Our dearly departed

i hate goodbyes.

but i guess sometimes a sort of goodbye can be kind of good. a very strange kind of good--"sweet sorrow", you know--a dismantling kind of tragedy that opens people, slightly, and exposes unusual glimpses. the hidden cables that tether me to you become briefly, unsettlingly visible. it's terrifying--like a kiss is terrifying.

tonight was a good kind of goodbye. gathering, food, legos, music, laughter, and circulating conversations, mostly like a hundred other conversations--except occasionally the cables are exposed. and, as much as i try to flee those moments, and as much as i hate a cliché--they mean a lot. thank you.

still, i do hate goodbyes.

Interesting fact

apparently my blog is the number one hit for the google query "Famous Losers named Jennifer". i know this because statcounter saw somebody came in that way. i'm not sure how i ended up winning that relevance contest--i don't think i've mentioned any losers named jennifer.

On friendship, and passing

God bless St. Augustine.

There were other things which occupied my mind in the company of my friends: to make conversation, to share a joke, to perform mutual acts of kindness, to read together well-written books, to share in trifling and in serious matters, to disagree though without animosity--just as a person debates with himself--and in the very rarity of disagreement to find the salt of normal harmony, to teach each other something or to learn from one another, to long with impatience for those absent, to welcome them with gladness on their arrival. These and other signs come from the heart of those who love and are loved and are expressed through the mouth, through the tongue, through the eyes, and a thousand gestures of delight, acting as fuel to set our minds on fire and out of many to forge unity.

This is what we love in friends....

'O God of hosts, turn to us and show us your face, and we shall be safe.' For wherever the human soul turns itself, other than to you, it is fixed in sorrows, even if it is fixed upon beautiful things external to you and external to itself, which could nevertheless be nothing if they did not have their being from you. Things rise and set: in their emerging they begin as it were to be, and grow to perfection; having reached perfection, they grow old and die. Not everything grows old, but everything dies. So when things rise and emerge into existence, the faster they grow to be, the quicker they rush towards non-being. That is the law limiting their being. So much have you given them, namely to be parts of things which do not all have their being at the same moment, but by passing away and by successiveness, they all form the whole of which they are parts. That is the way our speech is constructed by sounds which are significant. What we say would not be complete if one word did not cease to exist when it has sounded its constituent parts, so that it can be succeeded by another.

Let these transient things be the ground on which my soul praises you, God creator of all.... But in these things there is no point of rest: they lack permanence. They flee away and cannot be followed with the bodily senses. No one can fully grasp them even while they are present.

St. Augustine, Confessions IV.viii-x

Trinity: Episode IV

If you who haven't been following the comments, you're missing out. In particular, Dale Tuggy paid me the high compliment of linking here from his blog, trinities--a discussion of the same subject, with one exciting difference: Dale knows what he's talking about. Seriously, check it out.

Okay, let's recap. In my last post, I set up the inconsistent tetrad. For easier reference, I'm going to give the claims more mnemonic names:

(GW) Only God is worship-worthy.
(GH) God is not human.
(JH) Jesus is human.
(JW) Jesus is worship-worthy.

Let me quickly recant on one point. I spoke in a couple places as if orthodoxy would constrain us to explanations in which Jesus is identically God. On reflection, I think that probably can't be right, for the reasons in my first post on the subject. If orthodoxy really says "Jesus = God", then orthodoxy is confused. More likely, orthodoxy doesn't really say that--if indeed there is something out there called "orthodoxy" which is saying non-trivial things on the subject.

There's more to be said about the two parthood theories, but I don't get the sense that any of us really likes them that much. If somebody wants to go to bat for one of them or propose a refinement, then by all means.

**

Okay, so. Dale proposes a bold and clean solution to the difficulty: deny GW. But we want to do this in a way that preserves the sense of the first commandment. And there's a pretty neat way to do this.

Key word: context. If I say, "There's only beer in the fridge", I don't mean that beer is strictly the only thing in the fridge--there's air, after all, and beer bottles. The point of my statement is to rule out particular sorts of alternative things you might otherwise think were in the fridge--like cheese, or peanut butter.

Now when scripture says things like "Only worship God", the point is to rule out particular sorts of alternative things you might otherwise worship--other gods. Don't worship Baal. Don't worship Ashoreth. Don't worship Ra. But should you worship Jesus? He isn't one of the Ancient Near East deities, so no problem.

Of course, Dale isn't an ANE deity either. Doesn't mean we get to worship him (though after that argument against Son-modalism, we may be tempted). The doctrine about worship runs a little deeper than that, and we're gonna need to flesh it out.

After a quick perusal through BibleGateway, it looks to me like there are three main categories of things you shouldn't worship.

1. Other gods
2. Idols
3. Astronomical bodies

The first two arguably belong in the same category (the prophets like to talk about "gods of wood and stone"). Maybe the third one belongs in that category too (sun- and moon-gods). But we may want to extend those categories to include earthlier things. Read through Deuteronomy 4.15-20. Does this forbid worshiping animals? Or men and women? It doesn't say, precisely--maybe because that's not the sort of thing people would have thought to do--but my definite sense is that animal-worship is not okay. Any dissenters out there?

If I'm right, then even granting that GW is weakened by context, we still have a problem. Because as I'm reading the text, the weaker version of GW still entails

(HW) Humans are not worship-worthy.

Same dilemma. I admit, though, that HW rings a fair bit hollower than GW, in the light of the New Testament. But if that generalization isn't true, then what is the rule that prohibits us from worshiping Dale? (Or John from worshiping the angel in Revelation 19?)

If Dale's solution does work for worship-worthiness, it still doesn't answer the parallel problems for the other attributes I allege could fill that slot in the argument. But it does present a strategy for answering them. Is God really the numerically unique entity that can forgive sins? Is God really the numerically unique judge of the world, the numerically unique ruler of creation, the numerically unique source of life? Maybe not. (Or maybe Jesus really isn't some of these things.)

Does this make polytheists of us all? I'm not sure how far I'm willing to take the idea that "monotheism is a verbal issue". If Bert thinks that there's more than one all-powerful, all-wise ruler of creation deserving of praise--or at any rate something like that--then I don't think Bert's a monotheist no matter how you cut it. Surely the proclamation that "the LORD is God, there is no other" means more than the trivial claim that "Only the LORD is the LORD"--i.e. anything identical to the LORD is identical to the LORD. I'm not sure exactly how much uniqueness we can give up before we can no longer say truly and non-trivially, "I believe in one god"--but there is a limit, and seems to me worship-worthiness at least runs pretty close to it.