Marc Schelske
A
thread 1/10
Thesis Excerpt #2 : (Starting to lay out the problem) --
"We humans have often imagined God as the highest rightful holder of coercive power, a king whose absolute reign spans the cosmos.
05:16 PM - May 08, 2024
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Marc Schelske
A
thread 2/10
This view of God is less a revelation of divinity than a societal mirror, reflecting how the powerful in every age and culture behave. Expectations of human rulers were scaled to divine size.
05:16 PM - May 08, 2024
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Marc Schelske
A
thread 3/10
Greek philosophers, from the 6th to the 2nd century BCE, rejected such portrayals of the divine, proposing a conception of God as the perfect, impassable, transcendent principle or consciousness.
05:16 PM - May 08, 2024
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Marc Schelske
A
thread 4/10
This Greek logic of the divine perfections influenced early Christian theology, and later, as these ideas were filtered and expanded by theologians like Anselm and Thomas Aquinas, they became the basis for what would come to be called classical theism.
05:16 PM - May 08, 2024
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Marc Schelske
A
thread 5/10
Classical theism, descending from the thinking of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, among others, and later honed by Jewish and Christian theologians, starts from first principles, defining God as the perfect Ultimate Reality, which logically must be self-sufficient.
05:16 PM - May 08, 2024
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Marc Schelske
A
thread 6/10
Thus, God must be eternal, simple, immaterial, immutable, impassible, omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent. Anselm codified this perspective in the often-memorized phrase: God is "that than which nothing greater can be conceived."
05:16 PM - May 08, 2024
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Marc Schelske
A
thread 7/10
Perhaps so, but history demonstrates that the precise nature of the Greatest Conceivable Being depends rather dramatically on who is doing the conceiving.
05:16 PM - May 08, 2024
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Marc Schelske
A
thread 8/10
This monarchical conception of God tends to be invoked when power holders want to claim divine sanction or enroll religious people in their cause.
05:16 PM - May 08, 2024
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Marc Schelske
A
thread 9/10
Presently, an emerging stream of security-seeking, hierarchical, and zealously partisan Christianity is leveraging this type of theology for authoritarian ends. These Christians hold a consequentialist worldview.
05:16 PM - May 08, 2024
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Marc Schelske
A
thread 10/10
Their hierarchical hermeneutic provides sacred warrant to seek and use power by any necessary means to enact their social vision."
#goodtheologysaveslives
05:16 PM - May 08, 2024
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