Orthodox viewpoint on mystery???
Thursday, September 3, 2009
by Fr. Orthoduck | 4 Comments
Father Orthoduck wonders whether the priest pictured above is an Orthodox priest. 
Related posts:
- Top ten signs that you might be an Orthodox Christian – Nicholas Theodorakis
- Eastern Orthodox camp songs
- On the Orthodox and economic theories
- Orthodox books that will never be written
- On Katrina and Judgment — quote of the day
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
I love this quote …
God’s omnipotence means [His] power to do all that is not intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. This is no limit to His power. If you choose to say, “God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it”, you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words “God can.” It remains true that all things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities. It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives — not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.
-C.S. Lewis
Heh heh, good old C.S. Lewis. Part of the problem is that things can be said linguistically that make grammatical sense and can be understood, but are actually–as Lewis pointed out–quite nonsensical.
Here is another favorite question. What happens when an unstoppable force meets and immovable object? The sentence makes sense, but it is actually nonsensical.
LOL!!!
Mystery is not the art of the nonsensical, but the reality of God as at once incomprehensible and transcendent, and at the same relating to and revealing himself in an intimate way to the world. The Incarnation comes to mind. That’s mystery.
God making a rock too heavy for him to carry-that’s nonsense
Exactly. It’s just the whole “begging the question”. Someone seeks to disprove God is all-powerful using an argument based on an assumption that God is indeed all-powerful.
It’s fallacy, not mystery.