Two Paths

The revelation of God is one that compounds on the past. Creation, Expulsion, Punishment, Enrichment, Liberation, Exile etc until you reach God incarnate in the form of Jesus Christ who uses the history of human failures to illustrate the grace of God and the establishment of a new covenant that saves all people. This is a logical progression.

Which is kind of my point. A logical progression of revelation implies change over time in god’s plan, actions, or relationship with humanity. But a truly perfect, eternal, unchanging truth wouldn’t require progression or revision. If the Divine Truth was perfect and eternal and true, why did it need changing? Evangelicals talk about the ‘new covenant’ all the time, but humanity isn’t any different now than it was then, why did we need a new one? Seems like either god changed or the truth wasn’t eternal.

I haven’t seen a compelling case that divine truth has been fundamentally corrupted.

Corrupted might not be the right word, but we have examples of, say, King James commissioning his own bible to support the divine right of kings. But aside from that, human fallibility plays a part in the transmission of this truth, and anyone who has played a game of telephone in grade school can tell you how that tends to go: you line up the whole class, whisper something into the first kid’s ear, they whisper into the next, and what started out as ‘Billy can’t come to school today because he’s sick’ comes out the other end as ‘little Billy died’ or whatever. Even if you assume each person in the chain intends to transmit it faithfully people make mistakes, there are disputes over word choice and changes to meaning over time in translation, there are newly-discovered ancient texts that cast new light on the ones we had, etc. I don’t know about fundamentally corrupted, but if the perfect eternal truth is all of those things then something else has to account for the paradoxes, and if we’re assuming the literal existence of god then that leaves only human fallibility.

I recognize you may disagree with the points I adequately communicated or have questions about ones I failed to describe well. I am a fallible human after all 😂.

Me too man, I’m just here to have an engaging conversation and learn a little something. All we can do is do our best to own mistakes and not be shy about admitting fault.

You may find that many of the contradictions you’re grappling with don’t exist in Orthodox thought in the same way they might in some Western traditions. I’d encourage looking into Orthodox apologia for a perspective not burdened by the theological inheritances of later Western heresies like penal substitution or strict determinism…

That doesn’t surprise me. What little I know of the early history of Orthodoxy is that there was an early, pretty severe schism over some fundamental stuff that sent the two churches in very different directions. I am curious to know more, though, so I hope you stay and keep the discussion going. I admit that (probably because the way I fell out of Christianity and then into a long but fortunately-ended period of atheism) that Orthodoxy was never really on my radar in my religious studies. But I am a more curious person than I once was with considerably more free time, so I’ll do some poking about and see what I can find. ;)

An aside about “war crimes” … be wary of using a modern lens when assessing the ancient.

That’s entirely fair. I don’t think I was intentionally doing it but there may have been some subconscious stuff going on there. My intent, and perhaps I should’ve chosen a better tool, was to use the terminology of modern ethics to convey the weight of my distaste for the idea of punishing one person for another’s crime in any context.

What is the epistemic justification for Good and Bad in a world where everything is relative? Philosophically it is an arbitrary critique without grounding.

I don’t think everything is relative, nor do I think god is the only source of morality. Even without modern utilitarian concepts like least-harm, it’s pretty clear that ancient human cultures had a concept of justice that depended on the simple and self-evident truth that causing intentional harm to others is bad. It may have been applied unevenly and inconsistently, but. And hell, even a toddler with barely a grasp on language, much less culture or philosophy, can tell the difference between getting bitten by the kid you bit and getting bitten by some kid because she thought you bit her. They’re unhappy at being bitten in either case, but - and I’ve seen this in my nieces and nephews - they get downright angry when they feel that sting of injustice, even if they can’t describe it.