Grace, Form and Essence

The grace of God is so overly abundant to us that Christians have always tended toward one of two extremes in their experience of it. On the one hand, they emphasize the unboundedness of God’s grace and disregard limitations and corrections on their experience. On the other, they emphasize the preciousness of God’s grace such [...]

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Mystery

The soul-sickness called modernism runs deep in us. We have become creatures of mind and reason, and we have lost our hearts. Some, reacting to this desiccation of the human soul, have shredded their hearts by giving themselves over to mere feeling and impulse. So we categorize and pigeonhole one another. Or we manipulate and [...]

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Half-Finished Thoughts on Discerning God’s Will

We often approach the task of discerning God’s will quite dialectically: either this, or that. If we have free will–as I believe we do–we use that will to take one or another course, each of which is in opposition to the other. Some in fact predicate the concept of free will precisely on this dialectic [...]

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The Desire for Well-Being

I have been having a friendly discussion (not a debate, thank God) on whether or not the Orthodox teaching on theosis is just another way of talking about the Roman Catholic dogma of purgatory. It is sometimes attributed to “Byzantine”/Eastern Rite Catholics that differences on these things are a question of semantics. Nothing could be [...]

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Christmas and the Cross: Distinctions of Faith

While I do not believe that Faith and Reason are opposites, it is the case that Faith is a mystery to Reason. The moment we attempt to analyze faith we lose it, as though attempting to hold still in our peripheral vision that glint of light which flashes and is gone. Despite this, I’m going [...]

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A Thought-Question Posted on FB

Do most arguments against the existence of God result from deductive and definitional syllogisms? Do most arguments for the existence of God result from inductive and experiential probable strength? (Madman Mundt: I’ll show you the life of the mind!)

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The Distinction Between Essence and Energies and its Importance for Theology

I was just reacquainted with this article by Christos Yannaras on Perry’s blog, and recommend it to you: The Distinction Between Essence and Energies and its Importance for Theology. Yannaras was one of three influential authors I read in 02 and 03 as I began my initial exploration into the Orthodox Church. I started with, [...]

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An Answer Seeking an Articulation

For me, 2005 was a watershed year in much of my thinking both in terms of philosophy and theology. In 2005 I solidified my understanding of why it was that I was attracted to and felt it utterly important to promote so-called “ancient philosophy” (in part through a couple of books by Pierre Hadot, as [...]

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On the Priesthood of All Believers

I’d seen in my blog’s tracking stats, that a three-year-old post, Open Theism and the Essence-Energy Distinction, has been getting a bit of traffic recently, so I re-read it, and while doing so it occurred to me that definitional divine simplicity impacts the biblical doctrine of the priesthood of all believers creating a distortion that [...]

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The Christian Catacombs of Rome

Nice site over all. This page–The Christian Catacombs of Rome–deals with the liturgy and theology of the catacombs.

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