The Arian Heresy

The heresy of Arianism arose when a pastor from Libya named Arius (250–336) opposed the Orthodox idea that Jesus is co-eternal with the Father. In my article 'The Tenacity of Saint Athanasius,' I suggest that this heresy was attractive because it made the Christian message more politically correct. 

Like modern day Jehovah’s Witnesses, Arius argued that if Jesus was God’ son, then by definition he must have had a beginning to his existence and could not also be eternal God. Arius gathered a following of other pastors who walked around chanting, “There was a time when he was not, there was a time when he was not,” indicating their belief that Jesus was a creature with a beginning rather than the eternal Son of God.

The reason this heresy was appealing is because for hundreds of years Mediterranean culture had revolved around the worship of the emperor and various other demigods. If Jesus was simply a great man or angel, then serving Him was compatible with the worship of these other deities. Arianism was thus found to be highly attractive to those in positions of power.

Further Reading

• The Tenacity of Saint Athanasius
  
• A Brief History of some early Christeological Heresies 

Debate Rubric

I'm a busy person. In fact, I'm a really busy person. Yet still, I try to defend the things I write. I try to interact with my readers and field objections. 

When my articles are syndicated to my Facebook page, people often have questions to ask and often want to point out real or perceived flaws in my argumentation. I usually try to set aside time to respond to my interlocutors and defend my articles.

Invariably, however, I find that these discussions usually proceed in a maddeningly unsystematic manner. Moreover, I often find that my opponents will use rhetoric instead of cogent reasoning, and I end up having to teach basic Logic 101 to people who are not even interested in learning. The busier I get, the less time I have for these types of unstructured discussions, and the result is that some of my readers have got angry at me for not being more willing to come to the defense of my articles.

I have thus created a very structured rubric for those who wish to engage in public debate with me. Using this rubric, I am willing to defend anything I have written. The rubric is for a written debate (only because I don't have the equiptment for an audio debate) and can be conducted over any IM software like Skype of Facebook. Here it is:

Resolution (example): "Should government legalize same-sex marriage?"

Opening Statements

The Negative has up to 600 words to state his case
The Affirmative has up to 600 words to state his case
.

Cross-Examination
.
Affirmative can ask Negative 10 questions. The questions must not exceed 40 words. After each question the Negative is allowed to answer in 50 words or less, unless permission is granted to him by the other side to exceed this limit.

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Negative can ask Affirmative 10 questions. Same rules

 .
Rebuttals

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The Negative has 300 words to refute the Affirmative’s opening case
The Affirmative has 300 words to refute the Negatives opening case

 .
Concluding Remarks

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The Affirmative has up to 600 words to conclude his case
The Negative has up to 600 words to conclude his case


Additional Rules

After the debate, both sides are free to publish it whenever and wherever they want, provided it is published in full. The exception to this is if the word count has been exceeded in situations not authorized by the opposition, in which case either party is free to edit the other person's words to fit the word count. If either side drops out in the middle of the debate (as defined by at least a week’s hiatus in submitting a reply), then either party is free to treat the incomplete debate as finished and to publish it.

The debate will be moderated by Robin under a seperate name, but the involvement of this moderator will remain neutral and will be limited to enforcing the structure of the debate, such as making comments like, "It is now the Negative's turn to enter into cross-examination," etc.

During any point of the debate, the word count may be exceeded by 200 words for either side to explain a rule of logic provided that such an explanation is generic and does not mention anything pertaining specifically to the topic of the debate.

Hell and Beyond Interview and Discussion, part 2

Below is the second segment of the interview I did with my dad on his new e-book Hell and Beyond.  For background about the book and this interview, see my earlier post 'Introducing Hell and Beyond.' To read all the interview segments that have been published so far, click here.

As I said before, one of the original purposes of this interview was to generate a lot of discussion. If you would like to contribute your own thoughts to these questions, use the Facebook links at the end of this segment. This is your chance to continue the discussion about God, the afterlife, and the nature of reality, even if you haven't read the book. 


RP 4: You are careful to stress that this novel should not be taken literally, nor as a theological statement on everything you believe about hell and God's judgment. But in several places, the story seems to be directly critiquing traditional Christian beliefs about hell. What would you say to critics who take the book to be a theological treatise in the guise of fiction?

Hell and Beyond Interview and Discussion, Part 1

Below is the first segment of the much anticipated interview with my father on his new book Hell and Beyond.  

For background about the book and this interview, see my earlier post 'Introducing Hell and Beyond.' To read the other interview segments that have been published so far, click here.

One of the original purposes of this interview was to generate a lot of discussion. After the first couple segments, we get into some pretty deep questions. If you would like to contribute your own thoughts to these questions, use the Facebook links at the end of this segment. This is your chance to continue the discussion about God, the afterlife, and the nature of reality, even if you haven't read the book.

Introducing Hell and Beyond

  

My father, Michael Phillips, has just released a fantasy about the afterlife titled Hell and Beyond. Modeled after C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorce, but with more explicitly universalist motifs, the book is being heralded by many as the next step in the Love Wins phenomenon. (At the moment the book only exists in e-book format and can be purchased on Amazon Kindle or associated e-readers here.)

Does hell last forever? Is God or the devil in charge of hell? What is the lake of fire? What does it mean to be saved? These are just some of the many questions raised in Hell and Beyond.

My parents recently came to visit us, and while they were here I finished interviewing my father about the book, probing him about the book's implied theology and anticipating some of the objections he is likely to encounter from more traditionalist readers. Over the next few weeks I will be publishing our interview in separate segments in order to invite you, my readers, to participate in the ongoing discussion. A Facebook plugin will be imported into each interview segment to facilitate a user-friendly discussion. Meanwhile, the entire interview can be downloaded at the following link:

Hell And Beyond Interview: A Probing Conversation Between Father and Son

An important disclaimer for readers of this blog is that I do not agree with everything in Hell and Beyond, nor do I subscribe to the larger epistemological and hermeneutical architecture on which the book's conjectures ultimately depend. At the same time, I think the book raises some important questions about the afterlife, and I hope to use Hell and Beyond as a platform to generate a vibrant dialogue both in this blog and in the wider online community.

To read all the interview segments as they becoming available, and participate in the discussion, click on the following link:

Hell and Beyond Discussion

Compliments of Salvo Magazine

From Gorgias to Marcuse

The ancient Greeks had a school of philosophers known as the Sophists, who took pride in their ability to prove impossible things. Some sophists even hired themselves out at public events, where audiences could watch spellbound as they proceeded to prove propositions that were obviously false. 

 

The sophist philosopher Gorgias (4th century b.c.) invented an ingenuous argument to prove that: nothing exists; and even if something exists, nothing can be known about it; and even if something exists and something can be known about it, such knowledge cannot be communicated to others; and even if something exists, can be known about, and can be communicated about, no incentive exists to communicate anything about it to others. 

It would be nice if such sophistry had been limited to ancient Greeks. However, the 20th century saw a thinker whose nonsense rivaled and even surpassed anything produced by the sophists. His name was Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), the guru of the 1960s counterculture.  

Keep reading...

Gay Infertility

"Legislation has been filed that would require group insurance to cover gay and lesbian infertility treatments just as they do heterosexual. But, as I note elsewhere, AB 460 isn’t limited to a finding of actual infertility. Nor does it require that gays and lesbians have tried to conceive or sire a child using heterosexual means, natural or artificial. Rather–as with heterosexual couples–merely the inability to get pregnant for a year while having active sexual relations is sufficient to demonstrate need for treatment, meaning if the bill becomes law, it would require insurance companies to pay for services such as artificial insemination, surrogacy, etc. for people who are actually fecund. Indeed, since the bill prevents discrimination based on marital or domestic partnership status, theoretically every gay and lesbian in the state could be deemed infertile for purposes of insurance coverage merely by the fact that they don’t wish to engage in heterosexual relations." Wesley J. Smith, from CA Legislation Would Require Insurance for Gay “Infertility”

Raised a Spiritual Body

I used to teach history at a private Christian school. Like many schools in the classical education movement, we couldn’t afford our own building and had to rent from a church. One day as I was walking to my classroom, I stumbled over a piece of paper in the hallway. Stooping to pick it up, I saw that it was a hand-out from one of the church’s Sunday school classes, titled “Ten Great Doctrines of the Bible.”

 

I found myself intrigued. I knew that the church had Gnostic leanings, so I was curious to see how they would handle the doctrine of bodily resurrection. However, as I scanned the Ten Great Doctrines of the Bible I soon discovered that the doctrine had not made it onto the list.

 

Well, I thought, maybe resurrection is mentioned under something else, like salvation. Reading the section on salvation, I saw these words: “Salvation deals with the afterlife, heaven, hell, and whether or not it is safe to die.”

 

After that I decided to try the doctrine of “Future Things.” Maybe resurrection would make an appearance here. However, echoing the section on salvation, the paper said that the doctrine of future things dealt with “the end of the world, and eternity.”

 

I stood there in the hallway reflecting on the words, as students filed past me into their classes. How sad, I thought, that the entire Christian hope had been collapsed into fire assurance. How strange that salvation was being reduced to escaping to heaven for eternity and that the teachers of this class had not found it necessary to even mention the hope of bodily resurrection.

 

It would be nice to be able to say that the teachers at this church were an anomaly within the evangelical tradition. However, the truth is that this Sunday School class reflected a widespread move within the evangelical church towards a belief structure that is more Gnostic than Christian.

Keep reading...

The Supreme Court and the 14th Amendment

As the Supreme Court looks at the issue of same-sex 'marriage' the basic question centers on the Constitution’s 14th Amendment. The 14th Amendment was ratified after the War Between the States and specifies that “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The question that the Supreme Court must consider is whether California’s Proposition 8 and the Federal Defence of Marriage Act violate the 14th Amendment. This is a constitutional question that ought to be considered on purely legal grounds, though this is not happening because politics and ideology have inevitably got mixed up in it. But theoretically, it ought to simply be a question of what the Constitution means when it grants people equal protection under the law?

Love, Wonder and Perception

"Love achieves its creativity by being perceptive" wrote Oliver O'Donovan in his book Resurrection and Christian Order.

I like that quote, because it encapsulates the reality that for the great artists of the Western tradition, creativity was a form of love. This is the point that Josef Pieper made so eloquently in his tender book Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation.

Great sculptors like Michelangelo could look at a slab of unworked marble and ‘see’ the finished product that they would then take months to lovingly bring to reality. Similarly, Bach could be given a series of five or six notes and instantly realize in his mind the potential those notes had for an entire invention. (In the case of the Goldberg Variations, Bach was able to take a simple musical statement that by itself might seem unimportant and, under the loving care of his creativity, to worked it into some of the finest music that has ever existed.) This is similar to the way that we are the workmanship of our Heavenly Father, whom He is steadily bringing to completion (Ephesians 2:10). The Lord sees us not as we are, but as the people He is making us into and the people He will have brought to perfection when we are finally glorified.

If this is true of the way artists perceive raw materials and how God perceives us, it can also be true for how you and I perceive the world. We can train ourselves to observe the glory and beauty inherent in the world we inhabit.

Children do this naturally, since they have an inborn sense of wonder and enchantment. Part of what it means to grow in maturity, however, is to recover this sense: to learn to once again experience a child-like delight in the things we have become accustomed to taking for granted, to perceive the world around us in fresh and exciting ways.

Keep reading...

The Evolution of the Book

We are standing at a critical juncture in history, when the future of the printed word can no longer be taken for granted. It is appropriate therefore to ponder the implications the digital revolution might have for the Church's reception of Scripture. What might be the future of the Bible's role for the Church in a world where our communication technologies are changing so rapidly? 

To explore this question, it may be helpful first to consider some of the effects of previous paradigm shifts in communication technologies. In the history of human literacy, the "book" has undergone four key transformations. These can be crudely sketched as follows.

According to the historian Frederick Kilgour, the first phase in the history of the "book" roughly spanned the years 2500 b.c. to a.d. 100, when men used a stylus to inscribe text onto clay tablets. The second phase of book-making technology began about 2000 b.c. and lasted to about a.d. 700, when a brush or pen was used to write on papyrus rolls. The years a.d. 100 to the present are the period of the codex, a term that has become almost synonymous with our term "book." 

As these dates indicate, there was considerable overlap between the different phases of book-making technology. The fourth transformation, currently in overlap with the age of the codex, is, of course, the electronic book.

Within the era of the codex, there have been two important developments that helped give the written word the particular primacy it has enjoyed in Western culture. The first of these may seem trivial to us, but was of vital importance not only in affecting our relationship with the written word, but also in bringing reading to a wider audience.

Keep reading

Questions and Answers with the American Family Association

On Thursday the American Family Association published an interview where I am answering questions about Same-Sex 'Marriage' and the case before the Supreme Court. To read it, click on the link below:

Q&A about same-sex 'marriage'

Marriage is Bigger than the Couple

This post as moved to here.

Celtic Christianity

Their aspect is terrifying. . . They are very tall in stature, with rippling muscles under clear, white skin.” Thus wrote the Greek historian, Diodorus Siculus in the first century B.C., describing the Celtic peoples. 

Diodorus continued: “The Celtic way of fighting was alarming. They wore . . . bronze helmets with figures picked out on them, even horns, which make them look even taller than they already are . . . while others cover themselves with breast-armor made of chains. But most content themselves with the weapons nature gave them: they go naked into battle.”

Emerging from central Europe around 1000 B.C., these fierce warlike people were among the most successful conquerors the world had ever seen. Archaeologists have discovered Celtic artifacts as far North as Denmark and as far east as India. By the time of the Roman Empire, however, Celtic dominance had waned, being limited primarily to Gaul (modern France) and the British Isles, where Celtic languages are still spoken today.