I shared the following sketch, diatribe of sorts, on X just yesterday. A so-called Theobro (all bro no Theo) reshared it for his friend group, and they went to town. Memeing me galore. Dismissing me out of hand from their dilettantism. Not recognizing that I was leaving space for evangelizing, so to speak, even the philosophers; albeit in non-correlating ways. I.e., taking the philosophers’ respective grammars and language bags, and retexting them in a way that they are deployed in service of the King; insofar that that is possible or advisable. These guys are all bark and no theological bite. They claim to be scholastics reformed, proponents of Aristotelian Christianity, Christian Nationalists, so on and so forth. And yet they couldn’t even recognize how my off the top form vis-à-vis my post was written in a scholastic type of style. These immature souls are not worthy of engagement. They haven’t put any donkey work in, and they simply must rely on their swarming behavior; as if a hornets’ nest rattled by the Raid of God’s Word. My post, much like what I’m writing now, was just an in-the-moment venting of whatever came to mind as I wrote on a theme. It wasn’t really worded exactly the way I would have worded it if I was attempting to write with total clarity. It was simply a working out of my themes and thoughts that are seemingly always present to my mind’s-heart.
As anyone knows who has read me for any amount of time, you will notice how these themes are the themes I often opine upon as I engage the theological wormwood present in the forests of the correlationists and logic-choppers.
Objector. One has to wonder: when Aristotle and Plato were available to Jesus, why he didn’t use their respective philosophical categories to explain Himself to the world. Indeed, He was (is) Jewish; and He came first for the house of Israel, as the Jew from Nazareth. Even so, Philo was a Jew too.
Response. My conclusion: He considered the god of the philosophers as antiHim, even if some of their grammar might be commandeered and evangelized in non-correlationist ways later.
I think the response to this will be that He came for the Jews first, and was the Son of David, indeed. As the Gospel spread it had to be translated into different languages and conceptual frameworks. It had to subvert those languages and frameworks, disrupt even, for its own triune purposes (i.e., not colonial). His missio Dei, in the economy, was to mediate salvation to the Jews first, as a Jew, and then to the Gentiles. Which is why He was such a skandalon, a stumbling block, to both the Jews and the Greeks. He resisted the categories of this profane world, by irrupting within it, from the world He inhabited in the triune life; as the Bread of Heaven. He brought what the world was created to be (so a fittingness), in His incarnation and atonement; in the manger and the cross (as synecdoche). A world (from Heaven) of ostensible foolishness and weakness, particularly because He was just one man; a Jew even.
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P.S. One of my respondents even condemned me to hell for writing such words contra Aristotle and Plato. Hopefully these poor souls will ultimately come to know the joy of the Lord. I fear that its absence in their lives intimates a deeper delirium, beyond what they currently perceive of themselves coram Deo.