Thought Circles

It’s only the beginning of the second week of classes, but I’m happy to have one of my papers out of the way. It was a relatively small Ethics paper in which I had to reflect on one of Plato’s dialogues, Euthyphro. If you’re wondering why we’re reading Plato in Ethics class, it’s because, really, there’s hardly a field of study in which Plato is not relevant. But also, and more importantly, before coming to what Ethics looks like in our practice, it makes great sense to begin with what Ethics looks like in our thought. As a result, Dr. Van Raalte has spent the first few classes acquainting us with the good, the true, and the beautiful, and how these noble concepts have concerned philosophers through the ages, both Christian and not. Plato’s Euthyphro is a classic text on the good in particular, and how the good relates to God.

The setting of the dialogue is a conversation between Euthyphro and the philosopher Socrates. Euthyphro is prosecuting his own father for murder, an act which his family rejects as “impious.” Euthyphro doesn’t think his family knows the first thing about piety, so he in turn rejects their opinion. Socrates is intrigued that Euthyphro understands piety so well, so the philosopher asks him: What is piety? If you’ve ever read Plato, you’ll know that Socrates loves to trip up his overly assured conversation partners, so it’s no surprise that Euthyphro soon gets stuck trying to answer this simple question.

One of the questions that Socrates puts to him is this: Is an act pious because the gods love it, or do the gods love an act because it is pious?

Put another way: Is the good that which God commands, or does God command it because it is good?

Responsibly Profiling the Consequences of Aramaic

A great writer once said: “עֲשֹׂ֨ות סְפָרִ֤ים הַרְבֵּה֙ אֵ֣ין קֵ֔ץ וְלַ֥הַג הַרְבֵּ֖ה יְגִעַ֥תבָּשָֽׂר׃”
We would understand this as: “Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh.”

I picked up most of this year’s books from the seminary today:

The Good Wine

We have the pleasure this semester of indulging somewhat in the field of geography, “pleasure” and “indulging” being precisely the words. It’s part of our course, “History and Institutions of Old Testament Times,” which takes us into the details of Israelite history and culture. We get to work with a textbook that I’d happily recommend to anyone, a book that fourth-year Gerritt noted would properly grace your coffee table. The book is the Zondervan Atlas of the Bible by Carl G. Rasmussen, and while I realize that a geography party is really nobody’s idea of a good time, if you were to throw one, you’d start with this atlas because that’s what you do with the good wine.

In addition to having maps on everything from the geology of Palestine to the divisions of the Hasmonean dynasty, it has charts aligning Israel’s historical development with the dates and developments of the great empires around it, and it’s full of pictures, the appreciation of which you never really grow out of. Here are some of the photos, and you can find many more at HolyLandPhotos.org.

Psalm 29:5 – The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars; the Lord breaks the cedars of Lebanon:


Numbers 21:28 – For fire came out from Heshbon, flame from the city of Sihon. It devoured Ar of Moab, and swallowed the heights of the Arnon:


1 Samuel 17:2 – And Saul and the men of Israel were gathered, and encamped in the Valley of Elah:

Finest, Greatest, Deepest

The reading that I look most forward to every week is a book with a name that’s almost too boring to type: Systematic Theology. We read it for a course that at first blush sounds equally stodgy: Dogmatics. In fact, the term “dogmatic” is used these days almost exclusively to mean something like “stubbornly rigid,” or “unreasonable,” or “completely impervious to compromise.” As in, most sports teams do have a poor season every now and then but, unlike the Blue Jays, they aren’t dogmatic about it.

So it’s something of a rescue operation, a reaching blindly under the couch past the centipede nest in order to get the dust-covered mento that your son just dropped. And like most rescue operations involving theological nomenclature, the reaching goes way back into the Greek.

Philosophomy

I began my sophomore year this morning at CRTS, on a day that saw the Humidex cackling from its perch in the low forties. I showed up on time today, which means I’m batting at .500 for first-day punctuality. Modest; when not compared with anyone else’s. I have two double classes on Tuesday mornings, Church History, and New Testament background. Both courses cover material that I enjoy studying, so I imagine Tuesdays will be a good day.

The class in New Testament background covers the historical, social, cultural, etc., contexts in which the New Testament took place. So, for instance, we learned something of Herod the Great, King of Palestine when Christ was born. He had killed his wife, he had killed three of his sons, and he had killed the entire noble household of the Hasmoneans, simply because he saw in them a threat to his power. So you can imagine how he felt when the Magi came looking for the newly-born King of the Jews.