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EDUCATION-Christ as Prophet RELIGION-Christ as Priest GOVERNMENT-Christ as King + + + EDUCATION-Christ as Prophet =================== ======================
Today’s Leftists, Liberals and Humanists challenge the whole heritage of Western civilization upon which America is founded. The foundation of America is “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” of the Judeo-Christian worldview as expressed by Thomas Jefferson and the American founders in the Declaration of Independence. There is actually a 4000 year story of Western civilization going back to Abraham in the Jerusalem tradition and to Heraclitus in the tradition of the ancient Greeks of Athens. This 4000 year story is the subject of the two volume work The Story of Western Philosophy: The Rise and Fall and Return of Reason by Frank Mitchell. This "story" traces the 4000 year history of God's will for good government from Abraham to the present day in relationship to various Greek philosophical schools or worldviews in terms of their Rationality or Logos validity, and how these topics relate to a Shining City "Kingdom come" vision. Available at Amazon>> https://www.amazon.com/Story-Western-Philosophy-Return-Reason/dp/1625107501/
+ + + EDUCATION-Christ as Prophet There can be tendency to make things complicated or unnecessarily complicated. What is education about in the final analysis? It is about passing on truths established by Right Reason, and it is about teaching how to use and apply those truths (in Right Reason or Wisdom) to real life situations. In the West this is seen most famously in two figures: Socrates in the Greco-Roman tradition and Solomon in the Judeo-Christian one. Socrates is famous for his asking questions in order to come to proper conclusions in Rational or Reasoned discussions and debate. This is sometimes called the Socratic dialectic, and it will reign supreme in the West until the 19th century when it is replaced for humanists by the irrational and absurd Hegelian dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, and this replacement will begin the process of the fall of the Reason and Rationality that had produced the greatness of the West. And this fall will ultimately culminate in the second half of the 20th century in postmodernism, which openly advocates and champions absurdity and the complete end of the Logos Rationality (of Heraclitus and Socrates) that had built the West. But it is worse than this for today because the triumph of totally irrational and absurd postmodernism also throws out the Wisdom of Solomon which for the ancient Hebrews is the counterpart to the Logos Rationality of the ancient Greeks. In fact, the Wisdom of Solomon is the Logos of the Greeks. They are are one and the same says Justin Martyr with his Logos-Christology, and they are Christ. What the Early Church Fathers did is they merged the Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman traditions to give us Western civilization and to give us the Christian cosmology from the Creation to the Final Judgment: There is an all-Righteous Creator God, who created an ordered universe or cosmos (not a chaos), and He created man in the Garden of Eden, and man fell in sin and so God will send a Savior in Christ to redeem man out of his fallen state and from God's eternal condemnation at the Final Judgment. To cut to the chase here, this is not all a matter of “faith.” This Christian cosmology is established by Reason given the established truths of Reason and Revelation in the Judeo-Christian and the Greco-Roman traditions. The Christians (not the atheists) in the 18th century Enlightenment held this view, put forward most famously in modern times by John Locke. The atheists of the Enlightenment famously championed “Reason,” but for them “Reason” was limited to the material facts of science, which in itself is an un-Reasonable view!!! The facts of science of science are themselves immaterial, and further it is not Reasonable to say they contain all Reasoned knowledge regardless. But, anyway, for the atheists of the Enlightenment “Reason” did not apply to a belief in God or a belief in any real morality or a belief in the truths of the Bible, for which we have tons of good Reasons to believe is true. What one has in the 18th century Enlightenment is, in essence, a battle of the worldviews: the Christians and some Deists as Jefferson and Franklin were Rational moral theists while the atheists and clockwork-universe Deists with no Higher Moral Law were irrational amoral humanists, but this is exactly the same worldview conflict that existed between the Middle Stoic Cicero and the Epicurean Lucretius. This battle of the worldviews is a matter of secular education and natural philosophy and natural theology. Christ's dying for our sins is not a product of natural Reason but part of the Special Revelation of God in the Bible (just as Thomas Aquinas taught). However, even the Special Revelation of God in the Bible is known to be true by Reason just as Christian apologists have argued, correctly, since the 2nd century. “Faith” is not about the historical facts of the Resurrection and the Atonement and so forth, but rather faith is about personally trusting in Christ's atoning sacrifice for one's self, which is the central part of the sphere of religion, but such a personal faith in Christ's atoning sacrifice is not particularly relevant to a secular education based on Reason and the well-established by Reason facts of history. It is a Rational fact of history and of a good education that not only did Christ rise from the dead, but He died on the Cross for our sins, and this is so whether someone wants to accept this personally for himself or herself or not. That is really something of another matter altogether. Gravity is true, so don't jump out of an airplane. The objective truth and reality of gravity is based on Reason, observation, experience and investigation, and the objective truth and reality of gravity has little or nothing to do with whether one wants to personally (subjectively) accept it for one's self or not. Wise students accept the fact of gravity for themselves, un-Wise students do not. The same can be said of the objective truth and reality of the atoning work of Christ. It is sometimes said that the supernatural is not Reasonable. Is that true? Yes and no. Yes, in that the supernatural done by God is not part of the Reason of science, but no, in that it is perfectly Reasonable to say that a God who created the entire universe and everything in it can intervene in the normal natural laws of material science if He wants to in order to reveal Himself or demonstrate His power. Doing the supernatural is in no way a violation of God's nature because there is nothing immoral or unrighteous about it. The Christian believes in the natural laws of science as much as any atheist who refuses to accept the supernatural not because of Reason as the atheist says of himself but rather because of his irrational commitment to atheism. It is (as the agnostic Bertrand Russell proved) clearly irrational not to believe in God, and if so, it is also irrational not to believe in the possibility of the supernatural by God. The point is not that all of the supernatural events in the Bible necessarily occurred, but rather they could have, and it is not irrational to think this, but rather not to think it! Such is a good education based on Reason. Bottom line on right education: We return to the Reason of the West based on the Logos of the Socratic dialectic, and we reject the absurdity of humanist postmodernism as well as its forerunner of modern materialist humanism that foolishly attempted to limit all human knowledge to material facts. + + + |
The
Story of Western Philosophy: The Rise and Fall and Return of Reason
by Frank Mitchell