Taken from a video entitled”Paganism vs. Christianity
men like Occam and Scotus, as a bottom line in moving the West away from Thomistic natural law and toward the overwhelming view that pertained to complete fulfillment in the Knowledge. The point being that what we today call science– hard science, provable and falsifiable claims
, based on mathematical formulas, propositional knowing– is the only science that stands. As Pageau mentions, this has also affected Christianity in the West. What we see is what I call a kind of de-incarnation, a Christianity that ends up being really standard, really literalistic, very moralistic as
well. To fight the science of the age, Western Christianity(and, particularly, Protestants)turned the Bible into a science and history book: difficult science, provable and falsifiable claims, subject to mathematical formulas, propositional knowing.
Pageau continues that Orthodoxy did not follow this very same path, maintaining the mystical. So, what have I been considering recently? As regular readers understand, I value elements of each of Protestantism, Orthodoxy, and Catholicism. Yet, I have actually found myself thinking about why the appeal of Orthodox Christianity had such a considerable pull on me(and lots of others)in the last several years. Was I unfairly decreasing the worth of Protestantism– the focus on teaching the Bible, i.e., propositional learning? What I am concluding is that I, like, maybe, much of wider society, am responding versus the result of taking nominalism and propositional learning to the extreme. Was I overreacting?(As an aside, taking nominalism to the extreme is
the very same issue that is also behind the meaning crisis.)Concerning this understanding has actually helped me to remain strong in the value of Protestantism– to not enable myself similarly to overreact away from the propositional. We discover in different methods, and different
people find out in ways besides how others find out. If for no other factor, it is for this that I am grateful for all well-grounded Christian traditions– and it is likewise why I really do not like it when some people of one tradition or another highly slam those who are strolling a different path. C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity. As long as one is accepting of what is to be discovered in the corridor, this really suffices.