía in John 1:29 when it is mistrans­lated as “sin” [Greek hamártema]?)  That a newborn bears the guilt of an ancestor’s sin is immoral and heretical, as we learn from various passages in the Old Testament, although a child’s teeth may of course be set on edge in a state or condition that has resultd from an ancestor’s eating sour grapes!  Hamaratía is what Jesus came to erase in John 1:29, not the “sin” of juridicalized (moralized) mistranslations.  If hamartía gets erased by partaking of the divine nature, the link between Gen. 1:26 and 2 Pet. 1:4 (speaking of worshipers’ becoming partakers of the divine Nature) cannot be made in Western thinking because of  the absence of the Greek idea of energy (mistrans­lated as Latin actus or operatio and as English work) and of the distinction between essence and nature.  The entire noûs (“mindset, outlook, worldview, paradigm”—often mistranslated as “mind” except in “the mind of Christ”) is wrong.  In the East, the Divinization spoken of in 2 Pet. 1:26 and bodily resurrection are salvation in the Apostolic kéryma.  We are hre dealing with something that, like holiness, is ontic, not what in modal logic is called deontic (what is will-based, moral).  Hamartía is a state or condi­tion, something different from the moral righteousness (or immorality) produced by a created will.  The contrary of holiness is taboo—cf. the need for Moses to remove his sandals on holy ground at the Burning Bush (or violating the so-called holy Sabbath in Calvinism). 

     This is not the place to deal with the failure to deal with volitional energy in connection with the heretical Filioque in the Western creed and the anathematiza­tion of Pope Honorius I by the sith Œcumenical Synod for his monotheletist views. . . other than simply to observe that the heretical pagan term “Deifi­cation,” which refers to essence, is un-Orthodox, while Divinization is the proper term.

    We can now turn to what can and ought to be said of those who have studied Greek but nevertheless persist in mistranslating Lógos in John 1:1,3 as “Word,” a Greek term that does not mean “word” except in the extended sense of “message” (as in “Give ’em the word!”; lógos can also mean “saying, proverb, chapter” and a dozen other things, including “seat of reason, braininess,” and so on).  Tertullian sometimes used sermo (“speech” in both senses:  the ability to speak and the resultant sermon).  Some Protestants may claim (I have not known any to do so) that a Sermon created all that is. 

    If there is another explanation than a difference in Eastern and Western paradigms, ideologies, noi (plural of noûs), or frames of reference, I cannot think what it might be.  But as for details, it turns out that there is an explanation for miscalling the Creator a “Word.”  Consider that Jews cannot say God’s name—YHWH; they use “the Name” instead.  The commentators on the Torah of the Apostollic Age were stricter; they were forbidden even to write the name (even though they could wash their hands after writing YHWH in the manner of the older scribes) and had to substitute “the Word.”  When this became routinely associated as God’s Name, it is not surprising that LOGOS was so interpreted by Jewish Christians during the Apostlic Age.  The trail for the use of “Word” for the Creator seems to lead back with the Carthaginian lawyer Tertullian, who, along with two subsequent Carthaginian lawyers, Cyprian and Augustine, founded Western theology . . . on a juridical basis.  (As a former Semitic province and currently a Roman province proud of Roman Law, there was little chance that these thinkers could avoid a juridical outlook, something so alien to Eastern thinking, somethng that reached its extreme in the “forensic” view of salvaion accepted by classical Protestsant theologians.) 

     Tertullian knew Greek; Cyprian and Augustine did not.  Tertullian wrote that lógos means “ratio, gloria, verbum,” i.e. “reason, renown, word.”  But on grounds cononected with the Stoic philoso­phy and the writings of Philo the Jew of Alexandria, and perhaps for other reasons of the age that I need not delve into here, Tertullian signed onto “Word.”  Eevidence exists for his influence on versions of the North African “Old Latin Bible,” which was a prime basis for Jerome’s Vulgate, canonical for Roman Catholics.  Greek scholars of the Renaissance, including the “humanist” Reformers, followed suit.  (It is worth noting that they, like Luther, were dominated in the FORM of their paradigm by Luther’s will-based Ockhamist paradigm of the later Middle Ages and in the anti-sacra­mental {anit-materialist]) MATTER of their paradigm by the prevailing Platonic philosophy of the Renaissance.   

     Interestingly, Scotus and Ockham, like Anselm, Gratian, Thomas Aquinas, and other influential thinkers stimulated by Arab and Jewish studies of Greek philosphy made during the Western-Christian Dark Ages (this work was based on Arabic transla­tions of Greek philosophy completed soon after 800 AD) were Vikings—Normans, members of a will-based culture.

    How slovo “word” got into the Slavonic scriptures in the opening verse of St. John’s Gospel—the same thing happened with the Georgian Bible—is another question that can be dealt with in another entry to this collec­tion. 

     The only other point I would like to add here is to ask why Westerners speak in English of “eternal life”—something that not even the Angels can have, something outside of time that God alone enjoys.  Surely, “everlasting life” is what is meant.

     The following short pieces may give substance to what has been outloined in the foregoing.

WHAT IS MISSING IN MEDIA DISCUSSIONS OF EVOLUTION AND RELIGION

20061205    © 2006 by Orchid Land Publications    [preliminary version]

     Of the many discussions that I have read in the newspapers or heard on television, the counter­factual view that evolution is opposed by conservative (traditio­nalist) Christians is something that is routinely taken for granted.  Since this is so despite the fact that the most conservative form of Christianity, the one that retains the paradigm of the Apostolic writers of the original Greek New Testament as well as the Eastern Church Fathers, accepts evolution.  More broadly, this Faith accepts a valid rôle for created materiality and temporality in religion.  The rôle of materiality is realized in mysteries (sacra­ment[al]s or the even more juridical term ordinances); the rôle of tempo­rality is evident in evolution, not only in the creation of the cosmos, but also in revelation (tradition), and in salvation—which is normally not instantaneous and in fact has three phases in Orthodox thinking.  In fact, it can be shown that many crucial terms that both in Greek during the Hellenistic Age (subsequent to the time of Alexander and Aristotle) and in Patristic Eastern Christianity had ontic-energetic import lost their original import in Western Christianity.  The earliest Western Christian theologians—Tertullian (ca. 160-ca. 225), Cyprian (d. 258), and Augustine (d. 430), all from Carthage in North Africa, a Roman province which, like others, held Roman Law in almost rever­ent esteem—understood many Greek Christian terms with deontic (volitional-juridical; borrowed from modal logic) or “moral” import in place of their original ontic reference.  The historical reasons that will be laid sketched out below.  It is not accidental that, unlike Hellenistic Alexandria, Carthage had been a Semitic (Punic) territory before it became part of the Roman Empire, since juridicalism, whether Tōrāh or Sharī‘a, lies at the hear of Semitic religions.  The altered term forensic (another word for juridical) was employed by the Protestant Reformers to characterize their term for salvation:  justification, i.e. “making righteous”—not “making holy,” on which see below.

     In speaking of ontic import, I have in mind to the concept of reality expressed by means of the term enérgeia by its inventor, Aristotle, in his Physics and more discursively in his Metaphysics:  Ontic reality consists of pairings of a dýnamis, a potential or capacity, with an energy that makes it actual and functional:  Energization is actualiza­tion.  Too routinely overlooked by those who have studied Greek, its principles of word-formation distinguish nouns derived from causative verbs—feminine nouns ending in -sis and masculines ending in -smós are comparable to English nouns ending in -ization or in -ification—from parallel neuter formations ending in -ma that refer the result of the particular energization.  Ignorance of this leads to the misrendering of Genesis 1:26 in the Greek Old Testament,¹ the Old Testament used by the New Testament writers and other  

———————

     ¹It was translated more than two centuries before Christ’s birth by 72 bilingual rabbis in Alexandria; through the Dead Sea Scrolls, it is clear that it reflects the early Hebrew better than the oldest Massoretic Hebrew text almost a millennium more recent.

———————

Christians.   Instead of the pointlessly redundant “in the image and likeness of God” of Western translators, the Greek text says that God created the first human “according to the icon (image, likeness) of God and according to the Assimilation,” i.e. to the Divine, as the Fathers explain.  Assimilation is an energizing noun ending in –sis derived from a energetic or causative verb; it would have meant “likeness”  if it had been a neuter ending in -ma!  There are five other common words for “a likeness” in Greek; ‘omoíōsis is not one of them. 

     The main semantic gulf between Eastern and Western thought worlds is a difference between a fundamentally ONTIC outlook (the energetic world view) in the East and, in the West, a fundamentally DEONTIC outlook, viz. one in which volition and juridicality form the interpretation of what is read.  The idea of inherited sin or guilt is based on a confusion of ontic ‘amartía with deontic ‘amártēma, a (willed) sin.  If we inquire what  exactly ‘amartía, as used in its singular form, is we find that it represents an ontic condition or state deprived of the uncreated Energies of divine Life—Grace in Eastern Christianity.  The result is called Divinization in Eastern Christianity, a unity with the Energies of the divine Nature, not a pagan Deification through participating in the impar­ticipable divine Essence . . . a distinction that Western Christians find difficult to understand because of the absence of the distinction in their world view, one that can be resolved only by a non-literal interpretation of 2 Peter 1:4, which speaks of worshipers’ becoming partakers of the divine Nature.  (If the divine Nature were as changeless and imparticipable and the divine Essence, only Predestination would thinkable . . . as in the history of Western theology.)  To get back to Genesis 1:26, where the distinction between ontic ‘amartía, which can be inherited, and ‘amártēma “a sin,” a volitional act that cannot be inherited, is lost, the unintelligible redundancy of Western translations of the verse in question is unavoidable.  It is likewise with the contraries of these two terms, respectively holiness and righteousness, also confused in favor of the latter idea in Western languages.  Yet, he Bible gives examples of holy people sinning; righteous people are of course sinless. 

     What have such distinctions got to do with evolution?  More specifically, what has the view of reality held by everyone who thought or wrote in Greek during the (post-Alexander/post-Aristotle) Hellenistic Age got to do with the rôle of created matter and time in religion?  Stating the question this way lifts it out of the realm of WHATs, the realm of different beliefs concerning given subject matter, to the realm of WHYs, the realm of  axiomatic paradigms, which, though neither true nor false, for those who embrace those presuppositions fence in what can be accepted as true and fence out what must be rejected as untrue.  The interpretative FORM of a paradigm is con­stituted of axioms that fence in what how the MATTER is to be understood, essentially ontic-energetically in the East and deontically in the West.  The axiomatic MATTER of a religious paradigm fences in the content of given reality, physical or spiritual; in partic­ular, whether created materiality and temporality have essential rôles in a given religions or not.  The negative view is called gnostic; the favorable view is called mysteric or sacramentalist.   It is immediately obvious that a paradigm having axiomatic gnos­tic matter will reject an essential rôle for Mysteries (more deontically termed sacra­ments or ordinances in Western Christianity) and evolution (in creation, revelation [tradition], and salvation) in religion.

     With this roadmap in place, it is possible to understand many differences, prominent among which is the idea of evolution so rejected by those as far from traditional or conservative Orthodoxy as it is almost possible to go—except that Quakers, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Lat­ter Day Saints, and other persuasions may go further.  I claim that the acceptance or rejection of temporality (and materiality) underlies the acceptance or rejection of evolution; and that it is this that should be focused on in discussing evolution, a notion that is simply a con­sequence of a more basic assumption.  To establish the fact itself, I refer readers to http://www.zephyr.gr/ STJOHN/sixdawn1.htm (part 2 is linked at the end of part 1).  The writings of the magisterial St. Vasil on the Six days of Creation and of his brother, St. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Fashioning of Humanity are worth reading for the enduring Orthodox position on the relevant beliefs.

     I proceed on the assumption that a showing of the innovative character of the radical paradigm opposing evolution—a showing of how at odds it is with the paradigm of the New Testament authors, above all the framework of the Apostle Paul—will have a cru­cial bearing on current controversies about teaching evolution in science classes in public schools.  Such a showing requires an outline of how the two principal Western para­digms, Vatican and Protestant, have come about.  The history is well-known, or would be if history more aptly connected the dots among the lists of dates that it deals with.  The building blocks, the axiomatic assumptions of the paradigms, are fairly limited, if only because of the (fortunately) few subjective and objective possibilities of human categori­za­tions of Deity.  The most basic categorial opposition throughout history has been a static and imparticipable Essence and an energetic Nature, involved in what the Creator creates.        As it will prove more profitable to side-step the question of what is true or correct by simply dealing with the question concerning what the Apostle Paul’s paradigm was and then com­paring it with latter-day paradigms, what I propose to do is to show how ontic or energetic terminology in “the” (Greek) Bible—all other putative “the” Bibles are paradigm-influenced mistranslations in crucial ways—is interpreted in a deontic sense in “the” Wes­tern mistranslations.  The examples of ‘amartía : ‘amártēma and of holiness : righteous are pardigmataically related in a different way from the way in which  Divini­zation (Greek théōsis) and Deification (apothéōsis) are related, seeing that thes later pair  refer to (different kinds of) onticity, viz. static essence and energetic nature.  A pagan Deification is what the Emperor Claudius felt, as he lay dying, when he intimated that he was becoming a god.

     Since the West lacks the immediately foregoing distinction, both Latins and Prot­estants have to treat 2 Peter 1:4 non-literally—either as a conceptual mingling of ideas (Thom­ists) or in terms of a legal (juridical) covenant (Protestants).  Similarly, without its energetic import, Philippians 2:912-)13

“work out your salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God [Who is] energizing
in you all both to will and to energize for the sake of [His] being well-pleased”

means that good works stand in conflict with Grace, as conceptualized

√  in Thomism, as neither energetic (activa) nor uncreated (increata)—the mirror-image of the concept of Grace in Patristic Greek Christianity (both concepts are ontic);

√ in Protestantism, forensically (juridically) as the divine pretence that sinning humans are virtually righteous, Grace being deontic rather than ontic.

It has already been seen that what Adam and Eve lost was not the inherited image that consti­tutes human essence but the uninheritable energetic Assimilation to the Divine (Divi­nization) that human nature lost through the first humans’ sinning.  This confusion of an essential Icon or Image with the energetic Assimilation in the West is at the basis of ­­the un-Eastern doctrine of inherited sin or guilt, which is said to have begun with the first three Western theologian-jurists cited earlier.   

      The account that follows will be simpler if I add an additional clarification or so.  The volitional-juridical DEONTIC outlook characterizes the thought world of Semitic religions (Judaïsm, Phœnician, Islam) and those who overran Western Europe in the Dark Ages—Alans, Goths, Vikings (Normans), and Franks.  GNOSTIC assumptions characterize a world view that was extremely common in the Hellenistic Age, seeing that the pagan religion of the age was impressed on the ontic side with the view that materiality and temporality ought not to be considered part of a spiritual religion.  The early Gnostics attributed the creation of matter to an evil god and viewed time as spiraling downward to ever more brutish conditions—in contrast of St. Vasil’s view of time as exhibiting more complex and ontically superior realities.  It is a framwork that goes back to Indo-Iranian religion.  Although Plato mentions Zarathustra once, Platonic philosophy as well as the Neo-Platonism of Plotinos and other well-know philosophers that grew up in the days following the deaths of the Apostles was more gnostic-leaning than strictly gnostic in its view of materiality and temporality.  The early Christian apologetes and episcopal writers

constantly combated Gnosticism, especially the sect of the Manichees.  

      What the Apostle Paul achieved was to retain the sacramentalist matter of Hebrew religion and replace its juridical cognitive form with the ontic-energetic form of Hellen­ism.  The magisterial Eastern Father, St. Vasil the Great believed that creation has been evolving to what has been better and more complex—obviously a consequence of the energetic view of reality impressed on the New Testament.   The Apostles Paul and John respectively considered the Creator (LOGOS) to be God’s Reason (John 1:1,3) and Wisdom (1 Corinthians 1:24; wisdom is practical reason).  The Eastern Fathers taught that, since LOGOS created all that is, the cosmos is logikós  i.e. “intelligible,” amenable to scientific study.  St. Vasil’s Six Days of Creation, coupled with that of his brother St. Gregory of Nyssa’s Fashioning of the human race, present a picture that accepts the evolution of creating being that only differs grosso modo from modern science, viz. by assuming that God planned and foresaw the kind of evolution that scientists find to have taken place.

     The history of how Western Christianity came to be what it is involves several determinative phases:

1. It has already been notice that Western theology was formed from the middle quarters of the second century through the first quarter of the fifth century by three jurist theologians from the Province of Carthage.  Of these, Tertullian is credited with inventing “original sin” and other deontic notions, while the formidable Augustine, a former Neo-Platonist, added to the paradigmatic package a spiritualist twist that Luther quoted in a passage to be cited below.   Augustine died when the Vandals were at his city’s gates, the moment when the Western Dark Ages began there.  They began nine years later in Carthage itself.  Augustine (or Austin) died two decades after Alaric (a Visigoth who was an Areian, i.e. member of a heresy that held that there was a time when Christ was not) had devastated Rome in 410 and 25 years before Rome’s final reduction to a village in 455 by Gaiseric, a Vandal.  In 483, the surviving Western capital of the Byzantine-Roman Empire, Milan, under threat from the Goths, was moved to Ravenna.  The Dark Ages gained momentum a decade later, in 493, with Ravenna’s fall to the East Goths.  Though recaptured by the Byzantine Romans in 540, the city fell again in 751, this time to the Teutonic Lombards.  The barbarian tribes that overwhelmed the Roman Empire during the Dark Ages (which they brought about) imposed their deontic point of view on Latin Christianity during its 700-750 years of mostly illiterate Dark Ages.

2. The division developing between the original Eastern and the Western Christian outlooks was promoted by two events that were probably even more decisive in strengthening the deontic outlook of the West.    Since Latin Christians had access to Greek learning only once during this period—in a few translations by John Scotus Eriugena, born in Ireland where Greek was still understood—their knowledge of Greek and particularly of Aristotle came principally from the great Islamic culture.  It invented algebra, etc., and rivaled the culture of Byzantion, having begun with transla­tions of Greek learning by Nestorian Christians at Damascus by ca. 800.  It ended up in Córdova in as a juridicalized Aristotelianism.  Latin transla­tions of this Arabic-language scholarship (of Arabic-speaking Jews as well as Muslims) were made at Sicily and Toledo in the twelfth century.  This civilization peaked in 1198 at Córdova, when it fell to its Moorish militia—six years before the execrable Fourth Crusade raped Constantinople in 1204, weakening it to the degree that it was unable to resist the Turks in 1453.  It is significant that, as we read, all but a few popes leading the new culture from 1100-1300 were lawyers. 

      The Philosopher Thomas Aquinas was an Aristotelian.  It is significant, I suggest, that both Aquinas and his Scotist-Ockhamist opponents were born in Viking (Norman) kingdoms.  It is not hard to see the reasons that account for why Latin Christianity replaced the ontic senses of crucial Greek terminology with deontic import; energy had become actus or operatio in Latin (both being rendered as work in English), terms that represent activity but not the causative activity of Greek energy plainly evident in the morphology of the Greek language and in the explanations of energy for the last 2300 years in the East.  A juridically interpreted Crucifixion replaced the soterial Resurrection and (largely) the idea of Salvation as Divinization (Deification in Latin).  The Eastern focus on Salvation as Resurrection and Divinization yielded place in the West to the Life-giving Cross, . . . in the East an act of sacrificial Worship that made salvation by Resurrection and Divinization viable but in the West the primary and often only soterial Event. 

     The opposition to Thomism was Scotist-Ockhamist Nominalism, which was decidedly deontic.  It was a dominant influence on Luther, the iniator of the Protestant Reformation.

3. When the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 was imminent, Byzantine schol­ars fled with their Greek booksvia Mistrâs in the Pelopon­nesos and the Island of Crete, both Venetian dependencies since the Fourth Crusade, to Venice and beyond.   This second influx of Greek learning to the West was decidedly more Platonic and Plotinian (Neo-Platonic), i.e. gnostic-leaning in viewing the relifious role of created materiality and temporal­ity more negatively than as had been the case in the Apostolic (and indeed Hebraïc) sacrame­ntal outlook.  This migration triggered the Renaissance, whose devotees (including most of the Reformers other than Luther) were called humanists.  (Some, like Calvin, were also jurists.)

4. Material sacraments and time seemed increasingly unspiritual in the Renaissance view.   If most of the other Reformers were humanists, Luther called himself a Nominalist.  The axiomatic FORM of Luther’s paradigm was Ockham’s via moderna—Nominalist philosophy that preferred justum quia jussum (“right because com­manded” by a recognized authority) to the traditional jussum quia justum (“com­manded because right” in promoting human nature).  The MATTER of Luther’s paradigm was constituted by the other modernism of the age viz. the pietistic, quasi-gnostic devotio moderna.

    To tie 4 and 1 together, I quote from his most widely read book Luther’s citation of Augustine, where he lays out his anti-sacramentalist viewpoint:   

. . . as greater power is resident in the word than in the sign, there is likewise more [power] in a COVENANT than in a sac­rament.  For a person can have the WORD or COVENANT and benefit from it apart from the sign or sacrament.  “Believe,” says Augustine, “and you’ve eaten.”  But what is believed in if not the WORD of the One doing the prom­ising?  Thus am I able daily, indeed at every hour, to have the mass, just as often as I will [voluero!]:  I can set Christ’s words in front of me and nourish and strengthen my faith in them.  This is in truth to eat and drink SPIRITUALLY.  (WA VI.518.13-23)

Three things stand out in the foregoing: 

(i)   a gnostic, spiritualist view of material sacraments; 

(ii) a legalist covenant, to which one should add Luther’s forensic (juridical) view of
       justication of salvation

(iii) the replacing of ontic reality with words. 

Religion would of course bewordy if a WORD created all that is, as Western theologians teach. Word-reality (cathepic or rhematic reality) becomes real in place of ontic reality; while it may not reduce to word magic, it can be very hard for an outsider to see the difference.  Luther even changed fides “belief” (in ontic reality) to fiducia “faithful­ness”—will-based “loyalty, trust, confidence.”

     The innovative Reformation paradigm replaces the sacramental matter of Hebraic religion and Eastern Christianity with a gnostic-leaning antisac­ra­men­tal-antitem­poral paradigm matter and its the traditional Orthodox form with the Hebraïc deontic outlook that had also become the Western Christian form.  For all of the kaleidoscopic variety of their differences, Protestant thinking still adheres to and is constrained by Luther’s para­digm, which  

√  has spiritual and volitional (virtual) reality in place of created materiality and tempo­rality

and

√  subjective will in place of objective energetic form. 

Consistently, Luther changed fides “faith, belief” to fiducia “faith­fulness—loyalty, trust.”  Salvation for Luther was based on a juridical Cruci­fixion, and a forensic (jurid­ical) imputation by God of a virtual reality to believers.  This format is easily recogniz­able in today’s Evangelicalism.  Although Calvinists have gone further in anti-material and anti-temporal directions than today’s Evangelicals, both kinds of Western Christianity have embraced Luther’s paradigm laid out in the earlier quotation.  The Puri­tans punished people who feasted at the time of Christmas and changed the greatest festivals of the Church, Lordsdays or Resurrectiondays, to Sabbaths.  The juridical form of Calvinism is evident in their practice of reciting the Ten Commandments at the beginning of their Lord’s Supper (a position where the Beatitudes are sung in the celebration of the Orthodox Mysteric Supper, the divine Liturgy).    While I have no idea as to what the Televan­gelists prayer cloths and miracle spring water are, the current Evangelical outlook has little use for materiality (sacraments) and, other than the last trumpet, no great interest in temporality in religion:  Evolution is generally banned from creation, revelation, and salvation.

      Worship in this radical paradigm is hardly conservative, at least if early documents are considered reliable witnesses of Christian worship in its formative age.  Human-oriented sermons and long or numerous prayers for human needs make up much of the totality that is called “worship.”  However, the element of praise, so basic to worship, is by no means absent, especially among Black Christians, though it is expressed in words, overt emotions, and the “folk music” of our time, . . . not in OFFERING back to the Creator the most perfect part of creation in acknowledging the divine ownership of all that is.  The “sacrifice of praise” of the Psalmist, along with the collection plate, is what is offered in place of an Oblation of Christ’s Body and Blood “back” to the creation, although the collection plate, taken to representing worshipers’ labor and/or income and other parts of their lives, is offered—sometimes on a lectern formed like an altar.  The fact that the words that are read and preached and prayed (not those sung in hymns) are supposed (in both senses of that word) to be spontaneous and original is the antithesis of conservatism.   But the idea that the real (temporal) history of what the anti-gnostic early Christians experienced and endorsed are the keys to a truly conservative mentality counts for less in modern circles than usages developed in our time.     

     It is not easily to unravel the contradictory strands at play in the foregoing.   A slowly developing tradition—whose changes do not replace what has been already accepted but rather expand them—is rejected by today’s radicals in favor of a non-developing crea­tion, revelation, and salva­tion . . . while spontaneity in sermons and hearers’ responses to them is as highly favored as novel thought ways, gnostic or deontic, mistakenly attributed to this or that ancient writer,  who in fact may have rejected gnostic matter and juridical form.  The myriad-faced religion or religiosity prevailing in some quarters is as different from antiquity’s habits more than one might have thought possible.  The continuity valued in conser­vativism is devalued in the radicalism that considers itself conservative in accepting paradigm-distorted scriptural texts and interpretations either unknown to ancient writers or known to an author that rejected them.  The constant examination that pervades the Father’s thoughts on the Gospel may be replaced in some instances by the absence of any questioning.  The bleak picture is one of extremes, in short,of  religiosities in which the blinders or monoptic vision of an ideologue can literally not see the other side of the picture, . . . or one’s own axioms that make this or that mean what it is deemed to mean.  What is missing is a conside­ration of the ways in which axioms predeter­mine what one thinks to be factual or true!

     If one amplifies the foregoing problems of getting at the heart of the holy Gospel with the absence of an energetic divine Nature in a view of God as equivalent to the change­less divine Essence, one feels at home in a static universe, one in which the divine will is static . . . a world in which predestination is hardly escapable and will rules the roost.  How can a changeless God respond to people’s cries and needs?  This is hardly what one would call a conservative portrayal of Christianity. 

     While holding that the Creator is a Word (something that lógos doesn’t mean except in the extended sense evident in “Give them the word”—viz. a message or signal), Evan­gelicals do not hold that reality is exclusively wordy; their services are often emotional.  What is noticeable is that “the” Bible, however mistranslated under the influence of a post-Apostolic paradigm, is “the Word.”  The relationship to God is un-ontic in either worship or in soteriology, which is juridical in being based on a covenant or promise.

      It cannot be too strongly emphasized that comparing the individual doctrines of different parties is pointless when differing paradigms impose different senses on the crucial terminology of any such discussion.  Ecumenics is a lost cause when it does not discuss the CAUSES of the different teachings—their incommensurable paradigms.  Since the axiomatic matter and form of a cognitive paradigm is clearly neither true nor false (which doesn’t mean one cannot be argued for or against), ecumenical agreement is not on the table, at least if, as is foreseeable, scholars and worshipers remain imprisoned in their paradigms.  It will do no harm, I trust, to build a bit more formally on what has  been laid out earlier about the paradigms of Christianity (other than very mutable non-liberal ones).  Whereas the MATTER of Apostolic and Eastern Christian paradigm is constituted of Mysteries (sacramen[tal]s) in a framework in which an essential, soterial religious rôle for materiality is based on the Incarnation of God the Son as the first sacrament that validates the others in both Eastern and Western Fathers 

√   Christ’s and His worshipers’ Resurrections are, despite the New Testament evidence to the contrary, non-soterial rôle for what seems to be the generality of Western  theolo­gians.

Mgsr. Joseph Pohle is explicit on this in his Soteriology (2d English ed.; Herder 1916, p. 102).  It is also clear that revelation is only virtually temporal in the Catechism of the Catholic Church [I.III.66 titled “There will be no further Revela­tion”], where temporality seems to be less about evolution than a calendar of dates for different observances;

If Latin Catholics have preserved the sacramentalist matter of early Christianity they share their cognitive FORM with non-Liberal Protestants.

√   It is a deontic (volitional-juridical) FORM.  We read that most popes between 1100-1300 (during which the Dark Ages came to an end) were lawyers; popes have claimed and exercised tremendous juridical power, even to release reposed but believing sinners from what the Latins call Purgatory. 

But all Protestants have, in some degree,

√  gnostic MATTER . . . as the result of causes already laid out.

Temporality is limited to the last trum­pet; Puritans even punished believers for feasting on the date of Christmas and changed the Lordsday (or Resurrectionday, the greatest of ecclesiastical festivals) to a juridically conceptualized Sabbath.  The Ten Commandments were recited at the beginning of the Communion service . . . where the Orthodox chant Jesus’s Beati­tudes.

The Latin Catholic paradigm stands in the middle between Orthodox and Protestants, since the Latins share the sacramental matter of their paradigm with the East even as they have deontic form in common  with Protestants, who inherited it from them. 

     These points having been clarified, it may be useful to summarize important ways in which Evangelicals diverge from the distinctive characteristics of conservative Christian­ity, namely:

√  The passage in 2 Peter 1:4 that speaks of worshipers becoming “partakers of the divine Nature” implies the Greek distinction between God’s Nature (His uncreated energies) and His Essence, which is changeless, imparticipable, and so on.  (The confusion caused by the lack of this distinction is, as noted above, in great part responsible for predestination in Western theology, given that God has no unchanging aspect from this point of view.)

√  The Eastern Fathers thought of the Incarnation as the Proto-Mystery (the first sacrament that validates all of the others) and the Resurrection and Divinization as the “ultimate Mystery,” Salvation itself.  While highly revered in ambient Crucifixes and other icons and held to be necessary to salvation, the Life-giving Cross is what made bodily Resurrection and Divinization able to be soterial by Its offering back a perfect part of the Creation—Christ—and thus re-unifying Creator and creation in a manner that made Jesus’s bodily Resurrection and worshipers’ bodily resurrections  properly able to energize the latter as soterial events.

√  The Eastern Fathers also held and taught that the cosmos was created by God’s Reason (LOGOS in John l:1,3) or Wisdom (SOPHIA in 1 Cor. 1:24) and is therefore logikós “intelligible,” i.e. amenable to scientific analysis.

√   Philippians (12-)13 obviates the conflict of Grace (the uncreated Energy of God’s Life in Christ’s members) and works:  “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God (Who is) energizing in you both to will and to energize for the sake of His being well-pleased.”  Translating the Greek verb for “work out” and “energize” alike in Western translations has blotted out the distinction.

√ Evidently “the” Bible relied on by Western Christians is not “the” Bible.  While I do not question the sincerity of Western Christians’ understanding of whatever Biblical text they have at their disposal or the sincerity of their attempts to follow and remain loyal to those understandings (except perhaps in the matter of divorce, where the figures for the different forms of Christianity are about the same), the text from another culture requires more interpretation and understanding than most are willing to concede.  If the point here is anything but an intent to bemean or throw any party in a bad light, it is simply to get at the facts and let the chips fall where they may.  There are many fine points that need to be clarified—there is even a possible sense of resurrection of the soul in Eastern Christianity, although that sense does not replace or usurp the “material” revivification of worshipers’ bodies—in a complete treatment, the connecting of the dots here makes no claims to be a complete treatment. 

     It has already been made more than obvious that I think that a cognitive understanding of the evolution controversy needs to take into considera­tion the axiomatic assumptions of the various parties if the contemporary basis of the controversy is to be grasped.  If the anti-evolu­tionists opposi­tion to evolution in creation is secondary to more general assumptions about the nature of religion, leaving those out of consideration in discus­sions of Evangelicals’ anti-evolu­tionist position omits something integral and misses the boat.  The WHYs and HOWs of the Evangelical position need to be considered over and above the WHATs  if a discussion is to get to and rest on a proper cognitive plateau. 

      Enough has been said for the reader to be able to decide what is conservative and what is not.  Since axioms are neither true nor false, however stringently they constrain what can be true and what must be false, it does not seem that an understanding of either one’s own religion or that of others—and hence whatever hope for a rational ecumenics may be entertained—can be realized without attention to the basic axioms of the various positions.  The following points deserve attention:

√  What axioms constitute the form of the Apostolic paradigm described in the Hellenis­tic Greek of the original New Testament?

√   What form of Christianity has (always) preserved that paradigm?

√  What historical or other developments have caused Western Christian paradigms to be so different from the foregoing?

Answering these questions is, I think, a proper way of addressing, inter alia, the Christian view of evolution. 

     While answers to such questions can be found in the preceding discussion, it is not seldom helpful to contrast an idea with what it is not, it may be conducice to a more cer­tain grasp of the points at issue if I list the NOTs of Apostolic Christianity as presented in the New Testament and also in writings of the earliest Fathers like St. Ignatios of Antioch, a disciple of St. John the Theologian, Prophet, and Evangelist and second episcopal successor to the Apostle Peter, who was Antioch’s first bishop:

√   Rejecting the notion that the Incarnation is the “Proto-Mystery” underlying and vali­dat­ing all other mysteries (sacrament[al]s) necessary or helpful, as the case may be) for Salva­tion), including the ultimate resurrection of a worshiper’s body;

√   Rejecting the idea that bodily resurrection is not the goal and indeed core of salvation; and if Divinization (see 2 Peter 1:4) is not thought of as the ultimate Mystery;

√   The idea that a Word created the cosmos and, more generally, a denigration of reason . . . which is as anti-patristic as Liberal rationalism. 

√  A non-acceptance of the ontic-energetic outlook of the Apostles and the real history of how other, Western Christian world views have developed.

     Whereas the important theologians, Saints Vasil and Gregory (of Nazianzós) the Theologian, studied at the Academy in Athens, a modern theologian of one of the modernist, post-Reformation points of view would frown on that sort of humanistic approach to public education and advocate something very different.  Dialectic would be skipped and the natural sciences would be presented in ways quite different from what might be most beneficial to people.  

     The converse of this portrayal also holds.  

     Readers that have followed the foregoing discussion will see that the religious opposi­tion to evolution should not be laid at the feet of the real religious conservatives but at the feet of religious innovators who do not distinguish paradigm-influenced interpretations of a sometimes mistranslated Bible or  premises from notions derived from those premises.  It will become obvious to some or many that the ontic-deontic divide between East and West underlies many surficial differences.  While both sides may be able to distinguish ontic eternity from temporal everlastingness, it becomes murkier with ontic expiation and deontic propitiation, not to speak of ontic ‘amartía and deontic ‘amártēma or their contraries, ontic holiness and deontic righteousness in English translations, distinguishing energetic Divinization from essential Deification, both ontic, is more parlous.  If, as has been alleged here, a failure to distinguish  ‘amartía and ‘amártēma has been responsible for the indefen­sible Western teaching that newborns inherit the guilt of the first humans’ disobedience, the failure of translators familiar with Greek to make the Hellenistic distinguish eloquently displays the astounding power of a presupposed paradigm. 

   St. John of Damascus accepted Aristotle’s differentiation of three kinds of life, sequenced in one order at birth—vegetative life (embryo?) evolving into animate life that responds to stimuli and then into rational human life—but in the mirror-image order for those are near dying, when human life becomes merely animate and then vegetative.  This can affect the way murder is differentiated from killing; we don’t usually describe  the killing of animals other than pets as “murder,” any more than our laws condemns as murder such accidental actions that unintentionally cause human death.

    I conclude by re-emphasizing that writers on evolution should abandon the idea that Christians who oppose evolution are religious “conservatives,” seeing that they are in fact innovators.  Editors would do better to recognize the truth that traditionalist Chris­tianity, as integrally represented by early Christian anti-gnostic writers and the Fathers of Greek Orthodoxy, is not opposed to either proper science or evolution as such.