[–] Manmoth@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I'm an Orthodox Christian our theology (which is that of the first thousand years) is likely different from anything you take issue with from Catholic or Protestant traditions in regard to soteriology, ecclesiology, sanctification etc

It's great that you have interest in Christianity but Orthodoxy leans on 2000 years of scholarship and tradition. With all due respect you're not going to ask any new questions or bring up any novel points. I don't claim to be an expert but have Orthodox resources I can draw from.

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[–] Libra@lemmy.ml 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

Fair point. I am not very familiar with Orthodox Christianity at all, save a little of the very early history. You also sound fairly well-educated on the subject, which makes you twice over not the usual kind of person who responds to my comments about religion.

So, first, let me apologize for making assumptions; the usual kind of person I get is an American evangelical protestant who hasn't read most of his or her own bible and is of the opinion that anything important for them to know would be whispered on the wind directly into their ear by god himself, so they have a pretty dim view of learning in general, but also of learning about their religion in specific. That's clearly not you. My bad.

Second, it's my understanding that Orthodoxy (probably not the right word, my bad) uses fundamentally the same scriptures as Catholicism and Protestantism, with some additions to the Old Testament. My issues come from the bible's descriptions of god, events, and people, so I'm going to assume there's enough common ground that my these translate to Orthodoxy as well as the others. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

I have 3 core issues with Christianity:

Original sin: imposing the consequences of one person's actions on others is called collective punishment and it's a war crime, and needless to say baking a metaphysical war crime into the very heart of a religion - its origin story - is just not ever going to fly with me. It certainly doesn't help that this is further complicated by #2.
Omniscience/free will: either god is omniscient (lit: all knowledge, which includes perfect knowledge about the future) and free will is impossible so we can't choose to love god, or he isn't omniscient. His claims about moral authority are held together by this linchpin, and honestly either way it falls doesn't look great. If we can't choose to love god then punishing us for 'choosing' otherwise is effectively god punishing others for his own crimes since he made us unable to choose otherwise, so we're right back on the war crimes train. If he's not omniscient then he doesn't have a plan, can't judge sin in the hearts of men, etc. Is he even still a god at that point? Also that would make him a liar, which again is not a great foundation upon which to build a claim to moral authority.
Vengeful/loving god: the Old Testament is full of examples of god as an angry, petty, vengeful tyrant, only for him to change his ways or something in the New Testament and be all about love. There are exceptions in both, obviously, so I'm referring to general trends. I think Jesus had some great ideas (best summed up by Bill & Ted as, 'Be excellent to each other'), but the rest reads like infantile revenge-porn. And I'm not buying that 'hate the sin, love the sinner' thing either (that's probably an evangelical thing), because god sure wasn't raining fire and brimstone and calling for the wholesale slaughter of the sins, that was inflicted upon the sinners. And their sin mostly seems to boil down to not believing in god.

These, to me, seem like unsolvable, unavoidable paradoxes. I see two paths when faced with them:

I'm forced to admit that the 'perfect eternal Divine Truth' is neither perfect nor eternal (re:god's nature purportedly changing) and therefore also not true.
What is being passed off as divine truth was either created or corrupted (which doesn't necessarily imply malicious intent; simple error will suffice) by flawed humans and thus is also not true.

I don't begrudge people who believe or find comfort in it, mind you, but it's not for me. I'm searching for Truth, not a search for 'it's probably not true but I guess it's a nice idea?'

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[–] Manmoth@lemmy.ml 1 point 1 year ago* (2 children)

First of all “Orthodoxy” is accepted as a shorthand referent to Orthodox Christianity so no issues there.

Secondly no worries on the assumptions I also anticipate Protestant hand waving when it comes to certain topics such as canonicity.

Now for your core issues…

Original Sin - This is where Orthodoxy is different from everyone else. The Orthodox perspective is that the guilt of Adam and Eve’s sin is theirs alone. The consequence of their sin, death, is inherited however. This factors into the sotieriology (e.g. salvation doctrine) of the Church. The nature of man entered a state of fallenness due to the sin of Adam and Eve. Since God cannot be in the presence of sin Adam and Eve had to be expelled from the garden. This expulsion brought with it struggles such as the pain of childbirth, toil, hunger, sickness etc. This is, however, a mercy because despite entering a fallen state humanity has an opportunity to sanctify itself in this life and rejoin with God in death. This is a unique feature to humanity. Heavenly beings are in a static state. It is why Satan is jealous of humanity because the state of his soul cannot be changed and he will be eternally damned. The human soul can no longer change its spiritual state when this life ends. Human beings for all the struggles they have on earth can persevere in their faith and enter the Kingdom when they repose.
Omniscience/Free Will - This is a false dichotomy and is highly dependent on what you mean by free will. Just because God knows all things doesn’t mean he orchestrates all things (e.g. foreknowledge ≠ predestination). God is incomprehensible and operates outside of time. This is part of what makes God a transcendent all powerful being. Furthermore because the Orthodox don’t believe in Original Sin the theological allowance for how man moves and works in the world is different. Man can live in the world and freely choose between Good and Evil. Salvation is achieved through a process of working together with the Holy Spirit in all aspects of life. This process is called Theosis.

Orthodoxy doesn’t conceive of God’s knowledge as something that competes with human will. Because God is not bound by time, His knowledge isn’t predictive—it’s participatory. We remain free precisely because God allows our freedom to unfold within His omniscient love. This is the mystery of synergy with the Holy Spirit.

What we perceive as logical already presupposes the existence of God, because logic itself depends on the existence of objective truth. If God is bound by created laws, He ceases to be God; He is the source of all order, not subject to it.

Vengeful/loving god - This is primarily a postmodern critique of scripture by people like Richard Dawkins although ancient Marcionites and Gnostics love this critique as well. The Orthodox wholly reject this critique as a shallow reading of scripture that does not take into account the context of passages in and of themselves or scripture in its entirety. While God does render punishment in the Old Testament he is also endlessly loving despite being heartbroken by the wayward sins of his people who repeatedly abandon him for other Gods that can’t save them. There is love and wrath in both the OT and the NT. (e.g. OT - Jonah, God saving Nineveh when they repent; NT - Jesus over-turning tables of Money Changers) This is more of a squishy critique than the other two so I’m not sure what else to add.

Two paths forward…

I’m forced to admit that the ‘perfect eternal Divine Truth’ is neither perfect nor eternal (re:god’s nature purportedly changing) and therefore also not true.

The revelation of God is one that compounds on the past. Creation, Expulsion, Punishment, Enrichment, Liberation, Exile etc until you reach God incarnate in the form of Jesus Christ who uses the history of human failures to illustrate the grace of God and the establishment of a new covenant that saves all people. This is a logical progression.

What is being passed off as divine truth was either created or corrupted (which doesn’t necessarily imply malicious intent; simple error will suffice) by flawed humans and thus is also not true.

I haven’t seen a compelling case that divine truth has been fundamentally corrupted. It seems more a result of your sentiment than a critical analysis.

I recognize you may disagree with the points I adequately communicated or have questions about ones I failed to describe well. I am a fallible human after all 😂. You may find that many of the contradictions you’re grappling with don’t exist in Orthodox thought in the same way they might in some Western traditions. I’d encourage looking into Orthodox apologia for a perspective not burdened by the theological inheritances of later Western heresies like penal substitution or strict determinism..

An aside about "war crimes" -- I will not expound on this too much because it's a whole separate topic but be wary of using a modern lens when assessing the ancient. You're smuggling in a moral framework to critique a metaphysical one. It's easy to forget that secular ethical ideas such as "war crimes" typically find their origin in Christian morality to begin with (at least in the West). What is the epistemic justification for Good and Bad in a world where everything is relative? Philosophically it is an arbitrary critique without grounding.

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[–] Libra@lemmy.ml 1 point 1 year ago* (1 child)

Re:Orthodoxy - fair enough.

Original Sin

The Orthodox perspective is that the guilt of Adam and Eve’s sin is theirs alone. The consequence of their sin, death, is inherited however.

Ok, that's an interesting take. If man is not guilty of the sin of Adam then why does he bear the consequences of the act? Why punish someone for something you don't believe they did?

Since God cannot be in the presence of sin Adam and Eve had to be expelled from the garden.

Yeah but then he followed them around? Adam praises god on the birth of his sons, they give offerings to god and even talk to him, etc. And if Adam's sin is transmitted to all mankind then Cain and Abel were sinful too, so it kinda seems like god didn't have a problem being in the presence of sin?

This is, however, a mercy because despite entering a fallen state humanity has an opportunity to sanctify itself in this life

This doesn't fly with me, because god created Adam and Eve as they were and they (assuming omniscience) couldn't choose to do otherwise. So not only is god punishing them for a sin of his own making, he's punishing everyone else despite, in the Orthodox version, them not being guilty of that sin. And then to call pain and suffering a mercy because it gives us the 'opportunity' to 'earn' back what you took? Nah, I'll take a hard pass on that one. Sin but not guilt is kind of worse actually. It's like telling your kid, 'I know your brother was the one who took the cookie, but I'm going to spank you for it too.' See also: pettiness and tyranny.

Heavenly beings are in a static state ... the state of [Satan's] soul cannot be changed

If it was static, how did it change from 'angelic' to 'damned' or whatever after his act of rebellion? Was it the act itself that somehow changed the unchangeable, or did god decide to rewrite reality just this once? If that's the case, rewriting someone's soul just so you can eternally punish them for one mistake is kind of a dick move.

Free Will

This is a false dichotomy and is highly dependent on what you mean by free will.

I don't think so, though I concede that there might be definitions of free will that render it thus, I'm using the pretty common definition of having the ability to make choices.

Just because God knows all things doesn’t mean he orchestrates all things ... foreknowledge ≠ predestination

I whole-heartedly disagree, foreknowledge precisely equals predestination. He doesn't have to orchestrate things; merely knowing ahead of time that I will turn left instead of right at the next intersection means that it is definitionally impossible for me to turn right. If I was able to turn right anyway that would definitionally preclude foreknowledge: you can't know that I turned left if I turned right.

God is incomprehensible and operates outside of time.

Even if I grant this for the sake of argument, humans do not operate outside of time so foreknowledge of human futures, again definitionally, must necessarily be knowledge about the future of the time that humans operate in. But even if that wasn't true, if god exists outside of time then he also definitionally exists outside of causality and cannot influence or be influenced by human choices within time, which precludes foreknowledge of human futures.

Furthermore because the Orthodox don’t believe in Original Sin the theological allowance for how man moves and works in the world is different. Man can live in the world and freely choose between Good and Evil. Salvation is achieved through a process of working together with the Holy Spirit in all aspects of life. This process is called Theosis.

Ok, I'll take your word for it, but according to the most widely-accepted definitions if man is free to choose then god cannot have forenkowledge of those choices.

Because God is not bound by time, His knowledge isn’t predictive—it’s participatory. ... We remain free precisely because God allows our freedom to unfold within His omniscient love.

If he's not outside of causality (as implied by the participatory element here) then he's not outside of time, because those two things mean effectively the same thing. You say he allows it out of love, I say he allows it out of lack of foreknowledge, because that's the only thing that is logically consistent.

What we perceive as logical already presupposes the existence of God, because logic itself depends on the existence of objective truth.

Logic doesn't presuppose god, it merely presupposes consistency. Objective truth can arise from the structure of reality itself without requiring a divine source. We have mountains of evidence that logic is internally self-consistent; that's not the case for pretty much any holy book I've read.

Vengeful/loving God

This is primarily a postmodern critique of scripture by people like Richard Dawkins

That doesn't render it invalid. Also: primarily, but not uniquely as you point out; I was personally puzzling over this stuff back in the 80s before anyone but the editors of a few science journals had ever heard of Richard Dawkins.

The Orthodox wholly reject this critique as a shallow reading of scripture that does not take into account the context of passages in and of themselves or scripture in its entirety.

I don't dispute that he is also loving, I dispute that he is exclusively loving as of the New Testament. He just goes on and on about how vengeful and angry he is in the OT, and there's some of that in the NT too, though I think it's all said by others since (IIRC, it's been a while) god doesn't really have a speaking part in much of the NT. Also I don't think you get to send your PR team out to call you a 'loving god' after slaughtering innocents and children (and advocating the same) over and over again.

NT - Jesus over-turning tables of Money Changers

I wouldn't count that as wrath, and I also wouldn't attribute it to god. We know he's capable of turning those tables over himself if he wanted to, but he didn't. :P

This is more of a squishy critique than the other two

That's fair, it's definitely more of a vibe-check thing, I'm not sure there's much space to discuss there.

(cont, TIL lemmy doesn't have that high of a maximum post length.)

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[–] Libra@lemmy.ml 1 point 1 year ago

Two Paths

The revelation of God is one that compounds on the past. Creation, Expulsion, Punishment, Enrichment, Liberation, Exile etc until you reach God incarnate in the form of Jesus Christ who uses the history of human failures to illustrate the grace of God and the establishment of a new covenant that saves all people. This is a logical progression.

Which is kind of my point. A logical progression of revelation implies change over time in god's plan, actions, or relationship with humanity. But a truly perfect, eternal, unchanging truth wouldn't require progression or revision. If the Divine Truth was perfect and eternal and true, why did it need changing? Evangelicals talk about the 'new covenant' all the time, but humanity isn't any different now than it was then, why did we need a new one? Seems like either god changed or the truth wasn't eternal.

I haven’t seen a compelling case that divine truth has been fundamentally corrupted.

Corrupted might not be the right word, but we have examples of, say, King James commissioning his own bible to support the divine right of kings. But aside from that, human fallibility plays a part in the transmission of this truth, and anyone who has played a game of telephone in grade school can tell you how that tends to go: you line up the whole class, whisper something into the first kid's ear, they whisper into the next, and what started out as 'Billy can't come to school today because he's sick' comes out the other end as 'little Billy died' or whatever. Even if you assume each person in the chain intends to transmit it faithfully people make mistakes, there are disputes over word choice and changes to meaning over time in translation, there are newly-discovered ancient texts that cast new light on the ones we had, etc. I don't know about fundamentally corrupted, but if the perfect eternal truth is all of those things then something else has to account for the paradoxes, and if we're assuming the literal existence of god then that leaves only human fallibility.

I recognize you may disagree with the points I adequately communicated or have questions about ones I failed to describe well. I am a fallible human after all 😂.

Me too man, I'm just here to have an engaging conversation and learn a little something. All we can do is do our best to own mistakes and not be shy about admitting fault.

You may find that many of the contradictions you’re grappling with don’t exist in Orthodox thought in the same way they might in some Western traditions. I’d encourage looking into Orthodox apologia for a perspective not burdened by the theological inheritances of later Western heresies like penal substitution or strict determinism...

That doesn't surprise me. What little I know of the early history of Orthodoxy is that there was an early, pretty severe schism over some fundamental stuff that sent the two churches in very different directions. I am curious to know more, though, so I hope you stay and keep the discussion going. I admit that (probably because the way I fell out of Christianity and then into a long but fortunately-ended period of atheism) that Orthodoxy was never really on my radar in my religious studies. But I am a more curious person than I once was with considerably more free time, so I'll do some poking about and see what I can find. ;)

An aside about “war crimes” ... be wary of using a modern lens when assessing the ancient.

That's entirely fair. I don't think I was intentionally doing it but there may have been some subconscious stuff going on there. My intent, and perhaps I should've chosen a better tool, was to use the terminology of modern ethics to convey the weight of my distaste for the idea of punishing one person for another's crime in any context.

What is the epistemic justification for Good and Bad in a world where everything is relative? Philosophically it is an arbitrary critique without grounding.

I don't think everything is relative, nor do I think god is the only source of morality. Even without modern utilitarian concepts like least-harm, it's pretty clear that ancient human cultures had a concept of justice that depended on the simple and self-evident truth that causing intentional harm to others is bad. It may have been applied unevenly and inconsistently, but. And hell, even a toddler with barely a grasp on language, much less culture or philosophy, can tell the difference between getting bitten by the kid you bit and getting bitten by some kid because she thought you bit her. They're unhappy at being bitten in either case, but - and I've seen this in my nieces and nephews - they get downright angry when they feel that sting of injustice, even if they can't describe it.

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