Change

At the heart of Western culture lies a mistaken assumption: our belief in permanence, the ironic persistence of which endures—despite life's relentless attempt to beat it out of us."

Change is an ever-present reality in our lives, yet we can never seem to accept it. We design elaborate schemes to stabilize favorable circumstances, only to be surprised when they fail. And yet, we try again. Why do we so obstinately refuse to accept that permanence in this life is a myth?

The watershed moment in our culture came in Ancient Greece, when the insights of one man, Heraclitus, were overshadowed by those of another: Plato.

Plato taught that our physical world is merely a shadow of a higher realm of ideal forms—perfect and unchanging. He believed that the changes we witness every day in people and things are just material objects moving toward or away from these ideal forms. The adoption of this belief instilled in Western thought a longing for a nebulous ideal called perfection and, with it, a deep-seated bias against change.

How different might life be if the thought of Heraclitus had been the foundation of our culture? The man who famously said, "Nothing endures except change." Would we be as obsessed with preserving things like success and beauty? Would we harbor the same disdain for aging and failure?

I’ve spent most of my life trying to become something else—striving for my own idealized form. And yet, I never feel like I’ve truly gotten anywhere. There were moments in my life when I thought, I’m happy right here, and it would be fine if things stayed this way forever. But inevitably, those moments fell apart too.

Now at 53, I just want to find a way to be happy with where my life is and who I am now. I’m no longer convinced that happiness is something down the road. If I can’t enjoy what I have here and now, I doubt I ever will.

How did Paul die

Paul's death comes after the end of the Bible, so we can't be sure. 

One tradition says he was beheaded in Rome and the last we hear of him in the Bible is during his imprisonment in Rome. But he did have plans to eventually go to Spain and some say he was released and eventually made that missionary journey as well and died in Rome later during another imprisonment.

This would mean that his appeal to Caesar as a Roman citizen was ultimately successful. This is not unlikely especially when you consider his behavior in the Roman prison when it collapsed and during the shipwreck. Paul and his companions could have taken the opportunity to be free, but they said stayed saving the lives of their captors.

Paul's actions might have been seen not as a guilty man, but an honorable kne seeking the vindication only Caesar could offer to his reputation. 

And history is rarely as neat and tidy as we would like it to be.

 Everyone agrees that Paul was beheaded in Rome, and the  New Testament ends with Paul in Rome. It's very tempting to say that he simply died there, since we have no records beyond legend, but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Erickson on Ecclesiology

Today I took a stab at reading Millard Erickson.  I am hoping that, over time, my mind will become more focused - but it is very easy to get distracted by every little detail.  I'd wanted to read straight through his section on The Nature of the Church pp 949 - 970.  In actuality, I only got started on his section "Defining the Church". Pp 950-956

Lots of rabbit trails to wander here.  For instance, Erickson's assertion that the doctrine of Ecclesiology has not received as definitive treatment as doctrines such as Christology, the atonement, salvation (951).   

Is this true?  Or does it simply reflect the state of Protestant Ecclesiology after its reframing of the doctrine during the reformation?

The Catholic and Orthodox churches have a very clearly defined ecclesiology.  For them the term "Church" indicates a concrete historical body, with an authority structure, that was passed down to the present through Apostolic succession. This claim to historical continuity with the first disciples of Jesus is, for both bodies, perhaps the most important claim to authenticity.

The idea of apostolic succession appears to have its roots in one of the early churches strategies to combat gnostic heresies.  When rival interpretations of the Christian faith presented themselves - from the very beginning - the church has dealt with one of two strategies.  The first is apologetic - using reason and scripture.  The second is through a type of certification of authenticity - an appeal to a direct line of succession from Jesus' apostles down to the leadership of the church today.  Though one can find appeals to certification through succession in the Bible, the appeal to reason is far more prevalent and important - especially in light of the warnings that "false teachers will arise among you".  Despite this obvious weakness, the popularity of the appeal to succession seems to have grown in importance to the point where it overshadowed the appeal to reason.

The Protestant reformation called in to question the reliability of historical continuity as a criteria for defining the authentic church. What is to stop the church from going wildly wrong?  It suggested that scripture was the agent to employ in keeping the church on track, and that at may even need to operate from outside the institutional body of the church to be the agent of correction.  As Luther argued in his response to The Diet of Worms, "Popes and Councils can err".   The faith of the Reformers shifted from the institutional church, to the scriptures (Sola Scriptura).   "Ad Fontes" (To the Sources,) was the cry of the Reformation. 

SO the protestant reformation shifted the locus of authority from the leadership of the church to the scriptures.  Along with this the composition of the church changed from that of a concrete institution founded by Christ and his apostles and passed down through the laying on of hands, to a community of people gathered by the proclamation of the Word of God.

So, far from saying that ecclesiology has been an ignored topic in Church history - I would argue that there has been some significant activity in trying to define the nature of the church - and that activity has split the protestant church from its Catholic and Orthodox forebears. 

Perhaps what is meant by neglect has more to do with the practical FORM of the church.  The plethora of ecclesiological structures clearly indicate that the matter of organization has not been settled.  But I wonder how important this issue "how we run the church"  is to ecclesiology.  Is it a central, or a peripheral issue?  I would argue that the management of the church is not part of the ontological discussion of what the church is.  The core questions are rather,  what it is made of, how it comes into being, and what is its purpose.  These are all questions that scripture very clearly talks about. 

Father's Day

One of my favorite activities is organizing my thoughts, or at least learning about new ways to try to do that.  I'm very drawn to things like bullet journaling, commonplace notebooks, and the whole second brain thing.  The concept of outsourcing the task of memory reminds me a bit of computing, where the cloud and various sorts of drives are used to relieve your PC from the burden of having to store everything on its hard drive.  

This is Father's Day, and it did not go as I had planned.  I had hoped to spend last night out with my friend Austin, and after church today, to go out and spend some time reading.  Then I was going to go home and spend some time with my family.  Last night it was pouring - so I decided to stay home, then our power cut out and I spent the night trying to sleep in a recliner because my C-Pap doesn't work without electricity.  I finally went to bed this morning when the power came back on, but that meant we missed church.  Determined to salvage what I could of the day I am not sitting in Starbucks and spending some time structuring my notebooks which are spread across OneNote and Notion. It's a little consolation gift I'm giving myself to ward of my general disappointment with how things have unfolded. I'm not a very resilient person. If I'm able to get some things done, I when I go home to spend some time with April and the kids.  

I first became aware of the concept of external memory for humans, reading Steven Johnson's book "Emergence, the Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software.  He talks about cities becoming a sort of external communal memory.  Because it has a logical structure which we all can understand, it becomes a coherent space we can all navigate instead of a jumble of random locations we have to search whenever we need something. 

Anyhow, this is morphing from an update into some kind of informative essay on memory, which was not my intention.  I'm going to stop writing now so I can get down to work for an hour or so and then maybe read a bit before I go home.

Hello World! . . .Hello?

Is anybody blogging anymore?  

It feels like a stupid time to start blogging.  Like that ship has sailed.  Yet here I am with my steamer trunks like I'm actually going somewhere.  But I'm late to the dock.  People I want to follow all seem to have stopped blogging years ago. Most of the information I've seen about blogging is for entrepreneurs hoping to make a buck off their content.  I hear people complain about being overlooked by the algorithms. It seems like anyone hoping to start a blog these days should accept that nobody is ever going to read their stuff.

The thing is, I need this.  My mind is a jumble of thoughts and dream projects, and ideas that I think are clever - and it kills me to think that after springing to my awareness, that they will just sink back again into the obscurity of my subconscious maybe never be seen again.  Or just as bad, keep poking their heads above water as clever yet unfinished ideas to taunt me and remind me of how little I've ever done.  I need a place to put it all down.  To record it.  To look at it objectively, and maybe build on it.

Well, if that is all I want, I suppose there is nothing to stop me.  Does it really matter if anyone sees this, if that is all I want? I guess not. But it would still be nice to think a person could put themselves out there and be known by someone who reads what they wrote.  I'd like to think that might still happen.