Boccaccio, Kreeft, Chesterton

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RamistThomist

RamistThomist

Puritanboard Clerk
I recently picked up

Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron
Peter Kreeft's Socrates Meets Jesus (Socrates enrolls in a liberal divinity school and cleans house)
and
GK Chesterton's St Francis
 
Socrates is the father of liberal divinity schools. Both are concerned about man and making oneself a better person. Both want therapeutic managerial states run by unaccountable do-gooders (as does Kreeft). Both are suicidal.

Why Francis was not condemned as a heretic has more to do with medieval Roman Catholic politics than the quality of his teachings.

Tell your fiance about the Decameron...
 
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clstamper said:
Socrates is the father of liberal divinity schools. Both are concerned about man and making oneself a better person. Both want therapeutic managerial states run by unaccountable do-gooders. Both are suicidal.
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Probably. But I enjoy Kreeft's writing style and have really been helped my his "dialogue" method
Why Francis was not condemned as a heretic has more to do with medieval Roman Catholic politics than the quality of his teachings.
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Chesterton's writing style on that one.

Tell your fiance about the Decameron...
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Probably will. I got this one because of my interest in medieval studies and literature, dating back to high school and college. I had to read part of Boccaccio in college, found it interesting, finally found time to finish it.
 
Spear Dane said:
Probably. But I enjoy Kreeft's writing style and have really been helped my his "dialogue" method/QUOTE]

Kreeft was raised a Dutch Calvinist and has been in rebellion for decades.

Chesterton's writing style on that one.
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Chesterton was a Romantic with a wild imagination. He could not distinguish between dreams and reality. His is the faith of Lefebrists and Carlists, Do not take him seriously on any level. He regularly slandered the Calvinism he refused to understand.

Feel free to read to read this stuff, but these guys are not our friends.
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Spear Dane said:
I recently picked up

Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron
Peter Kreeft's Socrates Meets Jesus (Socrates enrolls in a liberal divinity school and cleans house)
and
GK Chesterton's St Francis
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I think someone said Jesus and Socrates represent the sacred and secular foundations of Western Civilization. Many people have drawn parallels between them:
1. Both martyred by the state on trumped up accusations of blasphemy.
2. Both oral teachers who left none of their own writings but are remembered through the recorded accounts of their disciples.
3. Both spoke with an authority people recognized beyond thatof established authorities. They were adored by their friends and disciples and absolutely reviled by their enemies.
4. Both had (or believed they had) a divine calling, mandate even, to preach their gospel. Socrates to the young men of Athens. Jesus to the Lost Sheep of Israel.
5. Both also at first it appeared a miserable failure at their mission but were later gloriously vindicated. The ignominy of their death was turned to triumph. Jesus by his death purchased our redemption and was declared the Son of God through his resurrection. Socrates by his death proved death is to be despised not feared and that to sin is far worse an evil than the destruction of the body.
6. Both were (or thought) they were inspired by God. Jesus was Jehovah who was full of the Spirit of Jehovah. Socrates had his mysterious voice from Apollo who from childhood instructed him.
7. Both were on the surface moral teachers and reformers but underneath they were much more. Socrates was the gadfly of Athens, pointing out the sin and the ignorance (for they are the same) of the Athenians. Jesus reproved the Jews of their hypocrisy and formalism. Yet behind Socrates moral teaching was a belief and experience of eternal, immutable Spiritual Being. He is the patron saint of the real existence of transcendental intelligibles. Even more, he believed (as we see most clearly in the Republic V and the speech of Diotima in Symposium) that they lead to (or perhaps in some way are) an ineffable Absolute Single Reality, the source of being beyond being. Jesus in addition to and vastly superior to his ethical reforms, proclaimed the Kingdom of God was come and he was the Gate through which to enter.
8. Both enjoyed life's pleasures yet reject and denied the body. They were simultaneously hedonists and ascetics. Socrates went to drinking parties and could drink any man under the table. Jesus was accused of being a glutton and a winebibbler. Yet Socrates could stay awake through the night (while at war) standing under a tree under a beatific trance. One of his main teachings was the dualism of mind and body, the intellect and the appetite and that the latter was to be always subjected to the former. Jesus fasted and was tempted of the devil 40 days. He taught a moral code of stringent self denial and cross bearing.
9. They both drew a huge following after their death and founded a movement that fractured as it expanded. Socrates is the source of Platonism, Aristoteleanism, Cynicism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, even Skeptism (Phyronnism). Jesus, well just look at all the denominations we have in this country!
 
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Spear Dane said:
I recently picked up

Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron
Peter Kreeft's Socrates Meets Jesus (Socrates enrolls in a liberal divinity school and cleans house)
and
GK Chesterton's St Francis
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Socrates Meets Jesus is very good. I am not convinced as Kreeft is that we will see Socrates in Heaven, however.

I have not read Chesterton's work on St. Francis, but I have many of his volumes from Ignatius. His work on Thomas Aquinas was masterful. :up:
 
clstamper said:
Spear Dane said:
Probably. But I enjoy Kreeft's writing style and have really been helped my his "dialogue" method/QUOTE]

Kreeft was raised a Dutch Calvinist and has been in rebellion for decades.

Chesterton's writing style on that one.
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Chesterton was a Romantic with a wild imagination. He could not distinguish between dreams and reality. His is the faith of Lefebrists and Carlists, Do not take him seriously on any level. He regularly slandered the Calvinism he refused to understand.

Feel free to read to read this stuff, but these guys are not our friends.
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While I agree with the statement that he was harsh towards Calvinism, and should be read with a discerning mind, Chesterton has many keen insights on a number of different subjects.

I would say it is always good to have Bahnsen, Frame, and Van Til handy to balance him out.
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clstamper said:
caddy said:
I would say it is always good to have Bahnsen, Frame, and Van Til handy to balance him out.
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These are all fideists. Better: Turretin, Perkins and Ames.
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Amen to Turretin, Perkins and Ames. Help me with your statement concerning Bahnsen et. all as being fideists. As I understand this group and their writings, they are in agreement with Luther that reason is the devil's W***.

I must understand this group differently than you do...:um:
 
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caddy said:
clstamper said:
caddy said:
I would say it is always good to have Bahnsen, Frame, and Van Til handy to balance him out.
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These are all fideists. Better: Turretin, Perkins and Ames.
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Amen to Turretin, Perkins and Amens. Help me with your statement concerning Bahnsen et. all as being fideists.
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I'm going to get in trouble for this, but here goes:

1.) Turretin, Perkins and Ames were Reformed Catholics. I _do not_ mean this phrase in the distorted sense that some of the more eccentric Doug Wilson devotees use it. I mean they saw the Reformation correcting and continuing the work of Western Christendom. So they retained Anselm, Augustine and Aquinas, but only to the extent that they followed Scripture. They also upheld natural theology.

This view is often known as "Reformed Scholastism." Later, after the Scottish Enlightenment as the Calvinist version of Common Sense Realism. Even though this view is perfectly orthodox, Reformed teachers today routinely claim that these men sold out to the enlightenment in upholding the proper use of reason.

2.) Fideism denies natural theology. It appeared briefly in France through the teachings of Peter Bayle, who was an early encyclopedists. It came storming back via liberal theology, as it surrendered to Kant and agreed that the existence of God is unknowable to reason. Barth carried this flag for the neo-orthodox, while a whole bunch of people passed it off as Reformed orthodoxy, such as Van Til and Dooyeweerd.

Fiedeists or "presuppositionalists" make straw man arguments about natural theology being humanistic and autonomous. They agree with the Kantians in attacking the classical proofs of God's existence. They make up weird doctrines about the Bible being full of contradictions or "antimonies" and how truth is "perspectival" rather than objective. In short, they are creating a skeptical mess, just as Bayle did long ago. They might as well be postmodernists.

I blame Westminster for spurning the Princeton orthodoxy, which held on to the true catholic teachings. I believe the classical theology was tossed for a bunch of irrational, ideological claptrap. Neither the Reformers nor the Puritans ever heard of it -- and they would have condemned it if they had.
 
I can't take the fideist claim seriously. I don't understand how someone could get that out of reading presupps.[/QUOTE]

Deny natural theology and you are a fideist. Presuppositionalists hate that label, but it fits. I'm not saying everything that movement says is bad, but it seriously deviates from the Reformed Faith as was known from 1560 until 1927.

I will now duck down, so that the Van Tillians may hurl their whisky bottles in my direction...:)
 
clstamper said:
I can't take the fideist claim seriously. I don't understand how someone could get that out of reading presupps.
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Deny natural theology and you are a fideist. Presuppositionalists hate that label, but it fits. I'm not saying everything that movement says is bad, but it seriously deviates from the Reformed Faith as was known from 1560 until 1927.

I will now duck down, so that the Van Tillians may hurl their whisky bottles in my direction...:)[/QUOTE]
Being Anglican was less confusing....all I had to worry about was crossing myself at the right time.:)
 
If Fideism denies natural theology, and Presuppositionalism denies natural theology, then Fideism is equivalent to Presuppositionalism. Right...spot the fallacy.

Presuppositionalism (at least the only kind I care for) does not say that the existence of God is unknowable to reason. In fact TAG claims that in order to make sense of reason we must presuppose the Christian God (at least as the only live option).

clstamper said:
They agree with the Kantians in attacking the classical proofs of God's existence.
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Yes we all know how much Frame vehemently opposes the classical arguments.

clstamper said:
They make up weird doctrines about the Bible being full of contradictions or "antimonies" and how truth is "perspectival" rather than objective. In short, they are creating a skeptical mess, just as Bayle did long ago. They might as well be postmodernists.
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Why do you think Multiperspectivalism and objectivism are mutually exclusive?

Please provide a source quote where presuppers argue there are contradictions in the bible (as opposed to paradoxes).

In what ways is presuppositionalism like postmodernism, and why?
Thanks.
 
caleb_woodrow said:
If Fideism denies natural theology, and Presuppositionalism denies natural theology, then Fideism is equivalent to Presuppositionalism. Right...spot the fallacy.
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Fideism may be defined as "the denial of natural theology" or the "anything that denies the ability of human reason to know that divine providence exists."

Put another way: All who deny natural theology are fideists. Van Tillians deny natural theology. Ergo Van Tillians are fideists.

caleb_woodrow said:
Why do you think Multiperspectivalism and objectivism are mutually exclusive?
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Not objectivism. That's Ayn Rand. Realism. There exists such a thing as objective reality, whether or not we grasp it fully.

MP says there are multiple paths to truth which are equally valid even though they contradict. This is relativist rubbish repacked as Christian apologetics.

caleb_woodrow said:
Please provide a source quote where presuppers argue there are contradictions in the bible (as opposed to paradoxes).
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Paradoxes and contradictions are the same thing, If God did not want us to understand something, it would not be in Scripture. Saying there are paradoxes in Scripture is the big lie of neo-orthodoxy.

caleb_woodrow said:
In what ways is presuppositionalism like postmodernism, and why?
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Both hold that there is no discernible metanarrative in the universe. Postmodernism says different people have different stories that are equally true. Presup says that both sides of a paradox are equally true. Both end in relativism, anarchy and atheism.
 
The above--that is just simply false. You have repeatedly given nothing but assertions as to what presuppositionalism is. No scholarly quotations--just assertions. And even worse, these are the tired old assertions from several decades ago.

Whenever someone equates presup with neo-orthodoxy on paradoxes, I no longer even try to debate the issue.
 
clstamper said:
Fideism may be defined as "the denial of natural theology" or the "anything that denies the ability of human reason to know that divine providence exists."
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I think that is pretty weird. Calvin also denied this. An excerpt from his Institutes, Book 2, chapter 2:

19. But since we are intoxicated with a false opinion of our own discernment, and can scarcely be persuaded that in divine things it is altogether stupid and blind, I believe the best course will be to establish the fact, not by argument, but by Scripture.
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Of course, maybe we cut Calvin some slack because he wasn't quite as reformed as his successors.

But it looks like you have backed off some. If natural theology is merely an ability to discern divine providence, then what's the big deal? Even presuppositionalists believe and apply Romans 1. (Perhaps I should say, 'especially presuppositionalists').
 
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I remember reading in the Decameron about a story where someone invited a woman over for dinner, but he did not have any food in his house so he cooked a falcon for her.
 
R. Bottomly, the code from your post is a little off, so it makes it look like that quote came from me!
 
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victorbravo said:
clstamper said:
Fideism may be defined as "the denial of natural theology" or the "anything that denies the ability of human reason to know that divine providence exists."
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I think that is pretty weird. Calvin also denied this.]
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No he didn't, although Karl Barth was adamant that he did. Certainly Peter Bayle, the godfather of both the French Enlightenment and Calvinist presuppositionalism, did.

victorbravo said:
An excerpt from his Institutes, Book 2, chapter 2:

19. But since we are intoxicated with a false opinion of our own discernment, and can scarcely be persuaded that in divine things it is altogether stupid and blind, I believe the best course will be to establish the fact, not by argument, but by Scripture.
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That's not an endorsement of fideism. Classical theology starts with Scripture. Look at the old Reformed theology texts. Catholic orthodoxy is not rationalism.
 
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