Graeme Goldsworthy asks how we can know what is true

What follows is a summary of Graeme L. Goldsworthy's essay "'Thus Sayeth the Lord': The Dogmatic Basis of Biblical Theology" printed in the festchrift God Who is Rich in Mercy (Lancer, 1986). I hope to add my own comments after.

Reworking Goldsworthy's Essay

How can human beings know what is really true? False presuppositions produce false results. So any philosophy constructed of human reason, such as the Thomism of Roman Catholicism, cannot help but err. "Thomism along with liberalism and Arminianism establishes human knowledge, reason and logic" as the means by which human beings can know what is real. As Aquinas, following Aristotle, taught, "By what is evident to the senses, man is capable of developing a philosophical framework within which revelation is defined and understood." But natural methods can never describe true reality because the human beings that use them are blind. Human beings not only deny but actively suppress the truth. Therefore, "common humanity and human interests in themselves provide no real common ground for understanding truth."

Certainly believers and unbelievers can and do "work side by side in the sciences, humanities, arts, and politics. But they can never agree on the ultimate meaning" of it all. For most, the measure of truth is the autonomous self. But for a believer--one who has been healed of his or her blindness--there is access to truth; the cornerstone of reality is made available. Yes, for those who can see, truth's measure is Jesus, the God-man, announced by the father and attested by witnesses inspired by the Spirit.

John Calvin, the last of the first wave of Protestant reformers, taught with his fellows that it was the Easter light of the Holy Spirit that opens the eyes of human beings to see the truth embodied in Jesus of Nazareth. And this is no mystic truth, but a historical one. The historical sweep of the Bible and all of history with it makes up the witness by which human beings understand the birth, life, death, resurrection, ascension, and enthronement of the man Jesus. The historical arc of Jesus' incarnation fits historiography into its proper frame. It is a jigsaw set right within the redemptive arc of time that begins in creation and goes on into the everlastingness of the age to come.

More to come . . .

Of the late Greek theologian Chrysostomos Stamoulis

Orthodox theologian, university professor, and musician Chrysostomos Stamoulis passed into the Lord's keeping in mid-August 2025. I'd not heard of him until I read a tribute by the World Council of Churches, which led to further research. I really like Dr. Stamoulis's ideas. So, here's a place to put what I know about him and his work.

“The aesthetic theology of Professor Chrysostomos Stamoulis is a holistic one. For him, the distinction between the holy and the unholy, the sacred and the profane, is false. Music, poetry, theatre, film, the novel, philosophy, and science are not ‘secular’ endeavors, but attempts to give significance to the world and especially to its most critical questions about love, life, and death. The rejection of the distinction between holy and unholy applies equally to the distinction between the familiar and the strange. The stranger should be a part of my own life. He invites me to dialogue, he challenges me and he is the chance for an authentic self-knowledge. Christ is the supreme criterion for judging the ecclesiastical life. The members of the Church, in order to be authentic, must follow Christ’s paradigm. They must be open to the unfamiliar, to the wholly different one. But He is also the assumption of concrete man and reality. As a consequence, the Christian must embrace real life, as it is, without nostalgic flight towards an idealized historical past. Professing a living theology, Stamoulis urges us not to lose the beauty of the present by overloading it with the chimerical beauties of the past, or indeed of the future. His thinking is, in its way, a theological version of Carpe diem.”

Bibliography

• Texts on the diologue of Orthodoxy with the city, politics and culture publishes by Armos, Athens 2016.
• Love and sexuality. Interdisciplinary narrative, from antiquity to the present day, from microorganisms to humans (ed.), Armos Publishing House, Athens 2014.
• Test for a culture of incarnation published by Akritas, Athens 2009.
• Lot's wife and modern theology published by Indictos, Athens 2008 and Armos 2014.
• The saint is beautiful. Probers in the hospitable aesthetics of Orthodoxy. Akristas, Athens 2004, 2005, 2008, 2010.
• About light. Personal or physical energies? Contributions to the modern problematic Holy Trinity in the Orthodox space, published by "To Palimpsiston", Thessaloniki 1999, 2007.
• Theotokos and orthodox dogma. Study in the teaching of Saint Cyril of Alexandris, published by "To Palimpsiston", Thessaloniki 1999, 2003.
• Holy Beauty: Prolegomena to an Orthodox Philocalic Aesthetics (Kallos to hagion). James Clarke. London, 2022.
• Broken Bridges: An Introduction to Orthodox Fundamentalism. trans. Constantine Lerounis. Sebastian Press. Alhambra, California. 2021.
• We got run over: Essays on Orthodoxy's self-entrapment. Athens 2021.
• What the Fox seeking in the Fair? Essays on the Dilogues of Orthodoxy with Politics, Culture, and the City Athens 2016.
• As if I were a Stranger and a Wanderer, or Incarnation: the Migration of Love. Athens 2011.
• Love and Death: An Essay on the Incarnation. Athens 2009.
• Lot's Wife and 20th Century Theology. Athens 2008.
• Sacred Beauty: An Introduction to the Philocalic Aesthetics of Orthodoxy. Athens 2004, 2005, 2008.

Links

In memory of Chrysostos Stamoulis
World Council of Churches
Author bio from James Clarke
Why theology needs the arts
Stamoulis on COVID-19
The Theater of a Dialogue in Three Acts
Holy Beauty: book review

The Genre of the Lord's Prayer

Let me add this to my notes around the Lord's Prayer: The genre of the prayer is lament. Here's how you get there. (1) By the time the disciples ask Jesus to "teach them to pray", they have hundreds of years of world-literature-level devotional tradition and practice behind and around them, which they've imbibed from infancy. (2) So, "teach us to pray" is more like asking a martial arts master to "sum up the essence of your take on the tradition." (3) The context of the Prayer is absolutely that devotional tradition--and chiefly the psalms. (4) Therefore, to understand the prayer, one must look to the psalms. (5) Psalms come in several genres. (6) The Prayer is without doubt functioning in the genre of lament. (7) The genre's of the psalms, from royal victory to the deepest despair, fall along the spokes of a cycle, where each genre is aware of the others. So, (8) lament psalms are on-the-way to psalms of absolute praise, even as absolute praise is aware that human life is going to include despair eventually as well. But the whole of the five books of psalms does, nevertheless, slowly lift as a whole into priestly adoration of Yahweh. (9) Back to #2, the Prayer defines the Messianic call in the context of the psalmic devotional tradition. (Anyone who wants to know more about this praise -> lament and repeat cycle should consult the work of OT scholar W. Bruggemann.)

The Meetup of Divine Intent

Driving in to work this morning, I was listening to a lecture on St. Bonaventure. I have always been fascinated by the mystics of Christian history, and I have read many of their works and summaries of their lives. The problem for me, though, is the explicit Neoplatonism that informs their ideas. The mystic way is not something I would have learned from the lips of the apostles. Its descent into the soul to find God is not the kind of spiritual advice that I read Jesus encouraging his followers to practice. So, as much as I admire these devout men and women of the church, I respectfully believe them misguided with respect to their Biblical theology. And that is no hidden scar.

But this morning I realized that I have come to find myself at the door of a better mystic way. This way is not a ladder of divine ascent. It does not struggle inward to God. Instead, it journeys outward--soul and body together--into the lives of one's neighbors and the needs of our communities. Instead of the cloud of unknowing, the self disappears into the river of God's selfless, overflowing love. One is carried in the eucharistic direction, to be broken and distributed for others. Perhaps there is still the threefold pattern of purgation, illumination, and union. Purgation of the self. Illumination about the people and communities in which one lives. And union with the Spirit as it pours itself kenotically into the world setting apart the name of God, living out the kingdom rule of God, and seeking to do the will of God.