• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1548 0

more and less Platonic views of God playing out among the early church fathers, such as Origen (more Platonist) and Gregory of Nyssa (less so). As Jean Danielou writes: “For the Platonist, change is a defect…. Even the Christian Platonism of Origen cannot avoid this difficulty. Change is always thought of as a degeneration from a state of initial perfection; and the transformation wrought by Christ has for its sole purpose to destroy change and restore immutability…. Now to overcome this difficulty Gregory had to destroy the equation: good = immutability, and evil = change. And consequently he had to show the possibility of a type of change which would not merely be a return to immobility.” Danielou describes Gregory’s un-Platonic notion of change as “the soul’s perpetual progress in sanctity…a process of infinite growth” (From Glory to Glory [Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995], pp. 47, 46). Thanks to Heidi Miller Yoder for this reference.

18. In other words, they receive, recalling an earlier note, exactly the imperial punishment for misbelief that Plato had recommended: banishment and the death penalty.

19. You can learn more about Michael and hear the song at http://www.michaelkellyblanchard.com. “The god of the philosophers” was a term Blaise Pascal used in describing a spiritual experience I recounted briefly in Finding Our Way Again (Nashville, TN: Nelson, 2008), chap. 18, and A Generous Orthodoxy (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2004), chap. 19.

Chapter 5: Setting the Stage for the Biblical Narrative

1. An apology is due here, a profound and heartrending apology to the Jewish people for the ways we Christians have colonized their story and then—this can hardly be said without the feeling of acute nausea—turned it against them through anti-Semitism and other forms of religious supremacy. And I must also apologize because I have not been careful enough in the past to avoid recolonizing their story, and I may inadvertently fail again in these pages. But I hope my Jewish readers will see that many of us are trying to fix something that we now realize is terribly broken, and sometimes fixing can only be done in steps and stages; these pages are, I hope they will agree, at least small and faltering steps in the right direction.

2. I explore this theme in more detail in The Story We Find Ourselves In (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005).

3. Contrary to popular opinion, the term “perfect” as often used in the New Testament—and as used within the Wesleyan tradition—does not necessarily mean technical Greco-Roman perfection; it is not “a perfect ten in the ontological beauty pageant.” Instead, it means “mature,” “fully formed,” “complete,” or “whole.”

4. “Evolving” is a blasphemy in the world of Theos, which helps explain why some strains of Western Christianity have resisted it so viscerally, against all evidence. Evolution fits beautifully in the good world of Elohim.

5. It’s interesting, in this context, to reflect on the use of the word “development” in economics today, contrasting the “developed world” with the “developing world.” We might replace the former with the “Greco-Roman world” or the “colonized world” and the latter with the “world being colonized and brought into the empire of Western (Greco-Roman) civilization.” In light of the ecological crisis, this is all terribly ironic and tragic, because “developers” typically destroy or undevelop a sustainable, beautiful, and regenerative ecosystem, turning it into something profitable for an elite few, plundering it and rendering it unsustainable, ugly, and spent for everyone else. Mountaintop removal in Appalachia provides an icon of this tragic and ironic kind of “development.”

6. You feel how powerful and fresh this vision is when you contrast it with, say, an Egyptian creation narrative, where the earth is created fully formed, the irrigation channels dug and the shadoofs in place. Then humans are created to maintain it all. Quite a convenient myth to keep the masses in their “God-given” place for the benefit of the elite!

7. Again, this is