Over at his Notions, our friend Bruce Charlton has commented upon the discussion here about the question, raised by our friend Francis Berger, whether the throne and altar have been superseded.
He writes:
I think the ultimate question is something like this:
Is The Christian Church (in some sense of The Church) in-charge-of human salvation – or is salvation primarily a matter for each individual.
The answer is yes.
It is obvious that we can’t go back. We must go forward. The project of the Orthosphere is to limn a cult, a culture, and a society that can work properly for humans after modernism – including the modernist “Church” – has crashed, by dint of exploration of the traditional societies that worked.
Creating a new Christianity that is not the old time religion can’t work. That has already been tried. We are now living in the midst of the results of that experiment. So, one thing we can be pretty sure of is that a properly flourishing Western civilization will have to be founded upon and ordered by – and, in the last analysis, governed by – traditional, orthodox Christianity. Thus one of the main subsidiary projects of the Orthosphere is the explanation of and apology for orthodox Christian doctrine. To the extent that moderns find Christianity incredible or repugnant, it is usually because they misunderstand Christianity. One of our jobs is to do what we can to dispel their confusion.
There is no way God could have created free beings – i.e., beings per se – so that they could not err and stray from his optimal Way, and in so doing enact evil, and then suffer.
The Maximality Test simply asks which of any two notions of God are greater, along some many dimensions of excellence. It turns out that in practice, the Test straightly demolishes the great Christological and Trinitarian heresies so prevalent in the early Church from AD 33 through AD 2022.
Let’s run through those perennial heresies in alphabetical order (rather than order of their allure, historical importance, foolishness, or wickedness), and see how they fare under the Test. Their descriptions are taken from the Infogalactic article on Trinitarian and Christological heresies.
Christianity is under attack. It has always been so but the attack has ramped up in recent years. It is more important than ever for Christians to be strong in their faith.
Christians should know general apologetics, that is, the reasons why Christianity is true. But they must also know the tenets of the tradition to which they belong. Only then can they stand firm against the world, the flesh and the Devil.
The Orthosphere is ecumenical but members are allowed to express their beliefs. I express Protestant beliefs. Others can express their beliefs.
Roosh has a post titled What is Orthodox Christianity? In it, he objects to what he calls “the Protestant notion of ‘faith alone.’ “
He does not seem to understand the actual doctrine, which is justification by faith alone. And he’s not the only one. Clarification is needed.
I call it a Protestant-Biblical doctrine because it was not invented. It is expressed clearly in Scripture as I show below, although other Christian traditions find reasons to disagree.
I do not expect non-Protestants to know our doctrines. But many Protestants also do not know this crucial teaching. Perhaps this post will help them understand. Continue reading
Liturgical innovation – e.g., priestesses – is metaphysically obtuse. It presupposes that the sacraments are merely human artifacts, when in fact – the Lamb having been slain from the foundation of the world – they are logically prior to the creation. We are not the masters of the sacraments, any more than we are the masters of the oceans or the skies. Our office is not to deform them, but to reckon and grapple with them, as objective aspects of Reality.
If Reality is Real, then the sacraments in respect thereto, as given ideally, are nowise subject to correction. They are, rather, handed down from on high. There is then nothing we might do about them, or want to do about them, other than to admit them wholly to our lives. Do they want correction? That then is to be had only in their admission to our lives.
Not us, first, but the rite, and of course the obedience in it signified.
What the hell is a ritual for, after all, if in the last analysis it is just meaningless? If a ritual is meaningful, then it must just force us to its formal purposes. In what other way might we be interested to participate in it?
This skeleton key helps us think about God, by telling us whether or not we are thinking about God in the first place, or about some lesser thing. The test presupposes that God, properly so called, can only be that being than whom there can be no other who is more worthy of worship: that he is the maximal being, the ultimate being. In helping us think about God, the Maximality Test shapes and directs, informs, orders and corrects our worship, our responses to our world, and thus our culture.
To run the Test on a particular notion about God is fairly simple: one merely asks whether another notion of God would make him nobler, greater, more perfect, or better, along any dimension of excellence, than the notion under test.
To take an extreme and so easy answer: which would be greater, along any dimension of excellence: a divine being who requires the sacrifice of millions of children, or a divine being who requires no such thing? The question answers itself. Take it a step further: along any dimension of excellence, which would be greater: a divine being who does not require the sacrifice of children, or a divine being who abhors it? Again, simple. In each of these examples, it is easy to see which notion indicates a thing unworthy of worship.
And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.
Revelation 13:8
Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem, factorem caeli et terrae, visibilium omnium, et invisibilium. Et in unum Dominum Jesum Christum, Filium Dei unigenitum. Et ex Patre natum ante omnia saecula. Deum de Deo, lumen de lumine, Deum verum de Deo vero, genitum, non factum, consubstantialem Patri: per quem omnia facta sunt. … Crucifixus etiam pro nobis sub Pontio Pilato; passus et sepultus est, et resurrexit tertia die, secundum Scripturas, et ascendit in cælum, sedet ad dexteram Patris. Et iterum venturus est cum gloria, iudicare vivos et mortuos, cuius regni non erit finis.
I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and Earth, and of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father; by whom all things are made. … he was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered, and was buried, and the third day he rose again, according to the Scriptures, and ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of the Father; from thence he shall come again, with glory, to judge the quick and the dead; whose kingdom shall have no end.
Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed of AD 381
The Lamb is begotten of the Father before all worlds. Then from the foundation of our world is he slain – and, as a necessary forecondition of that sacrifice, is he first incarnate from the foundation of the world (for, what is not already mortal cannot be slain) – and so risen to the right hand of the Father from the foundation of the world. The whole story of Jesus happens from the foundation of the world.
Well, but then that means that Pilate too does what he does in that story from the foundation of the world, no? So do Mary, Joseph, the Apostles, the Romans and Jews, aye and the mosquito resting for a moment on the bark of a sequoia in California in AD 33 as Jesus slept in his tomb.
It *all* happens from the foundation of the world. Everything. Including this moment of your life. Thus must be so; for, worlds are integrities. They cohere. You can’t change a jot of a world without getting a different world than you had before you effected the change. Subtract Jesus from the history of the cosmos and you’d have a different cosmos than the one we have. Ditto for that mosquito, and for the sequoia. And for that itch you felt a moment ago. To constitute a world, it must all agree and hang together perfectly, from one end to the other – not just in space, but in time. Not one item of the thing is dispensable; not one sparrow, not one hair of your head. Everything matters; everything counts; the whole of it depends wholly upon each bit of it.
The whole of the history of our cosmos then happens from the foundation thereof.
Anselm’s Argument presupposes that God is, as (almost) all men have always thought him to be, that than which no greater can be conceived – the Ultimate Being, along all dimensions of perfection, virtue, & goodness – and goes on to argue that such a being that actually exists, being greater than the mere idea of such a being, cannot but be what we mean by “God.” So, if we are talking about God, we *must* be talking about a being who actually exists. If we are talking about a being who might not or does not actually exist, we are not talking about God in the first place, and so all our talk of that thing (whatever it is) is simply inapt, ergo moot. Since we are in fact talking about God, we must be talking about a being who actually exists. So, in order for us even to talk about him, God must actually exist. The actual existence of God is implicit in the concept of God. This is what Aquinas is getting at in arguing that the existence of God is essential to his nature.
Almost all of Anselm’s critics lose him at that point. His famous Argument – which is perhaps the most famous in the entire history of philosophy – seems to many, if not most, to consist entirely of vain logic chopping; of proving a conclusion by a prior definition, that might with equal reason have been defined some other way.
It seems we cannot be free.
To each moment of decision, the schedule of inputs is what it is, and as completely constituting the matter of our decision, so it would seem that it completely forms our act therein. We choose what we wish to do, e.g., given our understanding of our circumstances as we find them as each new moment of life arises; but it does not seem that we choose our wishes, nor does it seem that we can choose what, how much or how well we understand. Decision begins with wishes and circumstances as all alike data.
Nor do we seem to be able to choose the way that we choose. The operation of decision – which is our lever of control over our experiences – is not itself subject to our decisions. We are not in control of our means of control.
It seems to us that we choose freely from among options, to be sure. But then, the entire schedule of options really open to us at any moment, however uncountably vast their number, are just as definite ex ante as the facts already accomplished that constitute the causal basis of decision.
Thus the bases, procedure and options of our decisions, being given to each moment of decision ab initio and so unchangeably, would seem to determine us to but one such option, again ab initio and unchangeably. What seems to us to be the free choice of a moment in our lives might then be no more than what it feels like to proceed from the entire schedule of the initial matter thereof to the one option that satisfies the desires felt as an aspect of those data.
Where in this account is there room for freedom?
That room may be found in Gödelian Incompleteness. But to see how this is so, we shall have to traverse several steps.
The Orthosphere 