Questions from the Unsettled Mind

Fasting does not make you holy and it does not make you spiritual. Mostly it makes you cranky. So why did Jesus spend forty days doing it, and why does the Church still ask it of you?

In this episode:

• Why fasting is for us and never for God, and how forgetting that produced the Pharisees and their public piety

• The Gnostic instinct still buried in parts of Christendom: that the body is either a prison or an irrelevance

• The ancient story of angels who rebelled at the indignity of God mixing flesh with spirit

• Why the Incarnation, a physical death, a bodily resurrection and an ascension in the body settle the worth of matter

• Matthew 17:21 and the claim that prayer without fasting is weak, because we are spirit and matter composites

• Lent's forty days, Advent as a trimming of the lamps, and the Friday fast set against the Sunday feast

• Why you cannot consistently keep the feast and quietly drop the fast

Mentioned: Matthew 17:21 · the Pharisees · Gnosticism · Lent and Advent

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

Hebrews describes a man with no father, no mother, no beginning of days and no end of life. Taken literally, that means he never died - which would mean he is still somewhere.

In this episode:

• Melek and tsedek: a name meaning King of Righteousness, and the first use of "God Most High" anywhere in the Bible

• The mystery of a priesthood devoted to the true God already established at Salem before Abraham arrived

• Bread broken and wine poured out for Abraham, the first Eucharistic imagery in Scripture

• Psalm 110 and "a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek," a psalm Jesus applied to himself

• Hebrews 7:17: Jesus qualifies for that priesthood by possessing a life that could not be destroyed

• Three readings on the table - a pre-incarnate epiphany of the Son, an angel, or a human contemporary of Abraham - and the objection each one runs into

• Why being the temporal king of Salem tells against both the angelic and the epiphanic readings

• No parents and no recorded death, read literally or metaphorically, and why Jesus's priesthood pushes toward the literal

Mentioned: Genesis 14 · Psalm 110 · Hebrews 7 · Matthew 22 · Justin Martyr · The Search for Melchizedek and Osiris Rising

This question also appears in Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. You may also enjoy The Search for Melchizedek and its exciting sequel, Osiris Rising, also available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

St John does not say that God loves. He says God is love. Take that at full strength and a problem opens up: before anything was created, who was there for him to love?

In this episode:

• Essential against non-essential qualities, from Ivar the Boneless to Esau the red-haired

• "I am" - why the name God gave Moses conveys both personhood and self-existence

• The dilemma stated exactly: if love is essential to God, there must have been a beloved before creation

• Why the only available beloved must himself be God, and how that argument arrives at the Trinity

• What Islam denies about the divine nature when it calls the Trinity heresy, and why you cannot have it both ways

• The first Estate, the Family: why nearly every love relationship in your life is given by blood rather than chosen

• The second Estate, the State: coercion and tyranny on one side, strangers driving into a flooded New Jersey on the other

• The third Estate, the Church: a community bound by neither blood nor flag, and not even by time

Mentioned: 1 John · the name "I am" in Exodus · Ivar the Boneless · Esau · the greatest commandment

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

Nobody knows where the cup went. The more revealing question is what people expect to do with it once found, which confuses three quite different things: magic, miracle and sacrament.

In this episode:

• Joseph of Arimathea, Roman Britannia, and how the Grail entered the Arthurian legends

• Magic as pre-scientific technology: techne is know-how, and before Descartes and Newton nobody could sort real technology from the pseudo kind

• Why even Newton chased alchemy, and why a world of Muggles and Wizards is coherent but is not the one we live in

• Angelic technology: telekinesis and telepathy involve no machines, but they are still know-how, and it can be passed down the ranks

• Pharaoh's sorcerers, Saul and the witch with a familiar spirit, and the price of borrowing power that belongs to someone else

• The Crusader army carrying fragments of the true cross into battle in 1187, and what its defeat demonstrated

• What a relic actually is - a touchstone, like handling Washington's sword at Mount Vernon - and why it torments demons without being magical

• Why the Eucharist is not less than magic but more: you cannot wield it, and you can receive it any Sunday

Mentioned: Joseph of Arimathea · Descartes and Newton · Exodus and the sorcerers of Egypt · Saladin and the 1187 defeat · Indiana Jones

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

The sheer number of religions on offer is often treated as proof that the question is hopeless. Four questions, asked in the right order, collapse the whole field into a handful of positions.

In this episode:

• Question one: does God exist, and what agnosticism really amounts to as an answer

• Question two: one or many, and why monotheism claims the supreme being rather than merely one deity somewhere

• Why you can hold monotheism and still grant a whole array of finite "gods" - Gabriel at the Annunciation is exactly such a being

• Question three: does God interact with his creation, and why only Judaism, Christianity and Islam answer yes

• Question four: has God already entered the world to save his people, and how those three divide over it

• Why the apparent plethora of choices turns out to be a small number of clear classes

Mentioned: the Annunciation and the angel Gabriel · theism, atheism, agnosticism · monotheism and polytheism

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

If God judges people by their deeds, what exactly does picking the wrong creed cost you? The answer is not nothing, but it is also not what most people are afraid of.

In this episode:

• Romans 2 quoted at length: repayment according to deeds, no favouritism with God, and those who sinned without the Law

• Why judgment falls on conduct, and where truth enters, since St Paul ties it directly to justice and injustice

• How bad theology becomes bad conduct: beliefs that misdescribe God will misdirect a life

• The ignorance strategy, and why deliberately knowing less is not a way to shrink your culpability

• St John describing the final judgment as a place prepared for the devil and his angels, not designed for human beings

• C. S. Lewis in The Last Battle, and why an atheist can choose goodness while appearing to reject God

• Why minimalism fails: heaven is the place for those who love God wholly, and a lover is drawn maximally, never minimally

Mentioned: Romans 2 · Revelation · C. S. Lewis, The Last Battle

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

Every December somebody points out that the tree belongs to Saturnalia and the feast to Yule. The claim is often true. The inference drawn from it is worthless.

In this episode:

• What the objection actually assumes: that borrowing a pagan form is proof of religious corruption

• Moses and the tabernacle - a tiered holiness system and an ark carried on poles, both of which Egyptian temples already had

• Why frankincense: God used the smell everyone in the ancient world already recognised as religious

• Where the pagans got it wrong, and why no consort goddess is waiting downriver in Israelite worship

• Apollo, son of Zeus, and how Christian imagery both used and superseded him

• The pagan column built into a church in the Imperial Forum, holding nothing up and making two declarations at once

• C. S. Lewis on finding the faith less credible without the pagan imagery, and Michelangelo's Sistine lunettes alternating Jewish prophets with pagan sibyls

• Fir trees and eternal life, and why the pagans noticing the symbolism first is to their credit

Mentioned: the tabernacle in Exodus · Egyptian temple architecture · Apollo · C. S. Lewis · Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel lunettes · the Magi

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

If Christ forgave your sins, what could possibly be left to endure? The medieval torture-dungeon picture deserves that objection. The actual doctrine is not that picture, and it turns on something other than sin.

In this episode:

• The central mistake: assuming sin is the only thing standing between a human being and God

• Three hindrances rather than one - our finitude, our sins, and our incomplete transformation by love

• Why the unfallen angels still could not see God, and why God cannot raise anyone to that vision without consent

• Faith as a habit spread across a life against faith as a single moment, and why only virtue changes who a man is

• The fear driving the single-act view, and the rejection of Jonathan Edwards's God dangling us above the fire

• Purgatory as hospital rather than dungeon: self-understanding, healing and time, not coercion

• Near-death experience reports and the Life Review, in which people see their own choices from the standpoint of those they harmed

• C. S. Lewis's The Great Divorce and Till We Have Faces as pictures of purgation ending in reconciliation, not psychotherapy

Mentioned: Jonathan Edwards · St Paul on deeds tried by fire · near-death experience and the Life Review · C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce and Till We Have Faces · Dante

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

"An eye for an eye" sounds barbaric, but it is a fair description of justice, ancient and modern alike. Jesus asks for forgiveness instead. So what do you do when the person you forgive has no intention of changing?

In this episode:

• Aristotle on retributive justice, and why proportionality is what separates justice from revenge

• Whether "seventy times seven" was ever meant as a rule for magistrates: Caesar, Pilate, and the thief on the cross

• The second kind of justice St Paul introduces in Romans 3, and why justice and righteousness share one Greek root

• Why retributive justice alone could never make anyone fit to love God

• The uncomfortable mechanics of forgiveness: it costs the forgiver, who has to eat the loss

• The unforgiving steward, and the line in the Lord's Prayer his story echoes

• Why we forgive sins rather than people, why forgiveness is not the same as reconciliation, and what it does for you even when the other party never changes

Mentioned: Aristotle · Romans 2 and 3 · the parable of the unforgiving steward · the Lord's Prayer · Masaccio, Expulsion from the Garden of Eden

Many of these questions are collected in Questions from the Unsettled Mind and More Questions from the Unsettled Mind, both available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

A wedding dress is a dress and something more. A sacrament works the same way, except that it does not merely suggest what it signifies - it accomplishes it.

In this episode:

• How images work: an ordinary object bespeaking something greater, from Christmas trees to roses, rings and rainbows

• Why the imagination mediates between sensation and intellect, and why religious imagery has the same structure

• The pagan seed that dies and rises, and why Christianity does not repeat the myth but enacts it - the myth becomes fact at a specific date and place

• Baptism as the test case: water already bespeaks cleansing, and in the rite the cleansing actually happens

• Why treating sacraments as bare symbols is a throwback to paganism rather than an advance beyond it

• Why God cannot simply confer the Beatific Vision: it would make any other choice impossible and reduce us to robots

• Naaman, the dirty Jordan and seven washings, and pride as the barrier to God's chosen means

• Why angels cannot receive sacraments and animals cannot either, and what that says about the creatures who can

Mentioned: Naaman and Elisha · the Incarnation · George Washington and the cherry tree

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