Mount Vigil

We’re interrupting our series on the story of God to talk about the ongoing war in Ukraine and the Church’s response to it.

Where to Connect
Mount Vigil has come to an end but you can still connect with Anthony and Blaine at their respective blogs:

• Anthony - Sun Tongue
• Blaine - The Paradise King

Some of the things we cover in this episode:

• What our fleshly responses and our repentance of those responses looks like
• How Christians can find solid ground in the midst of a powerful media narrative
• How the concept of the Dialectic is working it’s way out in the world
• The typology of empire and nations in the scriptures
• The economics of war
• What it looks like to be a prophetic, called out people who bring the Good News in the midst of the devastation of war

Additional Notes

• Jesus for President – Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw
• Life Together – Dietrich Bonhoeffer
• MV Prayer
• SNL COVID Skit
• Prophetic Imagination – Walter Brueggemann
• Born in Blood and Fire – John Charles Chasteen
• Bible Project Bad Words Series – Sin/Iniquity/Transgression
• Ash Wed and Lent Resources

This is the second in our series on the Story of God. In this episode we discuss the spiritual powers found in the Bible: the Elohim and the Divine Counsel, angels and demons. Our aim is to continue developing the foundations worldview this is not selectively supernatural but embraces the story as we have received it in scripture. We hope you enjoy.

Where to Connect
Mount Vigil has come to an end but you can still connect with Anthony and Blaine at their respective blogs:

• Anthony - Sun Tongue
• Blaine - The Paradise King

Additional Notes

• The Unseen Realm by Michael Heiser
• Lord of Spirits podcast
• The Bible Project Spiritual Beings Series

This is the first in a series of episodes on the story of God. We’ve talked about seeing reality as a story, we’ve talked about Apocalypse or spiritual revelation as to the nature of that story, and in our Endgame episode we talked about what it’s like at the end of the story. But exactly what story is it that we’re in? Where does it begin and how did we get here?

We argue that the place to begin is with God. In doing so we talk at length about the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, we spend some time discussing the hundreds of years the early Church spent developing this doctrine, we discuss what it means practically in our daily lives that God is a trinitarian God, and we end with a practice that I think you will find helpful in restoring your relationship with the persons of the Trinity.

We are invited not only to form our minds around the doctrine of the Trinity but to encounter the Trinity in an immediate and personal way.

Where to Connect
Mount Vigil has come to an end but you can still connect with Anthony and Blaine at their respective blogs:

• Anthony - Sun Tongue
• Blaine - The Paradise King

Additional Notes

• A New Christian Manifesto
• A Wind in the House of Islam
• Suffering: A Test of Theological Method by Arthur C. McGill
• Origen On First Principles translated by John Behr
• The Early Christian Doctrine of God Richard Hansen
• The History of the Early Church Podcast – The Story of Christianity from 30 to 451 A.D.
• The Nicene Creed
• The First Council of Constantinople
• Nicea and Its Legacy
• Two Powers in Heaven
• The Athanasian Creed
• The Religion of the Apostles: Orthodox Christianity in the First Century
• The Christian Doctrine of God: One being, three persons by Thomas Torrance

Grandmaster Jose Raul Capablanca said that to succeed “you must study the endgame before anything else.” In this episode we talk about endgame, an idea from chess that we extrapolate to answer the question, What is it like to be at the end of a great cosmic war?

Where to Connect
Mount Vigil has come to an end but you can still connect with Anthony and Blaine at their respective blogs:

• Anthony - Sun Tongue
• Blaine - The Paradise King

Notes
We begin by following up on the question of apocalypse posed in the previous episode: what exactly is being uncovered?

Moving on we get into a little chess (and poker) endgame theory as a way of charting the territory of this conversation. We talk about the characteristics of a these endgames and then generalize to find out what predictable changes we can expect if we are in an endgame outside the context of games

We discuss four characteristics of endgame’s strategic environment:

1. Speed
2. Deception
3. Surprising characters
4. Chaos

After talking about the qualities of an endgame we ask, what “game” is it that we think we are in the end of?

And who are the major players involved and what are their goals? Our non-exhuastive list includes:

• Spirits
• Pagans
• Sorcerers
• Humanists
• Nihilists
• Nations and Statists
• Jesus and his Church

Finally we end with some words of encouragement for the Christian who is trying to follow Jesus in a world that seems increasingly chaotic.

Additional Notes

• Just the Facts!: Winning Endgame Knowledge in One Volume
• Zugzwang
• Ruse de guerre
• COVID-19 The Great Reset – Klaus Schwab
• Petrodollar system overview
• Atlantic article on sperm count decline
• Megastatue of Buddha Destroyed in Sichuan
• Canadian Church Fires
• A Wind in the House of Islam
• Psalm 2

In today’s episode we talk about Apocalypse: the word, the genre of literature, the spiritual event. We attempt to develop a nuanced, robust, rounded-out sense of Apocalypse, which means “revelation,” a sense that is grounded in the fact that, ultimately, the Good News of Jesus Christ is what is revealed to us in an Apocalypse.

Where to Connect
Mount Vigil has come to an end but you can still connect with Anthony and Blaine at their respective blogs:

• Anthony - Sun Tongue
• Blaine - The Paradise King

Notes

We cut to the chase by answering the question, “If this is an apocalypse should I buy guns and crypto?” and then move on to discuss what apocalypse is in the scriptures and in the mind that has been formed by the story of God, and compare this perspective to the ideas that the broader culture have around apocalypse.

We discuss why it’s important to seek spiritual revelation in the ways that have been given by God and at the pace he dictates and why the world’s many offers of revelation outside of God’s plan are so harmful to us.

We talk about the many challenges facing us when we attempt to have a conversation around the word apocalypse:

• Why does this word stress me out?
• Why does pop culture have a whole movie genre called post-apocalyptic?
• Is there a safe way to talk about this given much of the Church’s misguided and harmful approaches to the subject?

We talk about the many senses of the word “apocalypse” in an effort to level-up our ability to think and speak about the subject.

We then look at the book of Revelation, otherwise known as the Apocalypse of Jesus given to John, and examine three key errors that often foul up our attempts to appreciate apocalyptic literature in the scriptures.

We wrap things up by asking the questions:

• What do we do in an apocalypse?
• What is the Good News for us in this time?
• How can we live free from fear?

We hope you find encouragement, comfort, and good counsel in a subject that, when mistreated, can often cause dread, anxiety, and misguided action. Apocalypse is a challenging subject–you may have a lot of baggage associated with it–but with God’s help we think we can confidently navigate this terrain toward the goal of union with Christ.

Additional Notes

• The story of Elisha, Gehazi, the Syrian army, and the flaming chariots
• McSweeneys: Your parenting choices have caused the apocalypse
• Barron’s: There will be no student loan apocalypse
• New Yorker: Should you have a baby during the global apocalypse? An FAQ
• US Sun: Apocalypse fears with millions lining up for food and water if power grid is hit
• Newsweek: Porkpocalypse
• The Book of Revelation
• Reading Revelation Responsibly by Michael Gorman
• Four Views on the Book of Revelation edited by C. Marvin Pate
• Microsoft Patent WO2020060606 – Cryptocurrency system using body activity data

In this episode, Blaine and Anthony discuss a foundational ability, an ability on which the rest of the Mount Vigil work depends: seeing reality.

It’s never been easy to see reality well. But it’s especially difficult in our time: the fallout of postmodernism and critical theory, the rise of nihilism, the divisive strategies of social media giants, and the advent of post-human and transhuman ideologies have eroded our ability to hold on to a coherent story. We’re taught to doubt our experience. We’re gaslit by the knowledge brokers of our time.

Where to Connect
Mount Vigil has come to an end but you can still connect with Anthony and Blaine at their respective blogs:

• Anthony - Sun Tongue
• Blaine - The Paradise King

Notes

In the first part of this conversation, Blaine and Anthony argue that reality is fundamentally narrative, and that a person’s ability to see reality is linked to the clarity of the story they’re living.

In the second part of this conversation, Blaine and Anthony explore some of the obstacles that stand in the way of a strong sense of reality: an incomplete Gospel, everyday trauma, and technological opposition.

In the third part of this conversation, Blaine and Anthony argue that a true sense of reality is dependent on a vision of Jesus, and then explore tactics to recover a strong sense of reality: engaging the real world, living in the family of God, and leaning on three effective discernment strategies. Those are the testimony of the Bible, the consensus of the Church, and the revelation of the Holy Spirit.

Additional Notes

• The GPT-3 Algorithm
• The Social Dilemma
• The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
• The Google Brain Team
• The Center for Humane Technology
• MIT Tech Review regarding troll farms
• Designing For Behavior Change
• Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
• The Race to the Bottom of the Brain Stem
• Reality Privilege
• Marc Andreessen’s work on the metaverse
• The Wim Hoff Breathing Method