Dave Sims retweeted
Robin Jensen, Mary Charles Murray, Paul Finney and Steven Bigham would good places to start. Finney in particular dismantles the "anthologizing" approach that you're employing here, that started at Hieria with their florilegia of apologists' quotes taken in isolation, gathered together and restated as if they were addressed to Christians and not pagans and the cultural elites. Finney shows quite convincingly that the apologists' goal was to distance themselves from depraved pagan practices that the imperial and intellectual elites also disdained, rather than being a either addressed to christian practices or good evidence of what christian worship was or wasn't.
There is also plenty of evidence, as Robin Jensen, Benjamin Anderson and others have put forward, that christians not only had icons during the "Golden era of the Patristics" as Richard Price put it, as well the apologists' period, but also that they venerated them with prayer, garlands, candles and incense, all of which constitute veneration. @Michael__Garten has compiled many instances from the material culture that supports this. Anderson's argument in the Mike Humphreys' anthology regarding iconic inscriptions I find particularly compelling.
But at the end of the day, besides the material, cultural and historical evidence, the fundamental problem with the protestant and the Roman "development" view, both of which affirm early aniconism, is that there's no coherent reason for the christians to have employed it, and on the other hand there are plenty of christological reasons for them to have rejected it.
This is why we see in the acta of Nicea II, their anthemas were aimed at The Council of Hieria's rationale for Iconoclasm, namely christological heresy. And if it was heresy in the 8th century, it was heresy in the 1st.
Dave Sims retweeted
Why I converted to Orthodox Christianity
Theosis: the process of union with God through active participation in the Uncreated Energies
Essence energies distinction: God is utterly transcendent in His essence, but knowable through His energies, both essence and energies are fully God, distinction without division
Synergeia: free will is synergy of individual effort and divine grace, cooperation or resistance
Physical/spiritual interdependence: the essence energies distinction and synergy allows for a radical affirmation of both immanence and transcendence, Orthodoxy is a both/and of holistic harmony
The nous: the eye of the soul or mind of the heart, the faculty by which we know and experience God, when the nous is pure it sees God and experiences the Uncreated Energies of God intuitively
Monarchical Trinitarianism: God is both one and many; one essence, three persons; Father as sole cause, Son begotten, Spirit proceeds, whatever is not common in the divine is unique to the person (against subordination in God, polytheism, or modalism)
Apophaticism: asserting through negation ex. “God is unknowable”, preserves divine mystery as life giving, carving away
Logos theology: aligning with God as the ordering principle and source of life, Jesus Christ as the Logos of the Greeks and Dao of Lao Tzu (the way, the truth, the life, the vine, the bridegroom, etc.), movement towards God as theosis, sin (stagnation) separates us from God, sin/evil as privation “It is only the misuse of things that is evil, and such misuse occurs when the intellect fails to cultivate its natural powers.” -St. Maximus the Confessor
“God became man so that man might become God.” -St. Athanasius
“What is unassumed is unhealed.” -St. Gregory of Nyssa
Everything else flows from here
Any worldview presupposes answers to the philosophical problem of the one (unity/changlessness/being) and the many (plurality/change/becoming), the question of how one and many fundamentally relate, which applies to its affirmation or denial of life and its coherence as a position. I believe Orthodox Christianity is the most coherent/universal worldview (I have yet to see good argument addressing philosophically/practically).
Here and now is how you experience God/eternity, “the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21), you are what you do, theosis is eternal progress (epektasis), already but not yet.
Man’s goal is to metabolize, God is the fire that does not consume you, the flow of energy and transcendent. Theosis is purification, illumination, deification. Jesus accepts if we accept Him. Forgiveness is love neutralizing the enemy.
“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you.” (John 6:53) “He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him.” (John 6:56) Holy Communion as the act of assimilating God as He assimilates us, nutrition as our most intimate interaction with the world.
Ancient Greek understanding of the Bible: ex. “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.” (Matthew 7:7) is present active imperative (ongoing process).
Historical continuity: apostolic succession/faith and decentralized church structure.
“A person must be in the religious search not for the sake of religious experiences, which can deceive, but for the sake of truth.” -Fr. Seraphim Rose
“Come and see.” (John 1:39)
The greatest mysteries are within the Divine Liturgy.
If I’m presenting anything wrong, I welcome correction.
Dave Sims retweeted
I'm coming to see the failure of conservatives in both politics and the church as a failure to understand mimesis.
The growth of the Orthodox church is partly because of its mimetic power. It has the rizz and imitative potency of a whole imaginative world like Star Wars or Harry Potter.
@PaulVanderKlay I think you have talked about this before.
Dave Sims retweeted
@gavinortlund is causing profound harm to his audience via his misrepresentations of Eastern Orthodoxy. It’s not having much impact on deterring conversions however their Protestant family members are in an uproar. Maybe this is the goal. A young woman told me yesterday, that her mother told her if she converted to EO that she wanted her to tell her “you’re going to hell” to her face.
We don’t do this. We don’t advocate this. We don’t believe this. Gavin believes it, however, and it says a lot about him that he is teaching this to his followers.
Dave Sims retweeted
Christian socialism vs Christian distributism, this is the political battle that we need, not the fake two party secular corporatism like what we have now
FYI
@Michael__Garten
@Alex_Ortodoxie
@iconsofgod
@Acolyte83349490
FYI another entry:
teapaw.org/daveedsims/status/2118…
1/ So, remember how @gavinortlund said, repeatedly, that the *only* debate is whether veneration emerged in the 6th or the 7th centuries?
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1/ So, remember how @gavinortlund said, repeatedly, that the *only* debate is whether veneration emerged in the 6th or the 7th centuries?
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5/ Benjamin Anderson in his essay is even more forceful, directly challenging both the 6th *and* 7th century dates, arguing that:
"The second-person inscriptions provide evidence, stronger still than the stories collected by Kitzinger, of a widespread cultural understanding that an image can – to borrow the formulation of Brubaker and Haldon – “serve as an intermediary between the viewer and the holy person represented.” This understanding was available well before 680: certainly by the 6th century, and probably much earlier. Indeed, rather than pose a choice between Kitzinger’s tipping point (ca. 550) and Brubaker and Haldon’s (ca. 680), we should consider the address to an agent through its representation as a near constant in the long-term history of Greco-Roman art."
So, in a video where Gavin's claim is that there is "no debate" among scholars that veneration emerged no earlier than the 6th Century, we see that the first essay in one of Gavin's featured volumes pushes the date back to *at least* the 5th Century (and we'll see in my next thread that Jensen actually dates it much earlier), and the second essay says veneration can be assumed as a "near constant" across the entire era. This is precisely the "push back" that Humphreys was talking about in his introduction.
Whether we or Gavin agrees with Jensen or Anderson is neither here nor there for the current discussion. The simple fact is that Gavin's "no debate" argument has been falsified by his own witnesses. There is in fact a vigorous debate among the very scholars Gavin himself is holding up.
Dave Sims retweeted
You still don't get it?
Forget left & right, forget Muslim or Jew.
The only target is Christianity. Every shift, every world change has one purpose: to destroy the Church. But be at peace, they fail.
1/ Ok, why not? Since we're on the subject @iconsofgod @Alex_Ortodoxie I might as well post a summary of the catalog of misattributions that @seraphim199 and I did over a year ago, for those who didn't listen to the full two hours. :)
There are several, but I'll start with the one that got my attention in the first place, the Mike Humphreys quote from Gavin's "Icons are Still an Accretion" video.
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Humphreys himself is clear in the introduction regarding the theme of his anthology:
"Overall, the present volume, or more precisely its individual components, pushes back against some of Brubaker and Haldon’s arguments, especially those based on the brilliant but often speculative work of Paul Speck. [...] To understand both Brubaker and Haldon and the present Companion, it is necessary to briefly survey the historiography"
It is in the subsequent section that Humphreys eventually synopsizes Brubaker and Haldon's "revisionist" position, and it's from that section that Gavin pulled the quote, mistakenly thinking it was Humphreys' own conclusion.
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In the subsequent discussion we had, Gavin finally agreed that the quote was not Mike Humphreys' own conclusion, and he posted a comment at the top of the video, but in doing so further confused the issue by trying to make it appear that Humphreys was merely summarizing a "recent tradition" and not explicitly Brubaker and Haldon, whose arguments the Humphreys volume would argue against. Here's Gavin's comment:
"Note: I should have been clearer that the Humphreys' quote starting around 29:23 is his summary of a recent tradition of scholarship, not Humphreys explicating his own view. Apologies for not being clearer about that."
More to come.
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