The "Mystical Theology" of the Orthodox Church

[@telosbound]

Time: Crown of Eternity: a.co/d/955i89l From the blurb: "This work provides readers with a rich, scholarly engagement with Biblical, patristic, and modern theology with the goal of articulating a profoundly Trinitarian and Christological ontology of time and eternity. Ideal for theologians, philosophers, and those seeking a deeper understanding of the spiritual and philosophical dimensions of our sojourn in time, this book offers a comprehensive and contemplative journey into the divine mystery that governs both time and eternity." Show less

[@redeemedzoomer6053]

This sounds like a very interesting channel! Would love to do a convo sometime

[@FlyingGospel]

You Catholic yet bro

[@redeemedzoomer6053]

@ no

[@telosbound]

Hmu on instagram

[@catcans]

RZ I've been following these guys for a long time, great channel and I'd love to see the collab.

[@travislee3372]

As an Orthodox Christian I just started following this channel and I'm very impressed, especially by its accuracy in what the Orthodox tradition teaches. This is really good and very accurate!

[@orthoclips2k24]

08:49 I've had a similar path. I was a nihilist and eventually reached a point where I had to reconsider my presuppositions, as they didn’t make sense. The presupposition (that I've had): "Everything is relative, and there is no absolute truth". This is in itself, an absolute truth claim and therefore a contradiction.

[@valimg1184]

Ayy Dumitru Staniloae is Romanian just like me! Just this Christmas I received the 8th Filocalia written by him from my parts. The first bit is on John of the Ladder and has a bunch of commentary by Staniloae on physical prayer techniques and general asceticism experience and mysticism. BTW congratulations you seem quite young with a great intellect and heart. All the best, Valentin

[@yecksd]

I hope a bajillion people see this

[@kyogyoshinsho]

If you are not already familiar, there’s an affinity here to certain strands of Japanese philosophy (it’s actually too rich to describe in comment). The main philosopher I’m thinking about here is Hajime Tanabe. The Japanese term he uses to express metanoia is more appropriate to apophatic theology: ‘zange’, or “repentance, confession, or penitence”.

[@telosbound]

Fascinating

[@z3rocodes]

12:38 That is gold, beautiful summation of my experience so far as an Orthodox Christian

[@kotisgalos8989]

Great video, keep up the good work! Just a recent insight I had on the subject after reading What is Ancient Greek Philosophy of Pierre Hadot. Philosophy in the original sense of the word for the Greeks means not just reason but someone's entire way of life. So, according to this definition, we Christians are philosophers and everything we do, from our faith, reason and prayer to our daily actions in the Church is our philosophy. Philosophy is the holistic movement of man towards God, while true theology is God's movement towards man. So in this sense, philosophy cannot be complete without theology, while theology does not negate the freedom of human will and action. Philosophy and theology are united like the two natures of Christ, fully without confusion.

[@patricks.2256]

Another great video!

[@AndrewBorrill-q4c]

Great video and brilliant channel. I'd love to see you compare the personal knowledge of God, and the concomitant sacrifice of reason in Orthodoxy, with John Vervaeke's idiosyncratic Neoplatonic view. Specific questions of interest (at least for me would be): 1. What is a person and how can this term be applied to God? How does this compare to the impersonal Neoplatonic One? (Maybe Spaemann or Hierotheos Vlachos might touch on this?) 2. How does one 'sacrifice' their intellect 'to' a personal God, and what is the phenomenological difference between a Personal Triune God and Vervaeke's 'One'? I struggle with this leap as it seems to me to be a rejection of reason and experience, rather than a realisation of reasons limit and the faith that is required for all positions (I am happy to be wrong here, maybe this is a case of not casting pearls before swine?) 3. How does this relate to the miraculous? The acceptance of the miraculous is something I struggle with from lack of experience of such phenomenon (though I am open to it, at least to the best of my knowledge of myself), but also because of the questions of intelligibility and the problem of Evil that seem to be raised by the miraculous. For context, I have been I have been circling around Christianity (specifically Orthodox/Catholic) for a number of years without ever being able to make the plunge and find Vervaeke's view (or my appropriation of it) quite a compelling as one can live in something that can't be grasped by their reason, but it still in line with what 'reason', 'experience' and 'science' seem to point towards. Having said that, I do see flaws with it, specifically the lack of community and tradition, and the risk of it falling into individualism. I hope that makes sense and thanks for reading, I appreciate that is a lot of writing!

[@VirtueInEternity]

Is there any place or group, if not directly affiliated with telosbound, sort of connected to it? I have almost completely lost my faith [after placing heavy trust on classical theism / natural theology], and it has induced extreme levels of pain. I am a practicing Orthodox Christian also. I would love to ask some things, even if just to rekindle the possibility of faith in my head, but I have no clue where. I assume that you are very busy, but perhaps there is a specific space you could direct me to? Thank you in advance, God bless you

[@gezalesko3813]

God is truth... truth is a person not an intellectual concept. It is not that everything God says or does is from truth it is that truth is everything God does or says...

[@AquariusGate]

All information is divine awareness, Hagia Sophia. Mankind reaches an alignment and new ideas arise, thee is no other wisdom. Science is this: A seed grows from both ends, a rooting and blossoming. Some time into the splendour a mind says "we can turn our minds back into the substance, to find all we are missing". Dissecting and cutting away the creative expression to find the source of divine inspiration, the soul of life itself. 500 tears of this and science has stripped away life's complexity. An attempt to find the seed, the cause of being. Their subject remains but all the splendour has withered away, unable to sustain a creative expression when the roots of existence have all been cut away. This is the intelligence that leads a Christian to the new house. That looks to the.future knowing the past is defeated on the splendour to come. Reject this abuse of nature and enslavement to desire. You are nature and we are all here to learn, not to be rewarded.

[@watsonblack7481]

So real real real

[@dernormale3232]

Wow I've always thought of something similar since I've read Nietzsche and understood that our reasoning needs a grounding in some suprarational assumptions. In the case of Nietzsche there are our vital forces which give birth to the most fundamental assumptions on which our world view is build. In the case of orthodox christianity as I've understood it's our faith in god and his revelation from which we are able to reason in a proper way. I think the next step would be to show that we get in christianity the only true revelation of god, because the point that our reasoning is limited still opens the door for a relativistic point of view in which we (similar to Nietzsche) can decide in which presumptions for our reasoning we put our faith in. But to do that we wouldn't we need our reasoning?

[@telosbound]

Christianity can only really be “defended” from “within,” because the revelation of God is received THROUGH HIM, so you can’t start from the outside and build up towards Him. Just as Christ does not defend Himself on a worldly basis, but rather accomplishes the will of His Father, theology does not have to justify itself but is tasked with meditating upon what has been revealed by God. I’d defend Christianity by demonstrating its inner coherence, how the person of Christ possesses infinite explanatory power. Next video will be on this, specifically how all of Scripture points to Christ.

[@irodjetson]

Philosophy is formally different than theology, it’s methodologically different, procedurally different, if you collapse the term philosophy to it’s etymology then sure, philosophy is just theology ultimately, but what makes philosophy in a sense autonomous from theology has to do with their formal distinctions. Philosophy begins with the created being and ends with the created being, because it’s what you come to know from your senses and can abstract from it with your intellect, the formal object of theology is faith, so you don’t argue philosophically about things that you know by faith, you argue theologically (from the Bible, tradition, magisterium, basically revelation). If you don’t. Distinguish the formal objects formally, you confuse them, and you might end up thinking that somebody that is doing philosophy (the 5 ways of Saint Thomas for example) is confusing the levels and that it's trying to argue from some weird form of rationalism about God. Philosophy broadly speaking is just love of Christ, formally and classically speaking it's about the love of knowing from the creaturely up to the highest universal knowledge you can attain by the natural God given power of natural reason.

[@brianortiz809]

I had no idea Orthodox epistemology had the same views wrt reason as Protestantism and Islam. Good to know

[@respectkindness-oj6xz]

compared to what?

[@codygraham2713]

11:58 hahaha!😂

[@janderson1798]

The mystery of God in Col. 2:2 is Christ; the mystery of Christ Eph. 3:4 is the church. God is a mystery, and Christ, as the embodiment of God to express Him, is the mystery of God. Christ also is a mystery, and the church, as the Body of Christ to express Him, is the mystery of Christ.

[@legostory33]

You cannot comprehend the divine mysteries without prayer and asceticism. You read however much you want about the Divine Liturgy and the whole counsel of God but it is not found in books. Christ did not come to give us knowledge or to write doctrines and theology. He came to save our souls. I find this western intellectual tradition to be pretty vain. Especially with the fact that no one discussing the mysteries is a priest or a monastic. We ought to all humble ourselves and not puff ourselves up with knowledge. But to accept that we do not know everything and that is okay but instead we trust in God to reveal us these things when we are ready.

[@frederickanderson1860]

You add to your faith not on philosophy. 2 Peter: chapter 1: 5-7. Stick to the scripture

[@Aaron-Ansell]

Hey have you thought of selling your book by some other means than Amazon? I prefer not to support that godless conglomerate

[@telosbound]

i can send u a pdf (no charge) if u email me. [e-mail]. amazon is just so efficient for us, we'll be switching to actual publishers soon

[@Aaron-Ansell]

@@telosbound Wow, thank you! I'll email you now.

[@TheWay-u1n]

To emphasize the 2nd person over the whole is partial thus discrediting Christianity relative to Islam and Judaism.. Out of the way Jesus

[@TheWay-u1n]

All is One

[@respectkindness-oj6xz]

who is second person?

[@joshuaparsons887]

​@TheWay-u1n only the second person of the Godhead balances the one and the many

[@respectkindness-oj6xz]

@joshuaparsons887 are you sure what you are talking about?

[@joshuaparsons887]

​@respectkindness-oj6xz yes, I am sure the Jesus Christ is the Logos