Questions from the Unsettled Mind

Secret knowledge sounds like power. Ask who is supplying it and why, and the offer starts to look less like enlightenment and more like a recruitment pitch with terms attached.

In this episode:

• The offer long predates Christianity: the Book of Thoth in pagan Egypt, the ancient mystery cults, arguably the serpent in Eden

• Why an angel serving God cannot be the source, since God reveals to all men and does so for the sake of love

• What is therefore left as the source, and what it means to place blind trust in it

• Anti-faith and anti-hope as names for what the Gnostic initiate is actually doing

• Why the demons always require tremendous sacrifice, and what the devotee is asked to abandon

• Colossians 2 read closely: empty seductive philosophy, worship of angels, self-abasement, delight in visions, the fleshly mind

• Why no creature can swap its nature, and the Little Mermaid as a picture of trying

• The three planks of the esoteric offer, and the three problems that undo each of them

Mentioned: Colossians 2 · the Book of Thoth · Gnosticism · St Paul · The Little Mermaid

This question also appears in More Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

Protestants hear Mary called the Mother of God and conclude that Rome has made her a goddess. The title was never a claim about Mary. It was a ruling about who Jesus is.

In this episode:

• How ancient the title theotokos is, and its use by Athanasius, John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nazianzus and Augustine

• Nestorius proposing christotokos, Mother of Christ, as the safer alternative

• Why nobody then or now took the title to mean Mary caused God or is a fourth member of the Trinity

• The real Nestorian error, which was about Christ: one person with two natures, or two persons in one body

• The hypostatic union explained through physis, hypostasis and prosopon, and why the Greek is hard to render

• The Third Ecumenical Council of Ephesus in AD 431 as a ratification of the Incarnation itself

• Why every Protestant who affirms that Jesus was fully God and fully man has already granted the title

Mentioned: theotokos · christotokos · Nestorius · Council of Ephesus AD 431 · St Athanasius · St John Chrysostom · St Gregory of Nazianzus · St Augustine · the hypostatic union

This question also appears in More Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

Of course reincarnation is real - Lazarus walked out of the tomb, and the general resurrection is coming. What people usually mean by the word is something else, and that something else cannot survive its own metaphysics.

In this episode:

• The two senses of the word, and why Christianity already affirms one of them outright

• Why the popular version presupposes a Gnostic account in which you merely possess a body

• The comparison with demonic possession, and why that is precisely what being human is not

• What follows ethically if your body is not essential to who you are

• Memory loss and continuity of identity: if your memory were wiped, in what sense would the next life be yours

• Why claimed past-life memories look nothing like the consistent identity memory we actually have

• Karma offered as the mechanism for multiple lifetimes, and why it does not do the work students expect of it

• The dogma that a new soul-spirit is created at conception, and what we are in the interval before the resurrection

Mentioned: Gnosticism · karma · the resurrection of the body

This question also appears in More Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

Evil is a privation, not a positive goal, so the demons have no objectives of their own - only the wrecking of yours. Work out what God wants for you and you have the enemy's targeting list.

In this episode:

• Why evil as privation means demonic strategy can only be read off God's objectives

• The two greatest commandments as the divine objectives, and therefore as the two things under attack

• Why demons must target moral freedom rather than cities, and the severe limits that places on them

• Demonic tactics mapped onto the four areas of philosophy: ethics, epistemology, aesthetics and metaphysics

• The double push away from our hybrid nature - Hedonism toward the animal, Gnosticism toward the angelic

• Jesus's opponents defining holiness as separation from physical things rather than as love of neighbour

• Demeaning revelation or replacing it with a rival revelation as the epistemic attack

• Ephesians 6, the armour, and standing like a legion that will not buckle

Mentioned: Ephesians 6 · the two greatest commandments · Gnosticism · Hedonism · the Church Militant

This question also appears in More Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

You pray, and you come away empty-handed. If God really were the father he claims to be, surely he would hand it over. The trouble may be that Father is only one of the ways he relates to you.

In this episode:

• The son ringing home for $400 with his hands shaking from withdrawal, and why a refused request is not neglect

• Four scriptural images at once: potter and clay, shepherd and sheep, father and child, husband and wife

• Why these are co-extensive rather than a sequence in which each new image retires the last

• The dropping test - a pot, a cat, an infant, a spouse - and how the relationship changes what the same act means

• Why we cannot hold all four together, and why that is a limit of our vantage point rather than a contradiction

• St Paul comparing this life to the pains of childbirth, and what all things working together for good does not mean

• How all of this should change what we actually ask for when we pray

Mentioned: the potter and the clay · the Good Shepherd · St Paul · Romans 8

This question also appears in More Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

The free will answer covers most of the evil in the world. It does not explain why God intervenes to save Harry and not Sally. That, rather than evil itself, is where the problem really bites.

In this episode:

• The argument at full strength: if God is good and does nothing, he is not good, so he does not exist

• Why a world in which your knife turned to butter would be a worse world, and the powers God has already withheld from us

• The Incarnation as the greatest intervention, with answered prayers and roadside rescues as small ones

• Why fairness cannot be the criterion, given that history has never distributed anything equally

• Why justice fails too: Job's friends, the three men before the furnace, and Satan daring Jesus to jump from the temple

• Mercy as what is left, and the honest admission that God's calculation is beyond us

• Why appealing to mystery is not cheating once the free will theodicy has already done the work

• Adam and Eve asked to trust without being given a reason, and Mary giving the answer they did not

Mentioned: the problem of evil · the free will theodicy · Job · Daniel's three friends · Nehemiah

This question also appears in More Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

Socrates answers the invisibility ring by building an entire city in speech, then arguing that your soul has the same three parts. If he is right, injustice is not clever. It is a disease.

In this episode:

• Why Socrates builds a just city first, on the theory that justice is easier to read in large letters

• The two founding principles: mutual need, and one man one job, with the three classes that follow

• Glaucon's complaint that this is a city of pigs, and the luxurious city that then requires an army

• Guardian education in gymnastic, music and philosophy, and the law forbidding guardians private property

• Locating wisdom, courage, moderation and justice in the city, with courage defined as control of fear about what is true, lawful and noble

• The principle of difference used to prove a reasoning part, a spirited part and an appetitive part of the soul

• Why anger problems mean the guardian part has seized the throne, and what Socrates prescribes to fix it

• The analogy with bodily health, the man on the rack, and Braveheart as the closing case

Mentioned: Plato · Republic · Socrates · Glaucon · Adeimantus · Braveheart

This question also appears in Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

The question has a false assumption inside it, like asking a man when he stopped beating his wife. There is no second second coming, so there is nothing to miss.

In this episode:

• The loaded assumption hidden inside the question itself

• The Ascension from the Mount of Olives, and what the angels actually told the disciples would happen

• Why the first generation expected Jesus back in their lifetimes, and a misreading of what he told St Peter

• 2 Peter 3:1-13 urging the Church not to despair that Christ has not yet returned

• 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 read as the one return of the King triumphant, not a secret snatching away

• Why nobody proposed two second comings in the Church's first 1800 years

• What the texts do promise: judgment, fire, a recreated universe, and a kingdom with his saints

Mentioned: Left Behind · 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 · 2 Peter 3:1-13 · the Ascension · Revelation

This question also appears in Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

Since the last episode on fasting, some genuinely damaging applications of it have turned up. The Church has always had exceptions, and ignoring them turns an exercise in virtue into a vice.

In this episode:

• Why pregnant and nursing women are excepted, and what that exception reveals about the purpose of the fast

• Jesus's forty days in the wilderness described from a visit to the site: rock, almost no water, and 120 degrees by day

• How the Pharisees used the fast to lord it over people who could far less afford to keep it

• Fasting to excess, and why immoderate fasting is as much a vice as any other immoderate act

• The Eastern Orthodox practice of fasting as a whole community rather than as private heroics

• Why people managing mental illness on a knife-edge of sleep, food and medication should take great care

• Why fasting never relieves us of our ordinary moral and charitable responsibilities

Mentioned: the Pharisees · Eastern Orthodox fasting · Lent

This question also appears in Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

If you had a ring that made you invisible, and could never be caught, would you still bother being just? Plato thought your honest answer decides whether goodness is worth anything at all.

In this episode:

• Plato's three categories of good things, and the question of which one justice of the soul belongs in

• Why the Greek word for justice means individual moral goodness, and how St Paul's righteousness shares the same root

• Glaucon and Adeimantus arguing that we pursue justice only because we are too weak to get away with injustice

• The myth of Gyges and his ring, and the version of it Tolkien handed to Bilbo and Frodo

• The updated test: an open bank vault, the FDIC, and every excuse you would reach for to justify taking the cash

• The patsy scenario, in which the just man is framed, interrogated, and offered a pardon to lie about a senator

• The thought experiment of God reversing the Ten Commandments, and what that does to goodness as mere obedience

Mentioned: Plato · Republic · Socrates · Glaucon · Adeimantus · the Ring of Gyges · J. R. R. Tolkien

This question also appears in Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.