R302: EASTERN & WESTERN TERMINOLOGY

CATECHESIS vs. DEBATE AND CONNECTING
THE DOTS: WHERE SHOULD A
REASONABLE ECUMENICS
BEGIN?

What follows is based on several assumptions:

1. AXIOM: Since the Reason and Wisdom of God created "everything that has been mad," the cosmos is, as the Fathers claimed, logikós "intelligible." THEOREM: There is nothing particularly pious or commendable in rejecting from the pursuit of religious truth the use one's highest commitment.

2. AXIOM: Making and learning a list is not thinking, which consists of connecting the dots.

Premises influence our thing in various ways (CLICK HERE). Note too the great fear of some people about thinking--or of letting their children think about religion. . . . maybe they'll go wrong. If they do go "wrong," it may be because their thinking is muddled! "Wrong" has been known to be right! If a religion cannot be defended on the basis of the greatest human faculty (if not achievements like love and so on), then it may quite simply be indefensible. Ignorance is not all bliss . . . nor is a purely rationalistic religion more than just a philosophy!

Either-or logic is a problem; e.g. "If something isn't good, it has to be bad. " But there is no error in saying, "If something is bad, avoiding it good"--where the avoidance is good, not to opposite of what is bad. A slightly different error is: "Since rationalist religion is really philosophy, reason should be abolished from religious thinking; only strategy, politics, and good behavior belong. See R177 for seventy-odd other errors.

One makes use of a Socratic dialectic to teach children how to think: They are made to debate and learn how to defend something correctly. Geometry taught formal thinking. Exposing oneself to opposing options helps one get out of one's subjective cognitive box (set of assumptions) to explore objectively whatever possibilities are truly viable.

A survivor of Stalin's death camps recounted his early schooling thus. One teacher had the pupils read a great novel, pick out a character, and put her or him on trial. A judge would be chosen as well as an accusing lawyer and a defending lawyer. The boys works for a week or more, all very excitedly.
When the day of the "trial" came, the teacher supervised but did not overtly obtrude himself in the proceedings. The case was judged by the class acting as a jury, and the accused character won or lost according to the voting.

What does it all come down to? Debating exposes weak and strong points and thus divides the sheep (those able to connect the dots) from the goats (those who do not rise about making and learning lists--catechesis). Rote learning is boring, as most will attest. Knowing why something is what it is and knowing how it is connected with whatever is implied by it helps one remember the thing itself.

What is the proper rôle of will and emotion--subjectivity? The use of reason is not incompatible with a subjective love of and loyalty to truth, with opposing error.

One one dimension, that of judging, objective reason is highest.	On one dimension, that of motivating behavior, love is highest, as St. Paul said in 1 Cor. 13.
Without reason, the emotions may love the wrong things and the will may pursue the wrong ends. Without love our otherwise good emotions can be "filthy rags." Emotions can be helpful, but one must always be aware that they can also cloud one's judgment.

As stated elsewhere on this website, it is lost labor to discuss individual doctrines in ecumenics before one has understood the premises that cause them to be true and rule out their contraries (denials) as false.
One is never tired of saying that "when we say the same things, we are not saying the same things." This is why interfaith verbal agreements are worthless. Even the very mention of the Bible refers to different things or similar things interpreted at odds with one another. The Trinity is one thing for the Orthodox, another thing for the Latins. We can all speak of death or Salvation, of course, but the context and connotations--ontological or juridical--are different in the East and West. Agreement on the words is not much more a waste of time. If the West believes that God can act counternaturally by imposing death on humans or condemn innocent newborns for Adam's sin, the West is in a different thought world from that of Eastern Christianity.
Can an ontological framework and a juridical framework be combined? That would be the suggestion of a feeble mentality if paradigms are being referred to, since it is the axioms of paradigms that define and fence in or out what is true or false. You can define the Fall as ontological and its consequences as juridical if you think that is worth doing. But since Salvation reverses the Fall and is its the mirror-image, how can it be both ontological and juridical in the same respect? Perhaps one could devise a coherent scheme (not just an assertion) that the Fall and Salvation are ontological in one respect (what happens) but juridical in another (perhaps a condition). But one has got to be very careful to avoid the morass of muddled thinking that such approaches are prone to! Why? Muddled thinking leads to ad hoc agreements whose illogical nature causes them in time to break down.