Crop Rotation - 010 - Kierkegaard - Philosophical Fragments (selection)

A discussion of Soren Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments, Chapter 1A: A Project of Thought. Topics: spirituality, paradox, the eternal, transcendence vs immanence.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Let us pause in life's pleasures and count its many tears. While we all stop sorrow with the song that will linger forever. Hard times come again. Hot times, hot times come again. Many days you roughly cabinet.

SPEAKER_05 0:48

Welcome to Crop Rotation, a literature, theology, and philosophy discussion podcast. A good firework doesn't grow the same thing every year. For soil to thrive, there needs to be variety. We're a group of friends who found that we have missed the life of the mind that we were able to live together when we were at St. John's College in Annapolis two decades ago. This podcast is an opportunity to explore and discuss works of art and of intellect that we've each discovered in the intervening years. Before each meeting, one of us gives the group an assignment. This leader is also responsible for asking an opening question to begin the discussion. The leader for this meeting is Matthew.

SPEAKER_02 1:30

Hello. The reading is from Soren Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments. That's the very first section. Well, after the various introductory pieces, it's called A Project of Thought. I have a little spiel to introduce it. Soren Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher and theologian who lived 1813 to 1855, often called the father of existentialism. In my opinion, many of the more well-known existentialists, such as Camus, Sartre, Heidegger, de Beauvoir, etc., tend to owe unacknowledged debts to his thought. Nietzsche does not. They were contemporaries who probably never met, so I sort of consider Kierkegaard and Nietzsche to be the grandparents of existentialism. I want to say at the top that for various reasons, which we can go into if you want, we should not take Kierkegaard himself seriously. We should take seriously what he's writing about. The attitude he wants from us is who cares what Kierkegaard thinks? What's true is what matters. So tonight's reading is from Philosophical Fragments. The first section entitled A Project of Thought. I will run through the argument really briefly so that anybody who is listening won't be completely lost. He starts with Mino's riddle. How can a person learn anything? If you don't know it, then you don't know what it is in order to seek it out. If you do know it, then you already have it, and you don't need to seek it out. Either way, whether you know it or you don't know it, you can't seek it out. He explains the answer Socrates gives, that all learning is merely recollection. The soul is immortal and has seen all things. The highest relationship of a teacher to a student is for the teacher to be the mere temporal, accidental occasion by which the student comes into possession of the knowledge that was always, already eternally theirs. And in that eternity, the teacher vanishes, the learning vanishes, the moment of encounter between them vanishes. He then considers what it would be like if learning is to be anything other than Socratic, if the moment were to have what he calls decisive significance. He goes through an argument characterizing the various features of any non-Socratic learning, which passes through a number of very recognizable terms God, sin, savior, redeemer, atonement, judge, the fullness of time, a new creature, conversion, repentance, new birth. He's obviously talking about Christ. It's like a joke. Either learning is nothing, it doesn't actually exist, or it's everything. It's the fate of your eternal soul. Socrates or Christ, and nothing in between. I first read this 20 years ago and I didn't take it very seriously. But over the years, I've noticed things that made me think, hey, maybe Kierkegaard was onto something. For instance, Stanislaw Lem and his time travel paradox was one of these, where uh, you know, you're able to locate the Minos paradox in the ontology of time travel, like time loops. Um, another that I saw recently that I thought I would use to frame the question that I want to ask is uh something that I happened to read on Substack by somebody called Miss Apprehension. The article is called There Is No Healing Journey. I don't know this person. I don't have anything to say about the article itself or the thesis or the other things that that this person writes about in this article. I just noticed these two paragraphs that I want to point out. Quote: There's a certain kind of therapist's attitude that goes something like this. Your present-day problems have mostly to do with your upbringing, mainly the things you didn't get as a child. You can't expect other people to give you these things, though. You have to find a way to give these things to yourself. This is the Capital H, Capital J healing journey. I have personally met with this sentiment in the therapy room and elsewhere on many occasions, and I find it abhorrent. I try to keep my cool when I hear it because I understand the truth contained in it. Yes, so much of our personal suffering has to do with our relationship to the past, and yes, we have to get our own house in order, and yes, we cannot expect anyone to save us from ourselves or plug our emotional holes. My question, which I learned never to ask therapists who peddle this wisdom, is this. If I'm supposed to give myself these things that I need so much, whence will these things come? I do not have these things. If I had them, then I would have them, and I wouldn't be in your office or on your dumbass Zoom looking for them. Right? So that's Mino's riddle, but applied to therapy. So, my opening question is, how absolute is this? For instance, when a child learns a multiplication table, do I have to say that either their teacher is merely activating latent developmental aptitudes already encoded in their neurology, or else they're having an existential encounter with the risen Christ? When therapy works for somebody, is that either merely a psychiatrist, for instance, invoking subconscious Jungian archetypes that were always already there, or else a full-on spiritual death and rebirth? How seriously do we take this? How far does it go?

SPEAKER_04 7:23

Well, I mean, I've probably got the most like data on this because my father is a psychologist and my mother is a therapist, and I almost went into the pastorate and I've been training for it, and I've read a lot about it, and I've walked next to a lot of professionals in the clinical and ministry parts of the field. And I would say that, yeah, by and large, a lot of it is just kind of convincing people to agree with your mental math and at best pulling levers on Jungian archetypes, but not really changing people. Like psychiatrists laugh when you ask them the question, how many people have you healed? Right? They just laugh and they say, I don't know. I think maybe one time one guy had a condition that actually ended under my medication and tenure, you know. So that would seem to immediately lend a lot of credit to the real world agreeing with you, Matt, that it is pretty pretty bleakly split, but yeah, interesting.

SPEAKER_03 8:29

Probably don't want to spend too much time talking about this or else you wouldn't sign the amino. But can we talk about I I don't really understand what Socrates is saying that oh, if you don't know what it is, you can't search for it. And if you do know, I mean, I sort of get if you do know you don't need to search for it. Great. What do you what is Socrates talking about? You brought up the multiplication table. As a kid, I did not know the multiplication table, and I would not have tried unless a teacher walked up to me and said, Here, we're going to learn this. And new knowledge, as far as I could tell, was poured into my brain. There was not recollection, whatever, you know. I never drank the stream of lethe, but of course I would say that because you know all of that. Yeah. But I don't get that part. Yeah. The way that you learn something that you don't know is someone comes to you and says, here's a thing.

SPEAKER_05 9:44

There's an epistemology question on top of the first layer, which is by the way, uh sorry, quick side note. I think both of these are foolishness. But anyway, um both of the Socratic and Kierkegaard Guardian ones, and I have some reasons for that. But nice that said, there's a question of epistemology in the Socratic one at least, which is if there's something you're setting out to learn, how will you know when you have learned it if you don't already know it? And in or some kind of shape of it or something.

SPEAKER_03 10:18

I get that that's the question asked, but again, I say the teacher says, Oh, you seem to have learned it. And I go, Oh, that thing that you told me to learn, I have now learned it to your satisfaction.

SPEAKER_02 10:35

Maybe the original framing, the Socratic framing, might be useful because it actually is a little bit, they're actually talking about something that's a little bit more like therapy and a little bit less like math, even though Socrates does use math to illustrate it. Yeah, they're talking about like virtue, something where people like really disagree about what is true. What when I think about that side of it, what I think of is I'm a computer programmer, that's my job. Like today, for instance, something that I needed for my work, a computer thing, just wasn't working. Like, I I type three characters and hit enter. I set this up on my first day on the job. I type three characters and hit enter, and it's supposed to do something. It's supposed to get me into a Linux environment that I can then write code in, right? And today it didn't do it. And I don't really care about Windows, I don't care about Linux. I'm a JavaScript guy. I'm just trying to get to my JavaScript IDE so I can, you know, have NPM compile this thing so I can push an image of it to the CI so I can run it in the test cluster to see if if it does what I want it to do, right? I don't care about the Linux thing. And suddenly it's not working, and I have no idea, right? And I don't even know where to start. So I'm sort of in this exact epistemological situation is I don't know the name of the thing that broke. Apparently, eventually I found the name of the thing that that was broken was the hypervisor, a word that I've never heard in my life, right? The hypervisor was broken. Oh no, the hypervisor. You know, I'm a JavaScript guy. I don't know about hypervisors. Um, I probably should. But so maybe this is a long way of saying like you do often need to know something and have absolutely zero access to how to learn what you need to know. I didn't know how to know what I needed to learn to fix the thing. Eventually I asked ChatGPT and I said, Hey ChatGPT, this is what happened. Help me troubleshoot it. And so instead of bothering a coworker, chat GPT walked me through it and fixed it. Because apparently it knows everything now.

SPEAKER_04 13:16

Well, I mean, it's certainly it has access to the extensively and extensively compiled knowledge of everyone who put everything on Substack for like 15 years, right?

SPEAKER_02 13:32

Yeah, or Stack Overflow is what you mean. I think you know, two years ago I would have gone to Stack Overflow. I went to ChatGPT instead. That's not the point. The point is, I'm trying to sort of get Dwight to a space that makes sense.

SPEAKER_04 13:47

Right. So, I mean, isn't it sufficient to say that like concepts are adjacent to other concepts? And so as you learn a concept, you inherently gain access to the ability to now more immediately leverage knowledge of other things? Like, why isn't that enough of an explanation for how we know other things that we don't know yet? Just the inherent expansiveness of lexical knowledge itself. How is that not a sufficient answer to how we can learn things?

SPEAKER_02 14:22

I guess, I guess it it might be a real problem with Socrates that this is like a special case where in the ordinary course of things, maybe I ought to be able to derive the hypervisor from first principles. But what I've got is a Windows PowerShell terminal that does nothing when I type what I'm used to typing, right? It just hangs. So yeah, I think maybe what I'm talking about is what Kierkegaard would call sin, or I don't know what Socrates would call it, but there is some state you can get into where you really need to know something, and you really have no idea even what the first step is to take, where you lack both the knowledge and the condition to learn the knowledge.

SPEAKER_04 15:10

Isn't that what the consequence of Adam and Eve eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is?

SPEAKER_02 15:17

Maybe. I want to hear what Twain thinks. I don't I don't know. Okay.

SPEAKER_05 15:24

I think, first of all, your articulation's pretty good, Matt, that it is possible to get into a position, metaphorically, in which you do not have some I'm gonna use the work Okay. Part of the part of my trouble with the whole thing is that we're just flinging words at walls as though we are, you know, monkeys with our feces. But I'm gonna use the word knowledge here without any specific meaning to it. But it's possible to get into a position in which you lack some knowledge and completely lack the wisdom needed to gain that knowledge. I'm gonna frame it that way. Wisdom being like, you know, kind of how to do stuff, how stuff works. I think that's a great framing. I've definitely been in that position, probably been in that position today. And that's a real condition that people find themselves in.

SPEAKER_02 16:20

Sorry, Sir Robert. Instead of wisdom, what about condition? Is that that is a term that Kierkegaard uses precisely?

SPEAKER_05 16:30

I appreciate Kierkegaard's desire to use that word. It seems to me to fall into the same trap that Socrates does. However, look well, let me ask you, I I actually don't have a an articulation of what precisely he means. If you have a precise one, I'd appreciate hearing it. I have like an intuition about it.

SPEAKER_02 16:54

Yeah, the condition is is just that state which is necessary beforehand for something.

SPEAKER_05 17:03

Uh that's approximately how I was thinking of it. The I think the challenge that he's falling into here, I'm looking for good words to use for that, is that he's buying into the idea of it as a state. And I think that that's I think it has the same problem that is why the ancient Greeks couldn't come up with calculus, and Newton could. They're already denying some fundamental reality. And Newton didn't take us from Greek thought into motion as possible. He didn't go from Xeno's paradox through some process into no, here's the reconciliation of tortoise of the tortoise and Achilles. See, here we think about it this way, he just said, Yeah, but there is motion. You're just that's silly the way you're thinking about states and and uh infinite uh cuttings. And I think that I can say more precise things about this perhaps, but I'm I'm just throwing this out there as a prompt. But I think that one of the things Socrates fell into is that he's thinking of things in terms of these um perfect uh kind of ideal states, and Kierkegaard does too. They're moments, they're detached from they have no continuity in them. But reality does, life does. Life is not these uh pristine.

SPEAKER_03 18:28

I think that was always my problem. I mean, as as foreign as I mean, I'm not saying like my struggle with just reading in with the Mino was just that it's very abstract, and it's except I did learn something, and I am not reincarnated. Right.

SPEAKER_02 18:47

I mean, obviously Kierkegaard is using the Socratic account of knowledge as a reductio ad absurdum. How do you mean? Well, he says that's just the structure of the reading. Oh, is he says, here's the Socratic account, in which you know, knowledge never actually learning never actually happens because you already know everything. What would it look like for it to be anything other than that? Right? So I mean, like Kierkegaard, I don't think this is the case, but Kierkegaard might say, well, yeah, duh, of course you do learn things, and so we can discard the Socratic notion because actually the moment when you encounter a teacher is a significant moment, and it doesn't fade into the eternity of your recollection of your like pre-life.

SPEAKER_04 19:47

And to me, that was the one thing in the entire list. I was surprised you left out. You went through and you read a lot of these words that he defines, but you did not include moment in your list.

SPEAKER_02 19:58

Oh, it's just because it's not italicized in the translation, I think.

SPEAKER_04 20:02

But so I'm glad you built up to it here and included it. You're right. It is the moment when you meet Jesus, and that's that was kind of what I was trying to build up to in my initial comment about how nobody who works professionally and clinically ever does anything, uh, because that sentiment is also largely proportionately shared with clergy people, and the exception are the people who manage to find some way into a praxis of either prayer or some sort of faith thing, which is really just prayer, where people just actually connect people to God, and then God does, in fact, miraculously touch, encounter, heal people, and things do really happen. They really do clinically have like medical and psychological, like verifiable mental health, physical health things get heal because Jesus encounters.

SPEAKER_02 20:59

But anyway, I d I don't wanna I don't want to lean hard on saying that we should discard the Socratic side of the Reductio because it doesn't match up to lived experience. Because the the Christ side of the reductio also doesn't really match up to lived experience. When you learn the multiplication tables, you're not the experience is not like being dying and being reborn.

SPEAKER_05 21:28

You know the Christ side of it suffers from a much worse flaw than not living up not being our lived experience, which is that it is directly contrary to the biblical narrative. Just in one verse, he grew in wisdom and stature. What so what did he just not encounter himself? What what are you talking about? Like angels who are in Ephesians 3, they Long the wisdom, manifold wisdom of God made known through the church has been was withheld, was held secret, right? For the ages past, and they've you know they want to look, they want to look into these things, right? So they learn and also are always kind of experiencing him there, but he withheld something. The son doesn't know the hour, only the father. What are you talking about? Like there's a much deeper issue here that it seems to me, than by the way, and I like Kierkegaard Gars, but there's a much deeper issue here, it seems to me, in this model than it not matching our lived experience. Could maybe you could say, well, it's so extreme, or it's like maybe that's a maybe that's a really pointed case or something when we have that kind of experience. I find frustrating Kierkegaard's notion of the eternal intersecting the temporal, which I think what he's doing here, right? And I find that frustratingly contrary to my understanding of how God interacts with me.

SPEAKER_04 23:08

Did that reflect in an insincerity to his the fullness of time notion? Did his concept of the fullness of time, which is where those two things that you were talking about intersect, did that have an insincere ring to it because it uh compatible with how God treats you?

SPEAKER_05 23:29

No, no, not insincere. It's just Kierkegaard, in this respect at least, seems to be building a model or models or something that aren't grounded in the thing from which that he's building a model of the pre-incarnate Christ, right? Theophanies in the Old Testament. Like, was that not?

SPEAKER_04 23:50

Jesus I think that's sorry, what does it encapsulate as a point because it allows Christ to intersect however he intersects, and it's just however he's doing it has to do with that point of the scale of the fullness of his revelation. So it takes a lot of pressure off he can just be there doing whatever he wants to be doing that's progressive. I mean, what's so what's the problem?

SPEAKER_05 24:17

That's not how anything is, and it's not the language that's talked about. It's it's like it just doesn't say it that way.

SPEAKER_02 24:25

He's he's a guy there. It seems to me that the most important doctrine of Christianity is the same as what Kierkegaard calls the fullness of time, which is the moment when some specific historical event creates an eternal change, like changes something about how things are going to be for eternity, and that's you know, that's the incarnation, the crucifixion, and any conversion experience that a person has is exactly that intersection of the temporal and the eternal, because it doesn't have to happen, right? The eternal is like that which has to be from all beginnings to all endings forever, amen. And the temporal is that which it could have been some other way, like you could have decided not to trust Christ and get baptized and become a Christian, and then your eternity would be different. But how can eternity be different, right? But that's like the core Christian doctrine.

SPEAKER_05 25:40

That okay. I I can think of a couple of I can argue on both sides of what I'm about to say, so I'm not making a very strong assertion here. But you're on the side of truth, yeah. Well, I I really want to argue from rather than on the side of truth, because I could be wrong about something, I want to argue from the source text, like from the data, right? From what God told us. And then sometimes I can be like, oh, I don't know, maybe he meant this or maybe he meant that. But I agree with you, Dwight, but that the truth is the goal. But but but the talk of eternity and eternal and stuff like that, that seems to me to smuggle in a lot of stuff that I just don't see being talked about in the way that I hear Kierkegaard, or maybe you, Matt, I'm not sure, saying eternal from time beginning, time in. There's well, that was a whole bunch of mobile. I was misspeaking there.

SPEAKER_02 26:40

So you don't see that in scripture?

SPEAKER_05 26:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 26:43

Oh boy. Here's link one. I mean, I do see the word we mean eternal, right? For since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made so that people are without excuse. Yeah, that's a great one. Sure. The eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms. Yeah. Your love, O Lord, endures forever.

SPEAKER_05 27:11

I don't see how any of these militate a meaning of eternal that has this kind of like beatific dynamic stasis kind of thing. Oh, it's like this un this like uh well, the thing that comes to mind is this geometric nucleus of of divinity. So so what? He's been this he's got character that's always been the same and always will be the same. Good, that's wonderful. How does that make any kind of weirdness with stuff happening? I just don't see the tension there.

SPEAKER_02 27:45

The necessary Because if some entity has a character such that it always has been and always will be, and even saying always has been and always will be gives too much of time to eternity, because the eternal can't be conditioned by time. So saying it always has been, that's actually saying everlasting. But the eternal, it's even kind of wrong to say that it is, because is is like also kind of time-bound. Well, can't is also wrong. I think all of that is silly. But no, no, no. What I'm saying is if you have something with qualities that can never have started and can never stop, sure, then for that thing to change is a big deal, right?

SPEAKER_04 28:41

I mean, it doesn't change in the ways that he can't change, but it does change in Christ. That's the whole point of what's so crazy about in Christ is that all of the work of the eternal and the immediate, like it hits the gear in Christ. Right.

SPEAKER_05 28:58

This may address that, I don't know, but God's loving kindness is we I think that's a reasonable thing to call an eternal characteristic. Right?

SPEAKER_04 29:10

And it emerges into time, right? I mean, isn't that the whole point of Christ? Is that Christ is mechanistically how the Father's intent temporally emerges is in Christ.

SPEAKER_02 29:23

God is alive. Yes. That is part of God's eternal nature. Agreed. Okay, then the crucifixion cannot have happened. Why? Because because then what do you mean why? Oh no.

SPEAKER_04 29:40

Hang on, we already, you know, we already jumped the shark. Last sentence. If we said we already lied to each other, we already messed up. We gotta go back a sentence.

SPEAKER_02 29:48

If you say that which is alive forever, yeah, never having not been alive, never will be not alive, for three days was dead.

SPEAKER_04 29:59

Right. That's nothing. By the way, and we could go ahead and take on and solve the same debate over the Eucharist, whether or not the Eucharist is real, because if you take it again, you're re-crucifying Christ. We can take that problem on and we'll knock that one out too when we fix this, but keep going back.

SPEAKER_02 30:17

I don't know what I'm sorry, I don't know what you're talking about, Josh. But I do think it is very clear that Yahweh is alive and the idols are dead. And he's eternally alive, everlastingly alive, or else what is the whole point? And he was dead for three days. Yahweh's son was dead for three days. Yeah. That's the intersection of the temporal and the eternal. That's the fullness of time. That's the thing that is so philosophically significant about the the Christian doctrine. Socrates would never, you know, that would be like saying for three days, three plus three added up to five. You know, the eternal truths that the world is built on were not for a certain amount of time. It's like Socrates can't allow that, right?

SPEAKER_05 31:14

The model sure, that makes sense to me. Yeah. Two plus two, two plus three is never not evil divided, whichever example you use. In order for this to be a confounding paradox or something like that, there has to be a set of notions already that we're married to really strongly that make this somehow real and not real, and stuff like that. And they're just not, those are not real. Those preconditions are not correct. Name them. Okay. That in whatever you mean by alive, God is always or always was alive and never will not be alive. I don't remember the exact framing you used for it, but that's just not true. I'll tell you how I know, because Jesus was crucified and died. He's performing dead. That's wrong with that. It's the real thing, is that God has of himself, he's alive, right? God, and by the way, and I just want to point out for a moment, by the way, I I have some model of what I mean when I say God, right? Of course, I'm I'm not just using a word and some sound, right, to do something. But God is not Yahweh giving him that name. I I want to point out that there are parts of scripture in which Yahweh speaks to Yahweh or about Yahweh. You know, there's sure things. And so this part I realize is gonna get um people get surprisingly emotional about certain descriptions and such that are really important to them about God or eternity or whatever. I'm gonna say the thing where, quote, God, unquote, is quote, alive, unquote, and can never not be, quote, alive. Just that formulation isn't a thing that you will see that way in scripture. What you do see that is that God is the God of the living, not the dead. He is alive. Sure, oh that and he dies, he's crucified, but the father isn't. Okay, that's fine. What that means is all the rest of the model, the all the other stuff that's being added is just wrong, and that's okay, but that's just not how it works. There's not this eternal eternal whenever.

SPEAKER_03 33:35

First of all, I'm very glad that we're all talking about this because when I read this, I didn't realize that Kierkegaard was taking the Socrates model and saying it was different from what he was saying. I thought he was saying, hey, look, all these Christian things map font. So that first off helps me understand this maybe a little bit more. I don't know that much. But second, I think the challenge, Sir Robert, is that if you come to Christianity from a Greek framework of thought, the principle of non-contradiction is very key. I agree with the principle of non-contradiction, by the way. I I get it. Go ahead. So, like as soon as you start talking about the Trinity, things start getting weird, right? It's like, oh, you have things that are I disagree, but go on.

SPEAKER_04 34:35

Okay. I don't think disagree then. But I mean, I don't think it gets weird. I think it gets more sensible. But I didn't mean to interrupt you. Keep going. Please disagree. I would like a disagreement. So I'm my counterargument to all this would be like the shroud of Tyran exists, and it's the answer to Matt's question. What the heck, man? How can Jesus be dead for three days? You don't get to say that. Well, I do. There's a piece of cloth that has the irradiated, holographically reactive image of Christ in it, which is could you disagree with the principle of non-crun contradiction instead of that? Well, yeah. So you're talking about Christ can't be dead and not dead, and the answer is the Holy Spirit sustained him. So you're being overly blood by saying, Oh, he's eternal, so he can't die. Well, he can, and that's the beauty of it. By the power of the Holy Spirit, he can both die and not die.

SPEAKER_03 35:32

I wish that there was someone a better representative for Socrates, but I will try to play Socrates' advocate and say the principle of non-contradiction says, you know, you can't be alive and dead at the same time. And you're saying in the same uh uh you can.

SPEAKER_04 35:52

Well, what was happening was he was rewriting the rules of the ways that you can be things. So the law of the thing.

SPEAKER_03 36:01

Either he was always alive or he died is at the again. You're saying, oh well, he rewrote it, but I'm saying he did die. Did he live?

SPEAKER_04 36:13

It was you know, yeah, you can't use the word in the definition in the same way. Christ also gets to change the rules about things as he's changing the rules about things. Like what he's doing is changing the rules, and as he's changing the rules, the rules are changing. So much so that before his resurrection, as he dies, people are coming out of the grave in mass. So literally, there's physical evidence that there are metaphysical rule changes at play in the moment. So it's very specifically not a philosophical question, it's an engineering question, it's a physics question.

SPEAKER_02 36:57

Then it's then you don't believe that Yahweh is the living God, because you can change the rules and then he dies. Like Baal dies, like the great God Finn died one day.

SPEAKER_04 37:13

But he's got blood all over him before the battle starts, and it it's his blood, so he's living, right? He's living even though he died.

SPEAKER_02 37:22

Yeah, yeah. I mean, so I'm saying a complicated thing. Kierkegaard is saying a complicated thing, and the complicated thing is that eternity is real. There is a real quality that real things can have, which is to be eternal. Examples include Yahweh's life, examples include Yahweh's power to sustain creation, also the words which Jesus said, or possibly his being as the word, have this quality of being eternal. Something that is eternal never alters and never stops being. There is no case or example in which it is not how it is. That's a real thing. And then also there are historical things, there are temporal things, and those things change all the time. And everything temporal is passing away. That's the law of that which is historical, temporal, contingent. It depends on things for its existence. Eventually, the sun will burn out, the stars will all collapse into a gigantic whatever at the center of the galaxy, and whatever you're talking about, which is temporal, will pass away. That's physics. And so something is never both of those things. The Greeks cannot imagine something being both of those things, but the Christian conception is not that everything is temporal and therefore there is no such thing as the eternal, which is what appears to be the Sir Robert position. And the Christian position is not that there is no such thing as the temporal and therefore everything is eternal, which is something like the Socratic or the Leibnizian or the like Jungian perspective. The Christian position is that there are eternal things and there are temporal things, and the temporal things somehow influence the eternal things. And that this is what a mystery is.

SPEAKER_05 39:32

Okay. A mystery is a thing that can only be known through revelation. That's just like definitions.

SPEAKER_02 39:38

Okay. That's the not mystery. Pick some other word. But there is a special thing, which these things are.

SPEAKER_05 39:46

I can make a clear articulation of what I think about some of these things, but I'm going to try to do it in terms of this notion of eternal that seems to me to be silly. But let me start with that. This idea of eternality being, I brought this up before with you guys, but being something like fundamentally different than temporal in a way that, by the way, I I have not ever heard a meaningful articulation of that I can tell. It's that it's different, it's totally different. Really, really different. Different now. My my did I not did I not articulate that? I don't think so.

SPEAKER_02 40:27

I think you you said in several different ways that it is, in fact, different. Uh specifically, here's the articulation that which is eternal is never not. Is that few enough words? I I don't think that means anything. I think that's not real. Right. So you you okay. So when Jesus says heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away, what he means is my words will eventually pass away. It was just wrong. Nope. That that's per your account.

SPEAKER_05 40:57

No, we can call we can call that eternal, but then I'm just saying there are other things that are eternal too.

SPEAKER_02 41:03

Yeah. Plenty of things are I'm eternal.

SPEAKER_05 41:06

Yeah, but no paradox arises out of that. Let me let me pull up a verse real quickly. I was just looking at what you're talking. Um, let's see. This is in first Peter. Actually, I'm gonna say one thing prior to this, and then I'll read the verse, which is this concept of eternality, I think, is an artifact of not just taking at face value what's being said in the corpus of scripture. I could be wrong, right? I totally acknowledge that. Sure. Everse. This is 1 Peter chapter 3, verse 18. Okay, and I'll actually read maybe 19 to the end of the sentence, basically. For Christ also suffered once for sins, okay, the just for the unjust. Makes sense. That he might bring us to God, okay, being put to death in the flesh, but made alive by the spirit. Okay, so he died in the flesh. Great. That's how he died. It's his flesh. His flesh died. He literally his flesh was all like dead. That that's not there's no way that's the way in which God the Father is alive. Because he doesn't have a body, he doesn't have flesh.

SPEAKER_02 42:18

Sure. Um so there's no issue. So Jesus's resurrected body, in your opinion, will eventually also die. No. Okay. You're not subject to decay. Great. After not subject to decay, also, not subject to decay, great definition for eternal. Because the the way of the temporal world is subject to decay. Passing away, everything is passing away. Anything that's not subject to decay, like for instance, the treasure that we store up in heaven when we do good deeds on earth, yeah, which is not subject to decay, that's eternal. Okay, and we'll that has a different quality. If eternality is not a thing, then your good deeds which you stored up will eventually be subject to decay. If that were somehow eventually be subject to decay, because there's no such thing as eternality, which means that all things are subject to decay.

SPEAKER_05 43:18

When I see that there's all eternality, that I'm not saying nothing lasts forever or anything like that. Things last forever. Sure, lots of stuff lasts forever. Nothing in saying that something lasts forever makes any kind of scriptural tension or paradox that I can see. Okay, some things last forever. Great. Then you know, you know what things don't last forever? Some other stuff. Okay. Like Jesus' body was never gonna like last forever a year before pre crucifixion. His resurrected body, in which he's sustained like we all should be, like we all were, by God not to decay. You know, we're eating from the tree of life. And hey, look, now that they've sinned. If we let them eat from the tree of life and they're being sustained by it, uh oh, they'll never die. So the what will become a turtle? Yeah. If if that's what you mean by a turtle. So he goes, okay, kick them out of the garden. It's processed still, it's all still there. There's no weird tensions. It's just like very straightforward.

SPEAKER_02 44:18

Cool. So I think we're at the place where. Sorry for being frustrating, Matt. No, no, no. I'm not frustrated at all. I just won. I got what I wanted. Because you were saying that this reading of Kierkegaard's does not make sense because it relies on this category of the eternal, which isn't real. But you actually do think that the category of the eternal is real. The thing that I don't think about it being a paradox is not even in this reading. I just mentioned that because I thought that you already believed that and I could use that as evidence to get to where I wanted you to be. Fair enough.

SPEAKER_05 44:55

I I do think when I hear people say eternal or eternity or things of that. Well, no. This I don't think about you, Matt. I know that you mean things, but my general impression is that they don't mean something in particular. But the ones who do mean something in particular, like you, I think do, I don't think that that thing that is meant is a real thing, generally speaking. If what we mean is something that lasts forever and maybe has been forever, okay, sure, fine. That said, just the surface reading of scripture has it has some weird stuff in it, but none of it's paradoxical. I don't see anything in scripture that looks like it says, and this is super paradoxical. The things I do see are things that are surprising or people being undone, like Isaiah falls down at, you know, before God, and he's like, ah, I'm a man amongst their lips. Yeah, I mean, he he has to be completely undone, and then God has to like do some stuff with him. But it doesn't seem like there's anything where it's like paradox.

SPEAKER_02 45:56

I I don't I I don't see it yet. I mean, where is he even using eternity in this reading? Eternity is something that the Socratic side of it depends on. I think maybe his capital T truth might be talking about an eternal truth.

SPEAKER_03 46:13

This whole thing is is an historical point of departure possible for an intern eternal consciousness? Right. How can such a point of departure have any other than merely historical interest? Is it possible to base an eternal happiness on historical knowledge?

SPEAKER_04 46:31

So isn't the problem that God is in and out of time, and the way that we are being changed is by participating in Him, therefore, that does create a host of immediate observable strangeness that would be paradoxical because it has to do with beings in time being changed into something that has a very different relationship with time and trying to talk about that language here and now, right? That's far. I don't think God is in and out of time. Well, here I found it.

SPEAKER_02 47:14

It's right at the beginning of the Christ half where there's a big letter B. Kierkegaard has Johannes Claymachus say, now if things are to be otherwise, which is to say, other than the Socratic, the moment in time. Oh this is page 16 on the PDF. Okay. Now, if things are to be otherwise, the moment in time must have a decisive significance, so that I will never be able to forget it, either in time or eternity, because the eternal, which hitherto did not exist, came into existence in this moment. Under this presupposition, let us now proceed to consider the consequences for the problem of how far it is possible to acquire a knowledge of the truth. So, Sir Robert, in your terms, there are lots of eternal things, and then there are also lots of temporal things, right? And what Kierkegaard is saying is that some temporal circumstance has caused something eternal to come about, which previously was not. Sorry, real quickly.

SPEAKER_05 48:20

In that PDF, the one that I have in the email, which is not the thing I was reading, jumps from 15 to 18. Page 15.

SPEAKER_02 48:28

Did I miss a page? I I'm oh no, that would explain why Dwight didn't understand about the thing. I I read a different one on my phone. Let me let me grab it real quickly. If I missed pages 16 and 17, oh my goodness. Dwight. You rage quit because of what I said.

SPEAKER_04 48:48

Oh, it's true. I thought that that was funny. I in my mind I tried to make sense of it, but yes.

SPEAKER_02 49:03

Oh page 16. Oh my goodness.

SPEAKER_03 49:08

And and you know the reason I didn't notice when I was reading is because there's that footnote, so I was like bouncing between the footnote and the thing, and then yeah.

SPEAKER_02 49:20

Well, I did it. It's my PDF. It goes straight from 15 to 18. Oh my goodness. I'm so sorry, guys. Can I should I I can read this up to you?

SPEAKER_03 49:33

I am not convinced I would have understood it even if I had it, Matt, if that makes you feel any better.

SPEAKER_02 49:40

Now, if things are to be otherwise, the moment in time must have a decisive significance, so that I will never be able to forget it either in time or in eternity, because the eternal which hitherto did not exist came into existence in this moment. We begin with the Socratic difficulty about seeking the truth, which seems equally impossible whether we have it or do not have it. The Socratic thought really abolishes this disjunction, since it appears that at the bottom, every human being is in possession of the truth. This was Socrates' explanation. We have seen what follows from it with respect to the moment. Now, if the latter is to have decisive significance, the seeker must be destitute of the truth up to the very moment of his learning it. He cannot even have possessed it in the form of ignorance, for in that case the moment becomes merely occasional. What is more, he cannot even be described as a seeker, for such is the expression we must give to the difficulty if we do not wish to explain it Socratically. He must therefore be characterized as beyond the pale of truth, not approaching it like a proselyte, but departing from it, or as being in error. He is then in a state of error. But how is he now to be reminded, or what will profit him to be reminded of what he has not known, and consequently cannot recall, etc. I really messed it up, guys.

SPEAKER_04 50:59

That's okay. No, it's fine. Matthew, my first text was an AI hallucination, so you're not going to beat that. All right.

SPEAKER_05 51:06

So my question for this, it Matt. Yeah. Would you say, I and I don't mean you, I mean this position or something like that. He's not referring to something like trivial knowledge, but specifically like only salvific kinds of knowledge or something where some kind of eternal thing is created in reality. Is he switching the argument from like just knowledge in general to a particular kind?

SPEAKER_02 51:47

Now, I think that is sort of where this thing falls apart. Okay. And actually, there are issues here that later Kierkegaard books will have to delve into in order to resolve. But I think, I mean, if you imagine that you're gonna be in heaven with an eternal body forever after you die and then are judged, and you're gonna know your times tables that whole time, and you learned your times tables in in fourth grade or whatever, then presumably you learning your times tables was the beginning of an eternal thing based on a temporal circumstance. So I think this is actually, you're just rephrasing my opening question. The Socratic thing seems to be about even trivial knowledge. And so, is this Kierkegaardian thing about even trivial knowledge? Let me ask you this.

SPEAKER_05 52:46

See if this helps or frames anything. It seems to me that eternity is a really, really long time. No. Okay. I that I thought that was probably a big difference, right? Why? I don't think there's an answer to to why. Why is it not the same? Why is eternity not a really, really long time? Um what it is not a really, really long time.

SPEAKER_02 53:12

For the same reason that Hamlet is not going to find Shakespeare, no matter how many rooms in Elsinore Castle he searches.

SPEAKER_04 53:21

You're talking about random chaos emergence. That doesn't the constraint on time.

SPEAKER_05 53:27

I I understand that you're saying that God's the originator of the thing, the interior thing, and that the interior thing is not going to have the thing that made it, right?

SPEAKER_02 53:38

Or I'll give you a different example. There is an image of it, a glimpse of it, when you are editing a video, and you can scroll to any point in the video that you want. And you can do something to the beginning of the video, and then go elsewhere and do something to the end of the video. What that is, is the machine of the film, you know, the or the computer that you're editing it on, rendering your relationship to the time of the video arbitrary. Sure. Now, arbitrary is different from no relationship. Arbitrary means you get to have the relationship you want with it. If you actually were eternal per the video, you wouldn't have a time. But the relationship of a person to a video that they're editing is something like the timeless nature of eternity. That time simply is not a factor in which things you see when. There's not a when for you to see them.

SPEAKER_05 54:48

And that made sense to me.

SPEAKER_02 54:50

Uh I've heard that kind of thing, and I understand the and specifically God's law and the laws of physics and the words of Christ, and my life written in the book of life, like the the books of God are of this nature.

SPEAKER_04 55:13

But but I disagree. You can have experience outside of time to the degree that God directly allows you to participate in enough of a local topology of reality to experience things consciously and not that time in general at a larger scale. You can experience God and have a conscious experience with God outside of the rest of time. That is a thing that God can do with any being, right? So rules about what you can and cannot experience vis-a-vis time aren't particularly meaningful if we're discussing the possibility of any kind of direct interaction with God. That'd be my only caveat. Outside of a direct experience of God, absolutely, you guys are winning all these arguments, right? Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_02 56:18

I think it's probably not right to say, well, I don't know. Uh having an experience is usually something that we talk about as having a beginning and a middle and an end. So an experience then cannot have an eternal character.

SPEAKER_04 56:39

Okay, so if you experience something in time with God, but that time has nothing to do with time outside of your time, then you can begin to develop language of pockets of time where before we were talking about time and no time, it's probably more accurate to talk about the contextual pocketing of the experience or the meaningful relationship between this time and other.

SPEAKER_02 57:08

Sure, yeah. I mean Kairos time. Yeah. So even on Earth, among temporal things, there are differences between times. For sure.

SPEAKER_04 57:21

Yeah, if you put a clock on an SR-71 Blackbird and you leave the other clock that are at time exact, the one that comes back on the SR-71 Blackbird will be slower because it will have moved through time at speed relative to the original clock, and therefore it will have moved slower. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 57:41

So Robert was challenging me on something.

SPEAKER_05 57:43

I'm trying to figure out a okay, let me propose something. I'm ready. I think there is a present and clean, simple reading of scripture that does not have God outside of time, and it agrees with everything there, with no weird culty stuff or anything. And I think one of the reasons that that's including all the passages like he knows the end of the beginning, whatever people want to say is outside of timeliness. I think that it seems to me that this discussion, not not this particular one, but the way people discuss eternality presupposes attention and then revels in it. It says things like God doesn't have a beginning. Just to use an example. And when they say beginning, when people say beginning, I think they mean something like a time when he wasn't and then he was. Yeah. Something like that. But that's not the same as saying that God doesn't have like a source.

SPEAKER_00 59:03

It's a great It was a great response, man.

SPEAKER_04 59:12

I think Dwight squint at you is almost as good, if not better, but go on.

SPEAKER_02 59:17

For listeners, Dwight squinted, and I raised my eyebrows as that statement.

SPEAKER_05 59:28

Okay. So let me clarify, and also especially clarify what I mean by source. And I'm gonna say something that whatever, I'll just say okay this has philosophical implications, and I think is not in any way destructive to anything anybody would care about. Blah blah blah. Except for the thing about eternity. Sorry, one more little preface here, which is I think there's a whole bunch of scripture for this. So, and I can say them, but I'm not gonna try to build it up right now as some kind of case. I have an internal rendering of this that uses one word that I just don't have a different word for, which is will, as in like uh choice or you know, acting. And I don't actually mean will, I mean something a little more fundamental than that, but like the will to be, right? I think dot is his own will to be, and he's his own source. And the what that actually means, there's like a technical concept there, which is he's the seat of reality, right? He's the self-existing well spring. That's literally what it that's why he's a overflowing spring and all that kind of stuff, is that uh he's the I'm gonna say this with a little bit sloppy language because it's not something we say about everything, right? It's kind of particular to him, but he's the self-making thing. And uh with quotes on making, but he's the self-producing again. But these are words about like uh processes that start existing. Something like that. Well, okay. I'm gonna say these in some slightly sloppy ways that are just colloquial, and then I'm gonna say a little more precisely he doesn't exist without choosing to exist. That's always been the case for him. He's again the seat of reality, he's what reality is, right? And the seat of reality has person, he's a he, he chooses, there's a willness in there, there's a livingness. That's what that is, that God is living, right? That's and he's real life. He's the life that is life, life, you know, really giving. He always he's good, he's he's always done this thing. And the fact that he's always done it, and by I'm saying again, always done it has this like idea of time. I would love to go into what I mean by some of this stuff, but we can talk about another time. The fact that he's always done it is what reality is. That's like there wouldn't be a reality without that.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:52

Okay. In doing that, I'll accept that there wouldn't be a reality without that, but not that that's what reality is, like definitionally, but go on.

SPEAKER_05 1:02:02

It is it is not definitionally what reality is. Reality comes from this. Sure. There's a whole bunch of stuff that emerges from this thought, and I'm not trying to enumerate all those now, although I'm happy to talk at great length at any time to anyone.

SPEAKER_04 1:02:17

However, I mean, I think both of you guys are crazy and they're the same thing, but keep going.

SPEAKER_05 1:02:22

There are a set of characteristics that God has that are bound up in, quote unquote, that self-willingness. Those characteristics are that he's loving, he could not generate himself without being loving. Those characteristics are that he's good, that's kind of definitionally what good is. There's a bunch of stuff like that. One of the things that he does that's good is he praises the praiseworthy. He's praiseworthy. He praises himself. He has always done that. The praise of himself is the word that perfectly represents it. When you praise something, you represent something, perfectly represents him. That word that perfectly represents him has all of his characteristics because it perfectly represents him. It has life, it has living, it has goodness, it has all his characteristics. That's the sun. Through that, all things are made. That that's the kind of mechanism of, so to speak, the self-existent trinity. If you want to call that something like eternity, fine. I don't object to that, right? But the first thing that that thing does is make and do, right? And then there's time, there's no period before that, but there's also not him before that, because there's no such thing as before. Yeah, of course. So that's all I'm saying. I'm saying that's all happening, and it will happen forever because that's just what it is. There's a tautology there, and because of that, there's no tension. Things that are forever came out of the thing that would make them forever. That's fine. And so I can make a choice, and that's okay. And that choice can affect eternity, and that doesn't cause any tension. God does everything he does in time because you can't do something not in time. Doesn't even make any sense. That's definitionally what it is to do something. So God does something, it's in time. What does God do that's outside of time? Nothing. That's not a thing. That's why the Bible's all the stuff it says, and God said this. What does it mean? It means what it says. It says he said something. Did he do it in time or outside of time?

SPEAKER_02 1:04:25

No, he did it in time because that's what doing something is. I think I agree with you completely. Particularly when you talk about the tautology of the way we speak about these things. Yeah. God doing something is doing something in time. I think that we have to acknowledge the existence of things that are real but don't have that quality. Which quality? Sorry. That quality of of happening in time. Such as, for instance, the record of the good deeds that you commit on earth, which is treasure stored up in heaven, which does not is not subject to decay. I think that does happen in time.

SPEAKER_05 1:05:10

It happens for a long, long, long time, namely forever.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:13

Yeah, it being not subject to decay doesn't mean that it's not participating in time. It means that it's participating in a regenerative nature of emergence, continual emergence within time that is able to maintain self.

SPEAKER_05 1:05:26

Decay is not a characteristic of time. Decay is a thing that came about. There was there was time in Eden before they're doing the sin decay thing. Now that they ate it, they're gonna die. That's all. Decay is not intrinsic to something being temporal. Temporality got kind of infected, so to speak, with decay, and that's all. But you can have temporal stuff that's forever and ever and ever, and even maybe even a day longer than that.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:51

Because it was a kingdom of God is going to be temporal, yeah, but not temporary.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:58

But again, the kingdom of God. And death. You guys are both just talking about the Holy Spirit. Is it most of this problem that we're talking about with time that we're not talking about the Holy Spirit? Really, we're just talking about weird things that the Holy Spirit does that have to do with time.

SPEAKER_05 1:06:13

I think I mean something different than that, but I'm not 100% sure what you mean, but it is the Holy Spirit. I want to point out a white statement real quickly, just because I agree with it. That the kingdom of God is temporal without being temporary. I just want to point out.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:29

Yeah. I think I'm I may not understand the word temporal, but it sounds like I do since you agree.

SPEAKER_05 1:06:35

So I think you do. I think we're gonna have brunches for eternity. Yeah. Jesus.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:43

And if he if you're doing things, there's time. And that life is eternal.

SPEAKER_05 1:06:48

That is eternal life. So which is to say eternal living.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:53

Good. Let me. I think that I can approach it. I cannot do it using this text. That's fine. Probably because I have not mastered this text well enough, because this is something he probably addresses in philosophical fragments. Where I see Kierkegaard caring about eternality in the sense of atemporality is what he calls the absolute. So you can think of it like this. There are some things that you do in order to get a certain outcome. And then there are some things that you do because people told you that you have to do them that way, right? And then there are some things that you do because that is the way it is to be done. Absolutely. Right? So the prohibition on murder is to some people just something that you follow while it's convenient. And those are unethical people. And there are some people for whom the prohibition against murder is just something that society invented, that society makes you do, and you do it because society decided. And those are unethical people. Okay. And there are some people for whom the prohibition against murder is absolute. You never murder. Even if somebody's gonna murder you, even if the world is gonna end, or you think the world is gonna end unless you murder somebody, you still won't murder them. Because that is what it means to be an ethical person. That's what ethics is. Ethics is the intersection of the absolute law with temporal reality.

SPEAKER_05 1:08:45

What you just said sounded to me like ethics is the intersection of an absolute law with temporal reality, because vegans won't eat meat.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:54

Sure. Yeah. Right. The notion of the absolute law is that God has declared one such, which is the true one. Okay. Distinct from the vegan one, probably, if we are to believe the stuff about Noah in Genesis.

SPEAKER_05 1:09:10

True here means what you're saying is true, it's true by virtue of it being declared by God? Uh, I don't know about declared but established.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:20

Sure. So what's the payload of what you're saying? So that law, like don't murder, if that is an example of the law, which maybe not, I don't know. Um, I think there's an argument against this, but the absolute law has a nature which is eternal and not temporal. I don't think that that is meaningful. It's rooted in God's character, okay. As opposed to I don't know if it's rooted in God's character, but it's not a matter of waking up in the morning and doing a day and doing that over and over an infinite number of times. That's not what the absolute law is. So it's it's eternal in a similar sort of way to two plus two equals four being eternal, and not in a similar way to Christ's risen body will not ever decay, being eternal.

SPEAKER_04 1:10:20

I disagree. I mean, C.S. Lewis seems to think that like one of the fundamental things about God's character is that he's like a little kid who you better not do something interesting, stimulating, or fun around them if they think they can make you do that again, or they will just sit there and tell you to do it again and again and again. That is the hallmark of the eternal nature of God is that he surprisingly keeps spontaneously generating and doing it. He violates this, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:10:50

He's not violating his absolute law.

SPEAKER_05 1:10:53

I the idea that two plus two or you know some mathematical law, some relationship. I don't think that that's a law in a in the same way that not killing is, right? Because saying two plus two is four is just right.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:13

It's a matter of mere semantics.

SPEAKER_05 1:11:15

Yeah. But that's essentially true. It's it's yeah, you're just articulating a thing, right? About reality. But that's not true of not murdering. There's a command. There's no command for two plus two to be four. Right. Is a command for you not to murder, and you cannot do that, but you can't not do two plus two to this four. Right. It's a different kind of thing.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:34

Yeah, very different kind of thing. But but similar in its nature as being in that it is eternal and not temporal. I don't see that as being something.

SPEAKER_05 1:11:47

God says don't do it. Don't do the thing. He doesn't want you to do the thing. That's all. He just he just doesn't want you to. And you shouldn't, or something.

SPEAKER_04 1:11:58

Yeah. Two times two is four is not eternal, that's a temporal.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:03

So, one day, the voice of God comes to Abram and says, Take your son, your only son who you love, and take him to a place that I will show you and sacrifice him. What say more. I agree, that happened. Yeah. Can't happen, or when it happens, you're in a very strange pickle. Why? Because the absolute law, which is true for all times no matter what, says one thing and the voice of God says another.

SPEAKER_05 1:12:37

So, just real quickly, one reconciliation of that is that there's only the voice of God. There's not the weird abstraction of the eternal law, whatever, whatever. There's just what God says. And right now He's telling you to go kill the dude, so you go kill the dude. And then he tells you to stop, by the way, and so you stop. And he does stop, right? He stopped, he stops Abraham, and Abraham goes, Oh, yeah. And then he says, Don't worry, I find another thing for you, it's not crazy. He goes, Oh, okay, cool. Not that it's trivial for him. I'm not, I don't mean to make it nonchalant.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:08

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:13:09

No, but just to say one way of talking about that is by bringing in some heaviness around absolute law of whatever, whatever. And another way is to say, well, here's what happened. God generally says don't kill, and then he told some guy to kill, and the guy's like, okay. And then he told him, No, never mind, don't do it after all. He goes, Okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:30

Right. So there is no absolute law. Sure. That sounds fine-ish, depending on what you mean by absolute. I mean, absolute means unconditioned in any way. Okay. Are there any utterances of God which are unconditioned in any way and universally valid? Whatever he says. Okay. No. The law won't murder.

SPEAKER_04 1:13:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:54

Because that became invalid when he told Abraham to murder somebody by your account.

SPEAKER_04 1:13:58

But it's not murder. No, you do you are making the accusation.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:04

He said, don't do human sacrifice.

SPEAKER_04 1:14:07

Until he tells you to, in which case, do.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:10

Oh, is that a part of it? I think that let me say this this way. What about the the proclamation of the saving work of Christ on the cross? Is that also subject to revocation?

SPEAKER_04 1:14:22

Hang on, we're playing games with argument here. This was pre-Lavitical revelation, so there wasn't something to go back on. Yeah, that's true.

SPEAKER_05 1:14:31

At the Noaiic one, there was a Noaic one that you should not shed blood by mint.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:36

Yeah. Abraham could have shed his son's blood Moses. And then he could have killed himself and obeyed the Noaiic covenant. I just he would have been fine.

unknown 1:14:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:47

But you're right.

SPEAKER_05 1:14:48

God would have been great with that. Pre-Mosaic. No, it wouldn't have been great with that. He's not supposed to do that. That's just because that's an overreaching, right? You don't get to, you're not the one in charge.

SPEAKER_04 1:14:58

Cain kills Abel. Okay, we need a lot more rules for this guy's uh gun.

SPEAKER_05 1:15:04

I think when God says to Abraham, God tells humane, right? Hey, don't kill people. As a let me let me pull it up real quickly just to like say it the way he's saying it.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:14

Because I don't want to like Yeah, he says any um any animal that sheds the blood of man, you gotta kill it. Also, any from any person who sheds the blood of man, I will demand an accounting.

SPEAKER_04 1:15:29

Does it say by man shall his blood be shed, or does it say it will demand an accounting?

SPEAKER_02 1:15:34

He says, sorry, he says, I will demand an accounting of the animals, and then of men, he says, by men shall his blood be shed. Right. Something like that.

SPEAKER_05 1:15:42

Yeah, something like that. So my point is to say he has this thing, you should not kill people. And he's just saying, don't kill people. And he tells Abraham, I want you to go and sacrifice your fact. He didn't say, I want you to. He says, go to the place that I will show you and sacrifice him. And I just to just to throw in, I think this is I don't have this is not a direct, like hard point on this. I just think it's really interesting that from inspired scripture, we know that Abraham had a wrong idea of what was gonna happen. I think that's super cool, right? The New Testament says that Abraham believed God could raise him from the dead. Oh Isaac. So he's like, okay, I'm gonna kill him, then God's gonna like raise him from the dead or something. But it turns out God, and he did figuratively, but not literally, and it turns out God was like, No, I have a different thing in mind.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:34

Which I think is just super cool. My overall point is that I think that this idea that you're putting forward of the eternal not contradicting the temporal, or of the various eternal things in the Christian religion being also temporal in nature, I think that ultimately this leaves us over a pit of chaos. And I my method is to push you until I find something where you will say, Oh, actually, this is solid ground that I will stand on. So my next my next step in that was to say the gospel of the salvation of Jesus Christ, is that as optional, as temporal, as revocable as the command against murder?

SPEAKER_05 1:17:33

First, I don't think you're saying a real thing when you say temporal, just there in that word, that phrase.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:40

But let me say it this way. So you were saying that our eternal life, like in heaven, is going to last forever and be a sequence of days where you wake up and that also like God's laws, they started at some time and they're gonna stop at some time, and they might be suspended, you know, if he says so for a certain amount of time. And these are things that all happen in time. That's what I mean by temporal. So I'm using a concept that you are using.

SPEAKER_05 1:18:08

I wouldn't say suspended, but I would say things do happen, yes. Suspended articles, what do you mean by of the thing being this like eternal thing? I'm just saying get rid of that idea first, and then just read what actually happened. As far as us losing the question of like losing our salvation, our salvation being eternal, this sort of thing. That's what you're asking? No. Okay, ask me again then.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:32

There is a thing called the gospel. Sure. The Great Commission is to carry the gospel to the ends of the earth. It is something like the story of Christ's life and ministry on earth, and it is by hearing the gospel and accepting it that one attains to the state of salvation of one's soul. You just described something that I think of as absolute and eternal, which is the law against murder, as being essentially suspendable or optional, or God might show up one day and say, Oh, by the way, murder this guy, right? And that's fine. That's that's not a problem at all. Okay, great. Is there anything of which you would say God will never show up and say, okay, this is not in effect for the following circumstance? Sure, lots of stuff. Cool.

SPEAKER_05 1:19:29

Like what? Um, he has a bunch of characteristics that are that way. His loving kindness endures forever and ever. Everything that's forever and ever. I I went ahead and while we were saying that, I just looked up real quickly because there's this great Bible in line called the Blue Letter Bible, whatever, snidger in here or whatever. So I just looked up the word that eternal word because I thought that'll be a fun one. And I not because I wanted to get a dictionary type definition, but here are some examples of eternal things. In no particular order, I just happened to be at the end. So this is from Revelation, but I'll go backwards for some. But and again they say, hallelujah, and her smoke rose up forever and ever. That's the same as the word eternally. All right. How about this one? Every creature in heaven, on the earth, under the sea, I heard them saying blessed and honor and glory, power be to him that sits on the throne and to the Lamb forever and ever, for eternity. How about Ephesians? Unto him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus throughout all the ages, world without end. That world without end part is the eternity part, and so forth and so on. All of these are just for a long, long time. When I say a long, long time, I don't mean bounded, and it'll stop sometime. It won't stop sometime. It's stuff that's gonna like not do it. The Lord gives light to them, they shall reign forever and ever. That's in this particular translation. Here's a good one. Um let's see. Whoever shall use this one. I'm the living bread which came down from heaven. If any man eats his bread, he shall live forever. That's the eternal word. People answered him, I'm skipping now, Jalan. We've heard that the law of Christ abideth forever, it lives eternally. What sayest to you, son of man? Yeah, yeah. And it never stops being there. All of his characteristics, his long-sufferingness and all of that. By the way, he is eternally long-suffering. And when the sin of the Amorites reached its full measure in Genesis 15, he's like, Okay, we're gonna kill them all. He actually waited, and I'm gonna let you, Abraham's descendants, suffer until this is the promise to Abraham, until the sin of the Amorites reaches its full measure, and then I'm gonna bring you out, you're gonna destroy them. Okay, well, he suffered long, and his long suffering is forever, but he didn't suffer that sin forever. He was like, I am all I am long-suffering and I'm just, and this is enough of this. Those are not intention, those are just present.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:57

His long-sufferingness is long-suffering to a certain extent, and to a certain extent, not. His character of being long-suffering is doesn't mean that he'll always suffer long.

SPEAKER_05 1:22:12

He will always suffer long, he is unceasingly long-suffering, but any particular long it sin can reach its full measure. That's fine.

SPEAKER_04 1:22:21

That doesn't diminish the long-sufferingness in order for something to be long suffering, it does have to have a termination point, otherwise, it is uh enduringly suffering, like without offense, unoffendable. He is long suffering because the delay, the forbearance is purposeful, prophetic, and loving. So, yeah, so can he tell you you as a command, do not kill? By the way, I'm telling you kill that person because I have the right to, and in this context, it is loving, but you cannot lovingly marshal your wrath and kill people. Vengeance is mine, but then again, it's the same with like food. There's got to be a place in the Bible where God tells somebody not to feed somebody else, right? And yet, it would generally be the case that God would tell you to you know show mercy and provide for the needs of others. Does that ever happen? Is there a place in the Bible where God tells somebody not to feed someone else?

SPEAKER_02 1:23:28

I mean, there are times when he tells them to go to some town and kill every living thing there and commit everything there to fire. Yeah, but there's more killing.

SPEAKER_04 1:23:36

I was trying to find more examples of weird times that God tells you to do something that is unkind but loving. But I guess that's a testimony to it, right? It's either kill or show absolute mercy and love and grace. God doesn't tell you to run around being moderately jerkish to people who are kind of bad, you know.

SPEAKER_05 1:23:57

I mean, tells you to do things to them that'll heap coals on their head. But that's getting good. Here's a verse that's one of the cool gone outside of time verses that says, This is King James, but you'll recognize it, but known unto God are all his works from and then the word that it's from is that Ion word, which is King James translates it the beginning of the world, but you could also say from eternity those ages past for from the ages past, whatever. And that's one of those great ones because it's like, you know, he's known from the beginning, all of his works and all that kind of stuff. But that word is lifetimes, it's the age, right? It's like goings-on of the world from the beginning of things. It includes that concept. All I'm saying there is when you're saying things like the eternal law, the law not to kill whatever the law, I know that particular one, maybe, maybe not, whatever. I just we're smuggling in stuff that's not real. What is real is the character of God. That's the foundation, right? Of everything. Literally the foundation of everything, because he's the seed of reality, he's being himself, and in being himself, he's being the source of himself. And that's the real thing. The real thing is the character of God.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:19

That's it. So you would say there is something that's absolute, which is the character of God. Yeah. So, for instance, in your account, the glorious emergence of the word from the Father. Sure. Something is is an absolute. Sure. So during the crucifixion.

SPEAKER_05 1:25:39

Oh, sorry. That one I would say he always does. I I know I'm not sure exactly what absolute means in that context, but he always does that. Absolute means never not. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:52

Yes, then I'll take that. Sure. Yeah, I'll take that. So during the crucifixion, by your account, there was no change to the interrelationship of the Trinity. No, I didn't say that. Oh. Jesus is wondering.

SPEAKER_05 1:26:06

Sounded like you were saying that. No, he Jesus says, and I think reasonably to his father, why have you forsaken me? Like I he's having an experience like that. He's the son. I think a way better one than dying is that he becomes sin. I think that's a way, way better example of the idea. Sure. But even in that, the father still sustains him. He's doing that with him. Jesus says, I have a will, I have a will to not die. Right? You have a will for me to die, and I agree with you in that will. Not my will, but yours. Sustain me, Father.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:45

And he does. But so what you would say is that there is some interrelationship between the Trinity, which is contingent and historical, and not absolute and eternal, because it can flip on and off.

SPEAKER_05 1:26:59

Again, there's I'm when you say and not absolute and eternal, you're you're smuggling in some stuff that's not real.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:06

I'm not saying I don't agree, I'm saying it's you just said that I just asked you for one part of it that's absolute, and you said, Yeah. The character of God is absolute, yeah. Right. Okay, but I specifically am asking about this particular relationship between the father and the son, the emergence of the son from the father in glory. Yeah, that's absolute. Yeah. And that was unchanged by the crucifixion. During the crucifixion, that continued.

SPEAKER_05 1:27:36

He didn't stop existing, he's just dead. He died in the flesh.

SPEAKER_04 1:27:42

Yeah, I was gonna say, and only in a particular way. Again, we should be talking about the Holy Spirit here.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:47

So, but well, hold on. There are so there are numerous different interrelationships between the persons of the Trinity. Okay. And some of them are absolute. For a moment, I'm just chilling. Whatever. Some of them are absolute. Absolute. I'm asking you about your account of these things. So Okay, go for it. Is there only one or are there many relationships between the persons of the Trinity? Um I don't think by relationship.

SPEAKER_05 1:28:13

I'm not sure it doesn't sound to me like by relationship, you mean something in particular. What I will say, so I'll tell you what I think.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:20

I mean, uh, there are two entities that are, I don't know what more fundamental term you want than relationship.

SPEAKER_05 1:28:27

Father and son, father and son love each other. That's the spirit. That's a relationship. Yeah, the spirit is their relationship.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:34

Yep. Okay. Oh, so you took us through like a Trinity explanation that had a lot of words in it. A super gloss of it, yeah. Sure. There is this relationship between the father and the son. Yeah. Holy Spirit. During the crucifixion, by your account, was any aspect or part of that altered? When he said, Why have you forsaken me? Yeah. Another way to ask what I'm asking is, was he referring to some accidental relationship? Or was he referring to some essential change or alteration? I don't think it was essential in that relationship.

SPEAKER_05 1:29:14

I think it was. I don't think the change was. So I think that I could be wrong, by the way. I don't know exactly why he said, Why did you forsaken me? Yeah. But I did think he in sustained by his father. Always.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:27

But I think here is where you've departed from like all Christian theology. Uh-oh. I hope not. I think I'm saying something really old.

SPEAKER_04 1:29:37

So Christ reconciles in his body sin, and he writes our name in his hands. He engraves our names into the palms of his hands. Like he brings our very life and identity into himself, and he also brings our brokenness and he forges them into whole newness and brings us into the kingdom of heaven as children of God by the Spirit, implementing a plan of the Father, that his will should be that by the same Spirit that He and the Son are one, then we should be one and alive in the Spirit. I don't know how that could possibly not be said to be a statement of emergent theology to the degree that God has the right to reveal that who his son is a savior. And in order for his son to be a savior, our identity and existence has to become existentially tangential to his nature to the degree that the name of Christ is an authentic name. So these statements that God is eternal and his nature never changes, it's kind of horseshit. I mean, it's not true. Like he saves us, and therefore heaven is bigger. So, how is that not a statement that God's character is changing in some way? How is that change not just more? And how is that change not just his will?

SPEAKER_02 1:31:23

I could exercise my prerogative as a question asker to get in one last statement, but I think I will leave Josh with the final word there, although I disagree with him. I I do too. And say thank you, guys. And his disagree if I knew it was happening. Hand it back to Sir Robert. Okay. By the way, I'm extremely delighted and very much enjoyed this conversation. Good. I'm glad.

SPEAKER_03 1:31:55

Might have enjoyed it if I knew it was happening.

SPEAKER_04 1:31:58

I think you guys are all scared of Eastern theology and you've been brainwashed by the Presbyterians, but well, I still love you.

SPEAKER_02 1:32:05

It's my fault. I left out extremely key pages, and I completely sabotaged Dwight's understanding of this great philosophical work. I've betrayed my hero, Kierkegaard. And sabotaged your life.

SPEAKER_05 1:32:22

You will have more opportunities, Matt, I predict. But tray skiergardi. Um I also, like you, Matt, went back and forth between two different things. But the one that I would prefer to do is very, very long, and I need a little more time to get the right parts of it. So I'm going to do the shorter one, which I also liked and enjoyed, and I think we can talk about well. Which is there is a book called The Unseen Realm by well, he passed away recently, a couple years ago, but he was a textual critic, a biblical scholar. His name is Michael Heiser. Then the book is called The Unseen Realm. It is a kind of popularish, accessible distilling of his dissertation work. His dissertation work is publicly available website, you can look for it. And it's much more obviously academic, and it's about 200 pages, 250 pages, something like that. I recommend both, but the formal reading is going to be The Unseen Realm by Michael Eiser. It is interesting, touches on some of the topics we talked about here. Possibly that's why I had some things on the tip of my tongue. You can find the audio version of it for on something like Spotify, probably. Audible if you have that. I don't know. Fair enough. Oh, and I meant to say also, there is a YouTube, not movie, but like 30-minute, well-produced video of the Unseen Realm as well. It's called the Unseen Realm, also. And so if you want to do both of those, let's do the book and the little 30-minute video, because it's a multimedia experience. Fair enough. I was in an email. So thank you for joining us for this discussion. You're dismissed with the following valediction from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Now the hungry lion roars and the wolf behowls the moon, whilst the heavy plowman snores all with weary task for Dove. Now the wasted brands do glow, whilst the screech owl screeching loud, puts the wretch that lies in woe in remembrance of a shroud. Now it is the time of night that the graves, all gaping wide, every one lets forth his sprite in the churchway paths to glide. And we fairies that do run by the triple hectate's team from the presence of the sun, following darkness like a dream, in our frolic. Not a mouse shall disturb this hallowed house. I am sent with Brune before to sweep the dust behind the door.