https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=kneG3Y6i9Ns
I want to tie this back to what you were hinting at with idolatry because to me it seems that whatever we place as our highest good, and this is something that you were alluding to as well, becomes for us for all intents and purposes God, right? So if I’m a theist or I’m a Christian, then my highest good that I recognize is in fact God or at least some conceptualization, some theology around what that means. And I try as much as possible to relate to that God, but one of the things that I will immediately recognize if I’m a Christian is that that God, that highest good, is something that is far surpassing anything that I can understand and any power that I can possibly wield, right? So I am subject to that God. I am contingent upon the the benevolence of that God. I am nothing before it. I am bankrupt before that God. So there’s a humbling effect, but there’s also a sense in which we submit to that highest good rather than try to control that highest good or manipulate that highest good. And you even see that to some degree in perhaps pagan cultic practices in which it’s not so much that they are submitting to the gods, depending on which tradition you’re drawing from, as much as they are trying to persuade the gods, right? Give me some benefit. Give me some favor, some fortune that I’m trying to access, and therefore I will devote myself to you and I will make sacrifices to you and I will humiliate myself before you to some degree. Whereas… But you’re totally right and that’s what we do it still all the time now. Right. All the things we engage with, we end up sacrificing to these purposes that we have, and people don’t realize that they end up acting very much as as gods. A lot of these… The world of paganism is flooding back in, you know, in all kinds of very strange and surprising ways. But that ends up being a side effect of the rejection of Christianity, because the formulation of Trinitarian theology is not arbitrary. It is a revelation, but it’s not arbitrary. Right? The world does exist through love. The world is a… The world… For the world to exist, it has to be a balance between unity and multiplicity. Like these things are all the manner in which the world actually exists. God is the infinite source and version of that, where he’s both fully one, fully three at the same time without contradiction. But it is actually the description of… Theological descriptions are not arbitrary. They really do underlie our experience and the way we exist in the world. Right. And they had to go through the spin cycle of intellectual and rational scrutiny of the tradition of reason that existed at that time. I mean, the reason that they were so… They were so caught up in all these debates about the Trinity and Christology and the divine nature of Jesus and all of the questions that surround that is because the revelation of Jerusalem collided with the reason of Athens. And the Athenians were looking at that and saying, well, how does this make sense? And then how does this work? And what’s the mechanics of that? And the Church Fathers had to say, well, we have to come up with some answers here because these are compelling questions. And that’s how essentially we get theology, which is this synthesis of revelation applied, our reason trying to understand the revelation, essentially. Now into… Yeah, but the idea, if you see in the first council, it’s usually mostly preserving the incarnation, trying to preserve the incarnation in a manner that will not create confusion and not create the problem of either putting too much importance on the human level and the human part, and then also not separating the human and the divine so much that there’s no connection between the higher world and the lower world, like the world of principalities and the world that exists. And so Christianity is… It’s just interesting. It’s interesting to notice how Christianity is incarnational, but the Fathers seem to have understood that almost in the revelation of the incarnation, there was a danger that if you get it wrong, it can lead to all kinds of distortions in the way we live our lives. And we can almost see, like you can see in the modern world how it is in a way getting the incarnation wrong and how it starts to manifest itself in all kinds of deformations. Yeah, it’s amazing how none of the novel ideas that we think are forward-thinking. I mean, everything under the sun had been conceived even prior to the incarnation. You look at the Greeks and they had nihilists, they had naturalists, they had pessimists, they had theists, they had all the kinds of… All the range of things that you would see in our modern relativist culture, they had already been talking about 2000 years ago, and we tend to think of that as sort of Bronze Age superstition, but in fact, we haven’t broken any new ground that wasn’t broken thousands of years ago.